Canceling 41% of math textbooks submitted for use in Florida public schools has benefited one company: Accelerate Learning, a Texas-based company that finds itself as the only publisher whose kindergarten through fifth grade books qualify for the Florida purchase, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.
DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education ruled nearly half of the math textbooks submitted for consideration for use in Florida schools were unsuitable because, they claimed, the textbooks included “prohibited material” including information that promotes critical race theory. The state has yet to release examples from these books that discuss the subject, which is taught in law schools, not math classes.
The CEO of Accelerate, Philip Galati, was a one-time donor to Republican candidates, having given a total of $1,500 to Mitt Romney’s and Scott Brown’s unsuccessful 2012 campaigns. There are no public records of Galati or other officers donating significant amounts to political candidates in the past decade.
Accelerate Learning is a nine year old company that produces education materials for schools and home schoolers. It states that it constructed the math textbooks were “built from the ground up to the Florida B.E.S.T. by practicing educators using the flexible 5E lesson model.” Its STEMscopes line is a digital-based education system for schools which is used primarily in Texas but has clients all over the country. One of its primary investors is the Carlyle Group.