Craig Bannister showed off his stenographic skills yet again in an April 20 CNSNews.com article:
“Math is about getting the right answer. And, we want kids to learn to think, so get they the right answer,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) said Monday, explaining why his state has rejected math textbooks that include elements of “social justice” ideology.
“It’s not about how you ‘feel’ about the problem, or to introduce some of these other things,” Gov. DeSantis explained in his speech. Math education should not be used to indoctrinate young students on issues like Critical Race Theory, Social Emotional Learning and Common Core principles, DeSantis said:
“There’s a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. And, we want all our students getting the right answers.
“And so, most of the books that did not meet Florida standards, for whatever reason, happened to be in the early grades. As you get into the older grades, most of those books did meet the standards. But, we’re going to continue to focus the education on the actual, strong academic performance of the students.”
“We don’t want things, like math, to have some of these other concepts introduced. It’s not been proven to be effective and, quite frankly, it takes our eye off the ball,” the governor said.
Florida recently rejected a record number of textbooks for content violating the state’s standards, The Daily Wire reported Tuesday.
However, Bannister was silent on the fact that DeSantis offered no specific examples of “social justice ideology” he claimed was appearing in math textbooks; it claimed “proprietary reasons” for hiding that information. In the meantime, others found copies of the books Florida rejected and found no purportedly offensive content, unless you consider encouraging students to be nice or brief bios of black mathematicians to be offensive. Florida did release a couple examples a few days later, but they were presented without context and were apparently not targeted to elementary students.
When Florida released more detailed information on what reviewers found, it was clear that, as the Washington Post reported, “The reviewers overwhelmingly noted that the books had avoided forbidden topics such as critical race theory” and that there were only a few overly sensitive right-wing reviewers who complained about such things like a (completely factual) statement that the U.S. has not eradicated racism or that the Federalist Papers weren’t referenced in a math discussion of the Electoral College. Those reviewers also pushing talking points against “social-emotional learning,” the new outrage among hateful right-wing activists.
Bannister didn’t report on any of those later developments — no need to let facts get in the way of a good right-wing narrative.