When Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis rolled out a bold new plan to crush public education under the boot of literacy-suspicious authoritarians, Republicans swore up and down that this was not actually the war on public schools it looked like. A pair of deliberately vague bills — one aimed at censoring "critical race theory" and another at banning "instruction" on "sexual orientation and gender identity" — were justified with disingenuous claims that Republicans merely wanted to protect children from "indoctrination" and even "grooming." Critics, however, noted that the funding and organization behind these efforts linked the DeSantis plan to a larger religious right assault on the very concept of public education.
Then Florida banned over two dozen math textbooks, proving critics right. This is, and always has been, an assault on education itself. DeSantis praised the ban, declaring that the books are "indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students."
