US textbooks a "scandal and outrage"

[donco6]

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.

Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago.

“They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12705167/

Here in Colorado, we don't have statewide textbooks - yet. But we still have to choose from what the publishers ultimately create, which are often determined by the states that DO have statewide texts - California, Texas and Florida. Districts like ours are between a rock and hard place; parents often demand texts as evidence that the school is spending money on instructional supplies, but curriculum directors decry the available texts as "horrible", "terrible" and "a waste of money" (all quotes from my last meeting with them.)

[Reverend_Smitty]

1. I've read several books about the failure of American text books...

between the cultural sensitivity coming from the left and all the other crap coming from the "won't someone think of the children" activists from the right, you can't imagine all the stuff that is being left out of them. Publishers have to make them so "inoffensive" to everyone just so they would sell that there is almost no point in publishing them at all. It's crazy really

[Warpy]

2. ....and all chosen by the consolidated school boards in Texas

which is really the problem. They get advance copies, mockups of the final text, and they choose which ones they want. Then everybody else has to follow because those are the only books that go into production.

Textbooks are ridiculously expensive, loaded with unnecessary pictures and artwork, and the market is limited by the number of school districts in the US. Texas has an amazing amount of clout as a heavily populated, huge state, and it makes damned sure none of those textbooks will offend a single redneck religious right Repug.

It might be better for us as a country if some state other than Texas got to choose the books that actually go into production. It would be best for us if some body, elected or appointed, chose those books on the basis of factual information given to students rather than razzle dazzle glitz and gloss together with jingoistic pablum.

If you want your kids to learn, skip the textbooks and introduce them to the LIBRARY. That's where the real stuff is, something I figured out in junior high.

[donco6]

6. A noble sentiment, but consider . . .

who would be the logical choice to make such a textbook selection. Since the US Dept of Education has already set nationwide standards for all content areas by grade level, they probably would also be the ones put in charge of selecting textbooks that match those standards. I can't imagine the selection being much better - if at all- than what the TX state board of ed. chooses.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. I learned history through the American Heritage and Horizon

coffee table books that my father loved to buy, as well as the Time-Life series on American history (10 volumes, I think.) Unlike most people who learned Iand promptly forgot) history from textbooks, I still remember some of the anecdotes and illustrations in those books.

If I were teaching an American history class, I'd turn the students loose in the library with a series of questions for each unit. For example, the first unit would be on the Native Americans before Columbus. The questions would be something like:

1) What are the theories on the origins of the Native Americans? What is the significance of the most recent archaeological discoveries?

2) How did climate and geography influence the cultures of the various tribes? What broad cultural regions are there (Plains, southwestern desert, Arctic, etc.), and what were the major tribes in each region?

3) Choose a tribe and research its traditional way of life and its history of contact with the Europeans.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. And reading non-textbooks, maybe even to class aloud...

...people like Bruce Caton and Shelby Foote, and Samuel Eliot Morison, and Barbara Tuchman -- folks who could write

[yardwork]

3. Public schools should reduce their reliance on textbooks

It's much better to use a variety of sources. There's no need to have kids trudge through a huge textbook to learn science or history.

[donco6]

4. Tell that to the parents.

Remember, we're run by school boards who are elected primarily by parents. If the parents want textbooks (and they often do, based on the mistaken belief that textbooks = back-to-basics learning), then we get textbooks.

[rodeodance]

7. textbooks are 'evidence' that schools are teaching. ( not so, but the myth

and image lives on).

[donco6]

8. EXACTLY.

I don't know how to fight that myth. It's utterly pervasive throughout society - even in districts with educated parents.

[yardwork]

18. I know. I didn't mean to blame the teachers at all in my previous post

Good teachers always want to use additional materials, but then sooner or later some hysterical (usually rightwing but sometimes leftwing) parent goes coo-coo over the article or book or poem or whatever the teacher asked her/his class to read.

It even happens at public universities. I often wonder why people send their kids to school if they don't want them ever confronted with anything that makes them have to think or defend their beliefs. I mean, isn't that the definition of an education? Learning more than one already knew?

[rodeodance]

5. A classic--The Politics of the Textbook by The Politics of the Textbook

I realize it is dated by still valuable-probably of the first critical assessments of textbooks. Well worth to read (prob. most who are in acedemia have already read).

[Cerridwen]

10. Meet the Gablers...

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol19/4477_texas_board_of_education_honor_12_30_1899.asp

<snip>

They have regularly appeared before the State Board of Education, offering the "conservative, Christian perspective" on content standards and textbook selections for every subject in the K-12 curriculum. Their lobbying activities have influenced other states as well: first, because other organizations - such as the Eagle Forum - rely on their textbook analyses; and second, because Texas is one of the nation's largest textbook purchasers, so Texas standards affect the content of textbooks that will be used in other states.

The Gablers have consistently opposed evolution. For example, in 1991, when Texas Proclamation 66 required evolution as a major theme in biology texts, pressure from the Gablers and other anti-evolutionists led to a lastminute revision calling for inclusion of "scientific evidence of evolution and other reliable scientific theories, if any" (RNCSE 10<6>:10). In 1998, ERA rated textbooks according to how much they "harp on" evolution (RNCSE 19<1>:10). In a section of their website titled "God-given victories", they claim credit for a drop in sales of the book which had received their lowest rating. To see this web page, go to , click on "God-given Victories!", see subhead "credibility with classroom teachers". The same document claims credit for "detection of subtle subversion" in social studies texts.

<snip>

[Odin2005]

11. College textbooks are a hell of a lot better then school ones.

In college the individual proffessor picks the textbook, so you don't have the watered down affect. My US History college textbook was FUN to read, even having some funny lines, you won't find that in a High School textbook.

[aikoaiko]

12. Secondary/tertiary sources in college not much better in colleges

As a professor who gets numerous textbooks to review, I have to say they are all pretty boring.

College gets a lot better when profs use primary sources.

[gristy]

13. Good textbooks are so important

By two favorites from high-school:

Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas
Physics (Vol I and II, 3rd ed.) by Haliday and Resnick

Wonderful books. I cannot imagine any good reason to use any other book for teaching calculus or introductory physics.

[Davis_X_Machina]

14. Interesting little example of bias...

...came up the other day in class.

Topic -- bleeding Kansas and the run up to the Civil War.

Pottawatomie massacre -- Northern abololitionist terrorist attack -- in book
Lawrence massacre -- Southern slaveholder terrorist attack -- no mention

So the student who reads no other source thinks that violence was something only the abolitionists resorted to.

[donco6]

16. They didn't have Quantrill's raid???

Now THAT's a glaring omission from KS history.

I grew up in Pott County.

[ToeBot]

17. Freshman year, I had Calculus, Physics, Chemistry and a couple piss offs.

After 2 semesters of playing the hunchback of science hall, I should have been comped a phys ed credit. My backback was huge and heavy.

[proud2BlibKansan]

19. I rarely use textbooks to teach from

I was taught in teacher school that they are a RESOURCE, and never the be all and end all to any curriculum.

But now that they are giving us scripted lesson plans, the thought police seem to be taking any originality out of instruction.

And speaking of textbook publishers, did you hear about this crap with SRA/McGraw Hill and the IRA?
http://www.patriciapolacco.com/

[peaches2003]

20. Feedup w/ TEXAS

Between the Gablers and the Bushies Texas has done more to ruin this country than all the other states combined!