Posted on March 27, 2010 - by David

Texas Rewrites Textbooks, But Will Kids Even Read Them?

Over the last several weeks, the preliminary approval of new social studies curriculum standards by the Texas State Board of Education on March 12^th has turned into major national news. As the story goes, because Texas is one of the nation’s largest textbook purchasers, the standards it sets will impact the content of textbooks across the country as publishers try to meet the Lone Star state’s requirements. And why is this such a problem? Because a group of conservative board members pushed through a number of controversial revisions, and rejected many of the changes proposed by liberals in a 10 – 5 vote split down party lines.

These changes include:

• An emphasis on the Christian identity and values of the founding fathers and a shift away from teaching about the separation of church and state. (As a result, Thomas Jefferson get’s scratched off the list of thinkers who inspired revolutions in the 18^th and 19^th century, replaced, according to the New York Times, by St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and William Blackstone).
• Referring to the U.S government as a “constitutional republic” rather than calling it “democratic.”
• Using the term “free-enterprise system” in place of “capitalism” to avoid its negative connotations.
• Including in discussions of McCarthyism that “the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.”
• A Greater focus on the conservative movement of the 70’s and 80’s

If you’re really interested in finding out about the revisions, I’d suggest you skip the major news outlets and check out this annotated version of the Board’s standards that was put together by writers at www.texastribune.org.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a clip from ABC’s Nightline, highly critical of lame-duck board member Don McLeroy who seems to be the driving force in this “conservative bloc.”

And I couldn’t resist including the less reverent but more entertaining perspectives of Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

If you watched the clips above or read any of the news articles out there, you probably picked up on the less than subtle jabs at some of the prominent conservative board members who have little or no background in education or history. The New York Times refers to Don McLeroy as “a dentist by training.” David Bradley is characterized as “a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate.” Whether or not these are valid criticisms, they’re definitely easy shots, and it’s hard to blame journalists for taking them.

So what happens next? The Texas Education Agency website will post a document containing the revisions by mid-April, at which time an official 30- day public comment period will begin. But everyone seems to expect that when the Board reconvenes in May, the ratification of the new curriculum will occur without much further discussion.

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When I started to think about what these changes might actually mean to students, a thought occurred to me which wasn’t mentioned in any of the media coverage. I’m not sure how else to put this, so I’ll just say it… Most high school students will not read these textbooks. They will be able to pass U.S history with a minimal amount of reading if they pay a little bit of attention in class and maybe take some notes when the teacher reviews the material. All this hype is based on the assumption that students are actually reading what’s printed, but what if that’s not the case?

I’m pretty sure my experience with American history was not typical. I attended a large public high school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. There were around 750 students in my graduating class. In 11^th grade, I took AP (advanced placement) U.S History. I believe there were only two sections of the class, so if each class had approximately 25 kids, that’s about 50 total for the year. That means over 90% of my classmates got some other, less rigorous education in our nation’s history, split up between classes designated as honors, college prep, career prep, and basic instruction. Besides the fact that we were (supposed to be) the best and the brightest of our class, we had real incentive to learn because we were all hoping to score a 4 or a 5 on the AP exam and receive college credit for our work in the class (BU actually gave me credit for 2 U.S history classes).  

This class was no joke. Our main text, The American Pageant, was the fattest book in my locker, over a thousand pages long, and we were expected to have read a good chunk of it over the summer before we showed up to school. Its companion was The American Spirit, a book of primary source materials compiled by the authors of The American Pageant. Add to this occasional readings from After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, a collection of cases studies from American history designed to teach students to think critically about context and how “history” and “the facts” come into being. Of course there were also novels, biographies, and other historical texts which the ambitious or desperate-to-pull-his-grade-up-at-the-last-second student could read and write about for extra credit, and the various relevant news and magazine stories of that our teacher brought in from time to time.

There was a lot to read, and I didn’t come close to reading it all. I don’t think any of us did (except maybe our valedictorian, who google tells me is currently doing graduate work in quantum physics at Stanford – my head hurts just looking at it). I’m sure a lot of students were like me, and tried to cram as much of the textbook as possible into their minds in the few nights before the AP test in May. Throughout most of the year, I skimmed the textbook on some of the nights we had assigned reading (which was most nights), and neglected to even carry the massive thing home on others. I think I probably absorbed the majority of the information through the instruction and discussion which took place in class each day. I don’t think I’m generalizing too much from my own experience when I say that regardless of the level of the history class, the teacher’s particular methods and what he/she emphasizes has more of an impact on what students will learn than what is written in the textbook. A good teacher will acknowledge when there is controversy on a particular topic, present the various positions with as little bias as possible, and encourage students to think critically about the information before they jump to conclusions. Obviously, this is an ideal, and there’s no doubt that the political views of a history teacher are likely to become visible in the classroom, at least occasionally. In my class, we spent a good deal of time talking about current events, (which tend to be the most charged with emotion), and considering that this was the year that the Towers fell and the war in Afghanistan started, there was plenty to talk about. Interestingly, because we had so much to cover, we barely even got up to 1980 in our textbook, so the years of this “conservative resurgence,” which seem central to the Texas Board’s amendments, were passed over fairly quickly.

The point is, regardless of how influential the Texas Board of Education may be in the composition of new American History textbooks, the claims that they are determining what the rest of the nation’s kids will learn are exaggerated. As journalist Brian Thevenot of The Texas Tribune points out in “The Textbook Myth,’ (by FAR the best article I’ve read on this subject), technology has made it much easier for publishers to customize their content to meet the standards of different states, lessening the impact of Texas’s large market share. Even within Texas, new laws regarding digital materials may undermine the power of the conservatively-crafted textbook. Thevenot writes:

Because of their sheer buying power, large states with statewide textbook adoption processes did once indeed influence what went into the books, which used to be printed almost exclusively in national editions, Diskey and other industry experts said. But since the mid-1990s and the rise of the state curriculum standards and testing movement, publishers have increasingly been forced to customize their books for different states, as well as for larger school districts in the roughly 30 states without statewide adoptions. Simultaneously, advances in publishing and printing technologies allow far more customization at lower cost, much like large newspapers that issue several geographically customized editions every day.

What’s more, rapidly shifting politics and the digital revolution in instructional materials promises to dilute the power of state school boards even further — both here in Texas and nationally. Texas remains one of only two states that has shunned the national standards movement being pushed out of Washington, which, if it progresses as expected, would no doubt dwarf the market influence of even giant states. And here in Texas, new legislation that impinges on the board’s previously well-guarded curricular turf allows Commissioner of Education Robert Scott, who does not report to the board, to create a separate list of approved digital materials over which the board has no say. The new law only requires that schools buy one “classroom set” of board-approved textbooks, rather than one for every student.

As Thevenot’s article suggests, even the idea that the new curriculum standards will drastically alter what students in Texas learn seems suspect. I understand that there are several layers of administration from the state to the district to the individual school which prescribe and monitor what kids should be learning. I also understand that for a teacher, going against the grain or trying to squeeze in extra lessons on excluded or controversial subjects can be risky and complicated. But if a teacher wants to spend 10 minutes talking about a little known Latino figure like Oscar Romero, or allow an interested student to write a report about him, does the Texas Board of Education’s vote against including him in the curriculum do anything to prevent that?

Though I’m skeptical about the impact of these changes, I’m not saying that what’s going on in Austin doesn’t matter. Certainly, I believe the attempt to balance out the perceived liberal bias by unabashedly injecting a conservative slant into the new standards demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of what it means to teach history. And the idea of a governmental mandate that praise for America’s “limited form of government” be included in the history books strikes me as just a bit ironic. But there is one important domain that all of the conservative muscle of the Texas Board of Education can’t do much to reshape: the internet. I suspect that as time goes on, despite what teachers and administrators might hope, kids who have grown up online will rely more heavily on google and Wikipedia for the answers to their history questions than the textbooks that get handed out at school. Simply put, it takes more effort to flip through a thick book and scan for key information than it does to type the name of an important historical figure into a search engine and find this key information already neatly packaged in hyperlinked, outlined form. Will this make lazy students even lazier? Perhaps, but I think it also opens doors for those students who are curious about what really happened. If there is controversy over a certain subject, they won’t have to look that hard to find it, and after informing themselves, they can draw their own conclusions. The message to conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education – don’t be surprised if these historical conclusions aren’t the same ones you’re about to vote into law.