A textbook case of failure

As a result, the politics of the boards adopting the books in Texas and California shape what is, to all intents and purposes, a de facto national curriculum, said Wang, who left Saxon Publishers, where he was president and chairman, in 2001 after he concluded that “this system was really unintentionally hurting the kids.”

Texas and California have both been the focus of campaigns to introduce intelligent design, an alternative explanation of the origin of life that critics dismiss as “creationism lite,” into the curriculum. But from there, the pressures diverge.

In Texas, the Board of Education is dominated by political conservatives who are heavily lobbied by conservative activists, among them the evangelical group Focus on the Family and the husband-and-wife team of Mel and Norma Gabler, whose tireless campaigning for religiously centered teaching materials has made them among the most influential forces in the production of American textbooks.

Texas’ textbooks, which are often adopted by other states that have few alternatives, have included board-ordered passages mandating politically conservative definitions of marriage, abortion and same-sex relationships and instructing students that pregnancies are best prevented by “respecting yourself” and getting “plenty of rest.” They have eliminated any mention of condoms, even though Texas leads the nation in teenage pregnancies.

161 pages of bias guidelines
In California, by contrast, the controlling forces are “social content standards” that insist that the state’s textbooks — even those in math and the sciences — portray ethnic groups, women, the elderly, the disabled and religious groups in precise proportionality to their representation in the population.

Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley, now part of textbook giant Pearson Prentice Hall, developed a 161-page manual titled “Multicultural Guidelines” in 1996 just to navigate the process in California. As summarized in the Fordham Institute report, the manual says company textbooks:

Textbook approval     Science Many states are gearing up to accept bids on new science textbooks: — 2006: Arkansas, California, Illinois*, Nevada, Utah* — 2007: Georgia, Illinois*, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah* — 2008: Illinois*, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah* * Illinois and Utah solicit bids in all subjects every year Source: Association of American Publishers

must include illustrations of tall and short people, heavy and thin individuals, people with disabilities, and families headed by two parents, by one parent, by grandparents, by aunts/uncles, and by other adults. When writing about the development of the U.S. Constitution, authors are directed to cite the dubious claim that it was patterned “partially after the League of Five Nations — a union formed by five Iroquois nations.”

Wang vividly remembers an encounter he had with the board that approves California’s textbooks when he showed up to testify for a book by Saxon.

“I was relating how well students did on state standardized tests” using the Saxon program, he said. The chairwoman pounded her gavel to interrupt the testimony to point out that quality wasn’t part of the discussion, he recalled.

According to a transcript of the meeting, which took place in 2001, the chairwoman said: “Effectiveness, while certainly something that we all look at as consumers, [is] not a criteria [here] and I think it is important that we keep that in mind. Test scores [are not] part of the criteria.”

“She was only considering whether the books had met the criteria,” not whether they actually worked, Wang said.

Wang, Ravitch and others have what they call a radical proposal: do away with the approval process altogether and let teachers and local school officials choose their own books.

“The system is resistant to the entrepreneurial spirit,” Wang said. “There isn’t a mechanism for encouraging innovation in education because of systems like this adoption process.”

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