If more people were aware of things like this, there would be a massive revolt against the education establishment.
11 thoughts on “The People Behind The Textbooks”
Comments are closed.
If more people were aware of things like this, there would be a massive revolt against the education establishment.
Comments are closed.
Full disclosure, Pearson’s my employer. We’re a UK company with a number of imprints. Scott Foresman is one under Pearson Education; a largely North American subsidiary based in Boston (I’m a software developer with PE’s Learning Technology Group). Like most publishers, we edit, but do not produce the content. I can tell you this much, I don’t think more than three people in either one of our buildings have a clue who Jane Addams is, and all three of us just found out this morning after discussing this post.
Most textbook content, for the entire USA, has its origin, in Texas. The reason for this is that Texas adopts textbooks at the state level and thus is the largest purchaser of textbooks… in the world. Other big states, like CA, NY, PA FL, adopt textbooks at the local level and don’t have as much clout. The publishers tend to cater to their biggest client and the rest of the states buy whatever Texas chooses to adopt.
The Texas State Board of education appoints committees to examine and choose textbooks in each subject area. Like most appointees, it’s not what you know but who you know. So US textbooks are inevitably a reflection of the whims and prejudices of the Texas State Board of Education.
@Jardinero1:
And now that people are starting to pay attention to the content of textbooks again, I can assure you that Pearson will move heaven and earth to meet the market. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of leftist entrenchment both in the standards process and amongst the most productive contributors of educational content. There’s a lot of work to be done before truly balanced products can reach the consumer.
All those lefty textbooks were picked by the Texas BoE?
Or maybe it was something to do with this clusterf—.
Texas and California are the two biggest purchasers, and historically California has been the most proactive in setting content standards. Texas is only recently starting to flex its muscle after a long and storied shift in the political make up of its state-wide board. I would note that this issue touches only on a handful of the offerings that states and school districts ultimately select, and that’s part of the reason why the industry as a whole has been so slow to react to conservative and libertarian concerns of bias in the content.
Jardinero, there’s no way the Texas folk picked Howard Zinn’s history-of-America text. California I could buy.
At Wikibooks seems doomed to me on the social sciences, but I’ve spent some time working on the Trig textbook. There really shouldn’t be any reason to pay $100 for any high school math or science text, nor for a large slice of undergrad texts.
Those are the facts as I know them. I only know these things because my lefty father sat on a number of these adoption committees when I was a child. There is plenty of press about the issue like this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
I used to teach school myself(math) so if it makes anyone feel any better or worse, the best teachers don’t teach from the text.
I keep saying it, but this is why we home school.
@David Hoffman
But what about socialization!
/sarc
That’s one reason among many that we homeschool, too.
“English is the enemy of social justice and equality”. No doubt, Newspeak would be much better.
At this point I’m thinking that someone qualified to teach should be developing their own texts. And that should be a condition of their employment. Provide samples of the texts you’ve developed that you’ll be teaching from when you apply for the job. Death to the text book cartel! Bring back the petrie dishes!