The Great Math Textbook Hoax of 2022

Last week’s math textbook roller-coaster suggests that, instead of assuming that everything newsmakers say is news, we should ask whether it’s something we should be amplifying.

By Greg Toppo

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a very good Easter weekend.

Beginning on Good Friday and stretching for nearly an entire week, news outlets amplified his messaging about the dangers of critical race theory (CRT) lurking in, of all places, K-12 math textbooks.

Despite very little evidence from DeSantis or anyone else that there was any truth to it, the story quickly went viral.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if the history of last week is ever written, it’ll be known as the Great Math Textbook Hoax of 2022.

It unfolded, as these things often do, in a flurry of mostly credulous (and occasionally incredulous) coverage, birthed from a single improbable press release. And while a few outlets eventually helped readers see the hoax, journalists on the whole fell into the now-familiar trap of reporting on something we probably should have ignored or minimized — or waited on until we had the goods.

But instead of making DeSantis back up what he was saying before we jumped, news outlets rushed ahead and reported his unsupported claims, ignoring the past seven years of media-baiting.

Next time, I hope that reporters and editors will look before they leap.

Instead of making DeSantis back up what he was saying before we jumped, news outlets rushed ahead and reported his unsupported claims.

The mischief began on April 15, the Friday that began Easter weekend, when the Florida Department of Education issued a press release with this irresistible assertion: “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.”

In it, DeSantis alleged that publishers had “attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.”

The announcement introduced the now-familiar claim that reviewers had rejected 41% of 132 submitted textbooks, with 21% rejected because they incorporated “prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies,” including references to CRT, Common Core, and “the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics.”

Indoctrinating math books? No assignment editor (or late-night comedian) could resist that.

Indoctrinating math books? No assignment editor (or late-night comedian) could resist that.

Over the long weekend, several news organizations bit, essentially reproducing the press release with dutiful straight news stories, though most looked at the strange announcement skeptically, making attempts to push back with dissenting voices who strongly suggested that the emperor had no clothes.

Education Week, for instance, linked to research on the academic benefits of SEL. But all weekend long, the substance of the rejections remained a mystery.

By Monday, three days after the announcement, a few outlets, including EdPost, began openly scoffing at the whole affair, offering its interpretation of DeSantis’ message: “We will NOT tell you what the books said, but trust us, it’s bad.”

And The New York Times offered readers a taste of what it would eventually undertake more fully a few days later, sampling one of the rejected texts and finding, to its tastes, little to fret about.

By Tuesday, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics released a statement saying students, teachers, and schools “lose whenever mathematics is used for political gain and divisiveness.” And news organizations were beginning to get their feet under them.

The news startup Florida Phoenix cast a critical eye on the affair, asking how a math textbook can “indoctrinate” students, and wondering exactly which textbooks were rejected for doing so. It noted that even the publishers didn’t know the answer to that – the education department actually rated a few books highly, then rejected them.

The Tallahassee Democrat figured out that the only publisher approved for regular K-5 mathematics classes was Texas-based Accelerate Learning, which in 2018 was acquired by The Carlyle Group, headed at the time by none other than Glenn Youngkin, who in 2020 resigned to run for and win the open governor’s seat in Virginia.

But it wasn’t really until Thursday and Friday, after Florida had released an opaque six-page document that offered publishers and titles and a handful of illustrated examples, that news outlets actually began offering readers an independent assessment of the books themselves.

On Thursday Education Week ran a lengthy explainer on the topic, noting that for all the drama, school districts may still be able to buy many of the offending textbooks – in fact, quite a few districts had already purchased them, since procurement timelines “aren’t on the same schedule as these reviews.”

Judd Legum’s journalism newsletter Popular Information got its hands on eight of the banned books and scoured them for mentions of SEL or CRT. “What we found bears no resemblance to the alarming assertions of Florida officials,” it concluded.

On Friday, The New York Times returned with what’s perhaps the most comprehensive review so far, diving into online samples from 21 titles. While many of the textbooks included SEL content, the Times found “there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory” in most of the books they reviewed.

It wasn’t really until Thursday and Friday that news outlets actually began offering readers an independent assessment.

In the end, it seems, there’s very little there there.

The emperor, in fact, had no clothes.

But the shock of that first announcement, eagerly reported by the mainstream media, remains. And readers are left trying to pick up the pieces, if they’re not simply exhausted.

Vox’s Sean Illing has rightly pointed out what he calls “a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth” in the age of folks like former President Trump and his protege DeSantis. That weariness, Illing says, “leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.”

This is not accidental, of course — everyone remembers former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s advice that Republicans fighting to keep their seats in 2020 and beyond need not worry about Democrats: “The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Seven years of dealing with newsmakers like Trump and DeSantis should have taught us that they’ve gotten very good at this. In the words of press critic Jay Rosen, they’ve “hacked the newsworthiness code” of hardworking journalists, turning our usefulness upside down, in a sense, so that we now risk serving not news consumers but newsmakers.

Journalists, Rosen says, value “timeliness, conflict, anything totally unexpected, anything seemingly consequential, anything that involves a charismatic person whose human interest looms large.” That code may no longer suffice. He has proposed that the media shift our coverage of Trump (and presumably DeSantis) to an “emergency setting” that swaps the auto-play of timeliness, conflict, and the like for a manual setting:

Instead of assuming that everything newsmakers say is news, we should ask, ‘Is what he said something we should be amplifying?’

Instead of assuming that everything newsmakers say is news, we should ask, ‘Is what he said something we should be amplifying?’

This is delicate stuff. We can’t ignore the news, even if on its face it seems patently ridiculous and something people should know (and make jokes about).

But as 2024 approaches, let’s reset:

When we see a press release about math books indoctrinating students, let’s work in reverse, seeking out the offending offerings before telling readers — a week later and entirely predictably — that the emperor has no clothes.

Previous commentary from Toppo:

‘Less like a banana slicer’; Making education news more useful
People are fighting. Is that news?