New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks

Keith Flaugh is a retired IBM executive living in Naples, Fla., and a man with a mission. He describes it as "getting the school boards to recognize ... the garbage that's in our textbooks." Flaugh helped found Florida Citizens' Alliance, a conservative group that fought unsuccessfully to stop Florida from signing on to Common Core educational standards.

More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida's schools. A new state law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh's group, allows parents, and any residents, to challenge the use of textbooks and instructional materials they find objectionable via an independent hearing. Flaugh finds many objections with the books used by Florida students. Two years ago, members of the alliance did what he calls a "deep dive" into 60 textbooks.

"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," he says.

The pornography, Flaugh says, was in literature and novels such as Angela's Ashes, A Clockwork Orange and books by author Toni Morrison, which were in school libraries or on summer reading lists. Flaugh says he's just as concerned about how textbooks describe U.S. history and our form of government. "I spent over 20 hours with a book called 'United States Government,'" he says.

He found more than 80 places where he believes the textbook was wrong or showed bias, beginning with the cover. Its subtitle is "Our Democracy."

"We're not a democracy, we're a constitutional republic," Flaugh says.

He believes many textbooks downplay the importance of individual liberties and promote a reliance on federal authority, and what he calls "a nanny state mentality."