Florida Department of Education pressured science-textbook publishers to soften or remove climate-change content for 2024 state approval

In the summer of 2024, Florida Department of Education (FDOE) officials directed three science-textbook publishers to soften or eliminate accurate climate-change content as a condition of approval during the state's 2024 science-textbook review cycle. Savvas Learning was told to add citations defending statements that human activity causes climate change and to cut a passage urging legislative climate action from its biology textbook, authored by Ken Miller and Joe Levine. McGraw Hill's Marine Science, authored by Michael Huber, was edited at FDOE's direction to replace a statement that climate change kills at least 150,000 people a year with vaguer language about CO2's health effects, and to replace the phrase "climate change" with "changes in the environment" elsewhere in the book; a July 2, 2024 email from a McGraw Hill vice president to FDOE's instructional materials office documents the specific language changes department officials requested "for the 4 special topics discussed" that day. Cengage's Environmental Science textbook lost the word "polluting" before "coal burning power plants," a reference to University of Washington students voting to pay higher fees for renewable electricity, and lines describing the fossil-fuel industry's political and economic power.

The department did not require these edits to bring the books in line with Florida's own science standards, according to Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education, who called the demand to weaken climate-change treatment "very unusual." Publishers received the requests in phone calls from state officials in June 2024, during a review cycle in which Florida rejected books outright before allowing publishers to revise and resubmit them; textbooks most likely to cover climate content -- environmental science, earth science, and marine science -- were adopted by the state at less than half the rate of other science subjects reviewed that cycle. FDOE did not answer press questions about the specific changes documented in the correspondence. Asked about the reporting in 2024, FDOE Communications Director Sydney Booker said the department "works with publishers to ensure that their product aligns with our standards and does not include any form of ideology or indoctrination" -- a statement that did not identify climate content as the subject of that standard or dispute that the changes were requested. [3]

Updates

2026-08-20 — Hechinger Report/WUSF investigation documented the FDOE-publisher correspondence [2]

A 15-month public-records investigation by The Hechinger Report and WUSF obtained the department's correspondence with the three publishers, including the July 2, 2024 McGraw Hill email, and an adoption-rate analysis confirming the pattern. FDOE told reporters its review process is "guided by state law, State Board of Education rule, and Florida's academic standards and benchmarks," and did not address the specific changes the correspondence documented.