Upon seeing those Florida math textbooks, what can we say? Nobody smells like roses.

 Earlier in the week, I wrote a sort of "wait and see" post about Florida's decision to reject a set of math textbooks-- yes, math textbooks-- citing their new ban on materials related to "critical race theory" and associated concepts.  In that post, I noted that while Florida is not exactly to be trusted, there actually are examples of critical race theory insinuating itself into math instruction.  Hence my entreaty:  Don't trust, just verify.  We now have a handful of examples from Florida about the offending passages.  We have four examples, which you can see here, if you have not yet examined them.  This is not complicated material.

Upon examination, what can we say?  First, of the four images we have seen, one stands out as particularly problematic.  Let's discuss.

As a technical point, the "Application Exercise" is not rooted in critical race theory.  Implicit bias is a concept from cognitive psychology, and it falls under the category of "science," rather than critical theory, which is anti-scientific in its epistemology.  I wrote extensively about this when I wrote my critical race theory series a while back, so I won't belabor the point again, but of course, critical race theorists are happy to accept any claim that fits within their world view, because anti-scientific thinking works that way.  Regardless, if you need a refresher on implicit bias, here's how it works.  Rather than explicit, negative attitudes towards minorities, people have tendencies to associate minorities with negative stereotypes that work at a subconscious level.  So, if you show people minority faces, or even cue them with color words, they will respond to word associations later in ways that suggest responsiveness to stereotypes.

Of course, there is a bit of an XKCD effect going on here, if anyone caught the last cartoon.  Yes, you can give people the implicit bias test, and that means you can do math on the scores.  The big question is what those numbers mean.  When implicit bias became the hot thing about a decade ago, like every other social scientist, I was hooked, lined and sinkered, which is not a phrase, but I just made it one, because it's my blog, and I can say whatever I want, so nyah!  What I should have asked, and what has since been asked is the following:  how much predictive power do scores have on behavior?

Um... not much.

Basically, if you get a high score, instead of your name showing up on the arcade game at the end of the run, they tell you that you are a horrible person, and Robin DiAngelo will gladly accept your money to coach you on how to accept what a horrible, horrible person you are.  It's kind of like scientology.  They start with a personality test, which is guaranteed to tell you that you are fucked up, and only the church of scientology can fix you, after you hand over all your money and autonomy, and if you don't, Xenu will torture you forever, so gimme your money now!

Anyway, the point is that a few social scientists eventually turned to the empirical question of the predictive power of implicit bias scores.  But that's not what those charts up there do.  They do two things.  They graph implicit bias scores by age, and by political ideology.  So old people are racist (which is kinda true...), and the more conservative you are, the more racist you are, which... um... yeah, that's kinda true too.

Where was I?

I'm still going to tell the writers of these textbooks to take their Paolo Freire books, roll 'em up real tight, and shove 'em up their asses, ideologically homeless person that I am.

OK, so this is about graphical representations of data, and polynomials, and shit like that.  Depending on the students' math proficiency, we are looking at late-elementary to middle school.  Or high school, if we are talking about some future burger-flippers who get put out of a job when the kid who does this in elementary school fixes the robot that flips the burger without whining about how "math is hard."  Regardless, once upon a time, I had textbooks that taught me how to work with polynomials.  They used examples.  What were the examples?  I do not remember, but they had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's ideological axe being ground.

Someone made a choice.  The choice to swap out a non-ideological example with an example that did two things.  First, it talks about a contestable concept-- implicit bias.  Second, it labels not just the oldsters, but one side of the political spectrum as racist.  Someone made that choice.

Was the choice made because it would improve mathematics education?

No.  It served two purposes.  First, the introduction of the concept of implicit bias was based on the idea that all classes, including math classes, should be used for social justice indoctrination.  Second, the graph that labels conservatives as racists was used to paint the enemies of those who wrote the textbooks as bad people, for the sake of fighting a political war, because the people who write these textbooks believe that math textbooks are the appropriate place to fight that war.

Let's do the Johnny Rawls thing.  The veil of ignorance thing.  Suppose I presented survey questions like, how proud are you to be an American?  I can make the left look pretty bad!  But wait!  As long as we're on the topic of race, let's really push those CRT buttons.  Suppose I used survey questions asking people to estimate how many unarmed African-Americans were killed by the police, and graphed responses by ideology?  Then compared that to the actual data.  Have you ever seen those numbers?  In 2019, there were 13 unarmed African-Americans killed by police.  When you ask people to estimate the number, what kind of estimates do you get?  It varies by ideology.  See for yourself.  The far left is way off.  Why?  Do I have to explain it to you?  Do you think that this kind of misinformation has anything to do with that "defund the police" stupidity?  We have survey data on "defund the police" too!  How about we replace that implicit bias stuff with this lesson plan!

And this is about the least controversial place I can go for graphs that would piss off the CRT crowd.  Imagine if Charles Murray wrote one of these textbooks!

Because the real problem?  The real problem is that math textbooks are not where we should be arguing about this stuff.  They are where we should be teaching kids how to argue about this stuff.

Is there a place for discussion of implicit bias in K-12?  I'll differ with Florida, to some degree!  In psychology classes, this is a legitimate topic of discussion.  As a general rule, I am not a fan of "stay in your lane" critiques, but math instruction really should be done in a way that is non-ideological, and I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who decided to turn it into an ideological opportunity.  Don't we have enough ideological conflict?  Does this help, in any way?  No.

Of course, one of the basic problems in polarized political conflict is that people have difficulty calling bullshit on their own sides.  The left will dig in, and refuse to acknowledge the basic points that a) politicizing math instruction is absurd at best, and really wrong when you recognize that the shoe could easily go on the other Rawlsian foot, and b) grinding an ideological axe within a math textbook lays bare what many of us have been noting for some time, but which the left ties itself in knots trying to deny.

Step back.

Those who cannot recognize the cranks and charlatans on their own side are lost.  That's how the country wound up with Trump.

Yet we must always look for the bigger picture.  Florida rejected a lot of textbooks, yet as of now, we have seen only four examples, and two struck me as innocuous.  They said some blather about social and emotional learning, or some such nonsense.  Schools cannot teach this.  They can barely teach basic skills like reading and arithmetic, and I would rather they focus on that than this hippy-dippy shit.  The people who wrote this crap are probably the same ones who harassed, bullied and traumatized Isabel Fall anyway.  Fuck 'em.

If I asked them to demonstrate the empirical benefit of any of this crap, could they?

No.

What would I do instead?  Take away the kids' phones.  Teach math, and take away the kids' phones.

Anyway, though, I do not see the harm here.  Wasting time is a form of harm, I suppose, but keep in mind the following.  After the uproar of revealing how many textbooks they were rejecting, this was all they could present as justification.  This.

If I were in this position, (projecting here...), I'd go big.  I'd take the worst of the worst, and do a big info-dump.  I'd say, hey, look.  Look how much social justice indoctrination bullshit is in these books!  And those graphs I embedded up there?  Those are not cool, man!  Those are not cool!  I mean, yeah, oldsters and conservatives really are racist-- I'm not arguing, here-- but you don't do that in a fucking math textbook!  Unless you'd be cool with handing the writing process over to Chucky Murray so that Texas and Mississippi can have some books that meet more with their political thinking?  No?

Then cut this shit out!

But... if that's all Florida has?  If they have a couple of graphs that address implicit bias, and then two more pages that blather about social and emotional fuckity-fuck somethingorother, and I don't even know why I'm supposed to be bothered by it?  Rather, I am bothered that a book is being banned and I can't figure out why?

Is that their best evidence?  Am I projecting here?  Because either this is the best/worst they have, and Florida is mostly full of shit, or they made some poor decisions about what evidence to release, and what they are holding back is worse than the social and emotional time-wasting exercises.

I suspect the former.  I suspect that the implicit bias math exercises were the worst, and they are overplaying their hand.  If they rejected just the implicit bias stuff, they would have been fully justified, but then they would not have rejected enough books to draw news attention!

And there's the point, for Florida.  If you are trying to drum up attention, you need to reject a fuckload of books, but then the problem becomes finding the justification.  Start with the worst offenders, and yeah, sure, you can find that.  The problem become looking for excuses to reject books after that.

I look at the four examples, and my assessment at this point is that Florida is likely trying to drum up attention.  Yes, some textbooks are written with too much of an ideological agenda, including math textbooks.  That should bother you, even when you agree with the ideology because you must apply the principle of the veil of ignorance.  Rawls.  Always Rawls.  And if those textbooks didn't exist, where would DeSantis be?  He'd have nothing!  If those math textbooks had just been math books, he'd have nothing.

And frankly, I have never understood why math requires new books, except as reprints so that a new class gets books that aren't so covered in scribbles, doodles and whathaveyous as to be unreadable.  Why?  Because math does not change.  A theorem, once proven, remains true for all time.  The math textbook racket is a racket.  We need new history books because history keeps-a-happenin'.  We need new science books to keep up with discovery.  Math?  Math does not change.  Take away the opportunity and you take away the potential for opportunism.

Battlegrounds will remain.  History, literature, and other fields.

This?  This is just stupid.

Music.  Writing this, I knew which song I wanted to use, but there are so many versions of the classic, I did not know which to choose.  "Days of Whine and Roses."  It is a jazz standard, so there are oodles of versions by luminaries, but I guess in the end, we're going with Lenny Breau.  There are a couple of versions that Breau recorded, but this one is just beautiful, warts and all.  From Cabin Fever, which is just him playing by himself, messing around, with the tape rolling.  Incomparable.