A question for DU'ers with school-aged kids....

preferably parents of those attending middle or high school: Have you ever skimmed through your child's history book?

Given what I feel are attempts by the current WH to revise history (for example, things all of a sudden become "classified"), I'm just wondering if anyone has noticed things that don't seem quite the way you remember them.

I've got history text books dating from the 1930's. They are serious books.
The history books now are a freakin' joke.

largely initiated in Texas, to change textbooks (not only history, but science as well) to conform to right wing beliefs . . . they've been pretty successful, and since the same texts are often sold to schools in other states as well, the movement is spreading rapidly . . .

In addition to the regular text book. Different kind of history teacher I guess. :)

conservative control of the media, etc.? I think this effort's been going on for decades. I've assumed this accounts for why so many younger folks have bought into so many conservative myths, such as that the "excesses of the sixties", unions & gov't regulation are "bad", Reagan defeated evil empire, etc.

who decide what textbooks their schools will use. In some states this is done at the State level.

It's interesting to note that the right wing is complaining about the same thing...the dirty liberals have gotten to the textbooks!

Well, they may not control it, but they come pretty damn close, since publishers have no intention of producing drastically different versions of books for each state or foregoing such huge markets as Texas and Florida. Large markets like Illinois and New York would have a significant influence as well, but they don't have as much control at the state level, as their adoptions are largely handled by individual communities or school districts.

Unless it can pass muster in Texas and Florida, a textbook is quite unlikely to find the inside of a desk in, say, Minnesota.

Of course, sometimes publishers will produce small Addendum packets for an individual state, but the major editorial decisions are made by Texas and Florida.

I used to work in educational publishing, and I remember once working on a phonics program which included some longer passages for students to practice reading. We had to remove a perfectly accurate (and fully impartial) passage about the Civil War because it used the words "Civil War," which upset adoption committees in southern states, who prefered "war between the states.:eyes: (To be fair, this wasn't a history text, and I don't know if they would have allowed "Civil War" in a history text or not.)

In my son's 4th grade science textbook, in a section on dinosaurs, the first date that was used referred to the finding of fossils in the 1800s.

There was no mention of when dinosaurs actually inhabited the earth, except to say that they lived "long ago" or something similar to that. I believe this was a Harcourt Brace textbook.

I always page through the science and social studies textbooks to see if there is anything truly objectionable.

Our district also offers parents the opportunity to review textbooks recommended for adoption. Our elementary school is great about notifying parents of these opportunities and putting all the proposed textbooks on display. I haven't come across anything yet that would prompt me to talk to the principal.

to look the textbooks over. The whole "dinosaurs lived long ago" vaguery is exactly the kind of thing that the Texas/Florida junta is able to obscure.

Just out of curiosity, do you know roughly what percentage of parents take advantage of the review opportunities?

And welcome to DU! :hi:

I've never seen anyone else reviewing the books (at least at the same time), but the books are always on display for a couple weeks, so people have a lot of time to look things over.

Fortunately my kids are science lovers and know exactly when the dinosaurs lived. We also live in an area with large numbers of people involved in high technology and science fields, so I don't think that parents in general would stand for such obfuscation.

Off subject a bit, do you attend school board meetings? That's where a lot of the fun usually happens and people need to be very much involved in monitoring what their school boards are doing. A major part of the right-wing strategy was to take over positions at the local level and establish a pipeline.

Thanks for the welcome!

I assume you are one of a select few who takes the time to look at them :)

I haven't attended school district meetings in quite a while. My wife used to teach school, which made them interesting (and frustrating), but no longer does. When I have kids, though, I definitely will. And you're totally right about the right-wing and their pipeline, as evidenced by what they were able to work to at the state level in Kansas with respect to evolution a few years ago ...

textbook review committees and I don't remember ever even having a conversation about whether content was politically correct or not. We focus on things like presentation, ease in teaching, clear goals and objectives, appropriate for grade level, etc. And all the texts we looked at were by the big publishers. Nobody podunk at all.

of the system, as the textbooks are guided by the state standards well before they reach local review committees (and then tweaked again throughout the review process, depending upon how much money is at stake in a given market). So I misspoke in that I didn't mean to imply any local textbook review committees influenced textbooks in that way.

We were a "podunk" publisher in the sense that we weren't one of the few multi-national conglomerates who control the vast majority of the market (though the company I worked for has since been absorbed by one of those megalopublishers), but we were, I believe, the largest independent publishers in mathematics and one of the largest independents in language arts. I worked there during a major initiative to develop a K-6 Reading program, and these regulations were something of which we simply had to be aware. And in extensively reviewing the competition, it was abundantly clear how they were tailored to these regs.

Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that review committees were corrupt, back-room affairs, or to denigrate the good work that the people on those committees do, but only to point out how the priorities of a few small states control the product used by students nationwide.

by the time you're reviewing the textbook, the content has already been decided, primarily by states such as Texas as others have pointed out. And all of the publishers are working through the same approval processes, so you probably won't see huge differences in the ways that ideas are presented. When there are differences, they're often subtle.

There's a great book (which, to be honest, I've started and haven't finished yet) by Diane Ravitch called "The Language Police" that discusses how criticism from the right (and left) shapes the development of textbooks.

I knew it was something like that. One of my co-workers read that (when it came out I was still working for this publisher) and it made its way through our department like wildfire. I never read the whole thing either, but from what I did read and from the interviews I heard with her on several NPR shows, my impression was that while she claimed to take both left and right to task about this, the majority of her examples and critique concerned the left and "PC run amok." Though, in my opinion (and this probably will come as no surprise) the right is a bigger offender. (She is, after all, a right-wing critic.) Still, it was an important book for putting a spotlight on some of these issues, even if the spotlight wasn't quite aimed properly ;)

wrong information, but the history covers such a large time period that it is skimpy history. When I sub for a history class, I usually fill in some of the missing material.

In Florida, kids take a year of World History in sixth grade, Geography in seventh grade, U.S. History in eight grade, and in High School, they take World History again (more detailed than the sixth grade), U.S. Government, and U.S. History. They also have the option of taking a "street law" course and a more formal U.S. law course.

History books that have been written during the Bush Administration are only now making it into the classrooms, thus, I cannot comment on what is left out in those.

High school history. It has deteriated badly since I was in HS twenty seven years ago, and I feel that somebody needs to be teaching these kids the truth, not the propaganda.

But I grew up in a very rural, totally red, extremely right-wing part of Ohio. My history teachers in HS were terrified of "comminists" and they had drunk the kool-aid (yes, there was kool-aid back in those days too). This was in the late 1970s and most of the kids in my classes thought that we should have stayed in Vietnam until we "won."

I looked at my son's 9th grade Biology text a few weeks ago and was pleased to see an entire chapter on evolution, natural selection, etc. It looked pretty good to me. I'm not a fan of textbooks in general - the info is compiled by committee and is usually somewhat out of date by the time it is used in the classroom, but this seemed ok.

My son's World History book, I likewise thought was ok. It was totally Eurocentric of course and full of the same old same old, but I didn't see anything worse than usual.

Is full of fiction about mismanagement and exaggerated infighting, blaming the leaders overthrown by the CIA for their own demise. The wars in which the US funneled weapons and money to warlords, anti-socialists, and underdogs approaching the bargaining table are not mentioned.