美国国家公共电台 NPR New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks

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Educators in Florida are working to comply with a new state law. It lets state residents challenge textbooks and instructional materials they object to. Science educators fear their demands for an independent hearing will open the way for attacks on evolution and climate change. NPR's Greg Allen reports.

GREG ALLEN, BYLINE 1: Keith Flaugh is a retired 2 IBM executive and a man with a mission.

KEITH FLAUGH: Getting the school boards to recognize - and I'm going to use an ugly term here - the garbage that's in our textbooks.

ALLEN: Flaugh helped found Florida Citizens' Alliance. It's a conservative group that fought unsuccessfully to stop Florida from signing onto Common Core educational standards. More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida's schools.

FLAUGH: And we found them to be full of political indoctrination, religious indoctrination, revisionist history and distorting our founding values and principles, even a significant quantity of pornography.

ALLEN: The pornography, Flaugh says, was in literature and novels in school libraries or on a summer reading list, including "Angela's Ashes," "A Clockwork Orange" and books by author Toni Morrison. Personally, Flaugh says, he's more concerned about how textbooks describe U.S. history and our form of government.

FLAUGH: I spent over 20 hours with a book called "United States Government," and you look at what's on the cover there...

ALLEN: Our democracy.

FLAUGH: We're not a democracy. We're a constitutional republic.

ALLEN: Flaugh says words do matter. He believes many textbooks downplay the importance of individual liberties and promote a reliance on federal authority. The new law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh's group, gives any taxpayer 3 in Florida the right to object the textbooks or other instructional materials being adopted and to make their case before what the law calls an unbiased hearing officer. Members of Florida Citizens' Alliance have other concerns. David Bolduc says he's most concerned about protecting the U.S. Constitution. He concedes he's not a scientist but also believes there's a bias 4 in how textbooks discuss climate change.

DAVID BOLDUC: It seems to me it's very slanted 5 in one direction - that, you know, man is at fault, and it's definitely happening, and it's real.

ALLEN: Bolduc also believes parents should be able to challenge how textbooks deal with evolution. In Florida and nationally, it's those last two topics - climate change and evolution - that have sparked the greatest interest. Glenn Branch with the National Center for Science Education says the bill clearly was formed with those issues in mind.

GLENN BRANCH: In affidavits 6 submitted to the legislature in support of the bill, they said, we complained that they were teaching evolution. We complained that they were teaching climate change. So that's why we need this new law.

ALLEN: Under the law, school districts will still have the final say. Even so, some worry it will have a chilling effect. Brandon Haught is a high school environmental science teacher and a member of Florida Citizens for Science.

BRANDON HAUGHT: You know, a science teacher might feel like, I got a lot of this heat coming down on all of us teachers. Maybe we should just not teach it as strongly - those kind of things.

ALLEN: The state school board association says one thing is clear - more challenges to the textbooks adopted by Florida schools are likely. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

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