Interesting Idea

Could technology render the bureaucratic battles over textbook content null? A school district in Missouri is considering replacing textbooks with Kindles (or other e-readers), which they argue would provide students with a wider array of texts available instantaneously. Apparently it's been done by a couple of school districts already. I see the appeal; e-readers are highly interactive and provide instantaneous access to learning tools like dictionaries, thesaurus, and references to other resources.

My question is what is the socio-economic status of these districts. How is it really possible that some school districts in the U.S. are considering providing students with such a high-tech piece of equipment, while others struggle to keep the lights on? It doesn't seem fair. Even though this Missouri district says it will only implement its plan if they can get the Kindles donated, I have to imagine that it's a fairly affluent district that can even dream of spearheading such an effort.

I have also seen firsthand how students treat their schoolbooks and materials, and I can almost guarantee that these Kindles won't last--I'd say that two years would be impressive, three at the very max. It's hard to see how that would really be a cost-saving measure, which is one of the arguments in favor of the plan that the district offers--saying that it would be saving money by not having to buy textbooks.

I can see points in favor and against making e-readers the primary text resource for students. Regardless of how I might feel about it as a teacher, parent, or community member, I think it's safe to say that e-readers are a technology that will be increasingly incorporated into classrooms. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the textbook industry, and by proxy textbook standards at the state level.

Education and Economy

A common theme of my readings on textbook content and curriculum is the relationship between education and the economy. “We need to educate children to be leaders in the technology/energy/health/ sectors!” is a common political battle cry from many corners. Politicians want to breed the next generation of workers, schools adopt approaches to comply and get funding, and textbook companies provide materials oriented in that direction. Refocusing on “core curriculum” is a common direction taken, as if somehow by just drilling harder better faster MORE on rote memorization and particular facts will make kids smarter.


This "core curriculum" as its always been taught just so happens to have little perceived relevance to the life and experiences of students for whom the achievement gap is widest. In Minnesota the high school graduation rate for African Americans is 44%. For white students, it's 82%. Hello! Let's connect some dots here. It shouldn’t really come as a shock that the “core curriculum” generally approaches subjects from a white/Euro-centric viewpoint, and although there are clearly lots of factors involved in graduation rates I think that the presence (or lack thereof) of culturally relevant materials is important to consider.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, just think this:

vs. this:

Apple reports that teachers tend to resist top-down approaches to school reform like "refocusing on core curriculum"; this doesn’t really surprise me. Teachers are professional educators, which requires having ownership over which decisions need to be made in the classroom. This varies from class to class, and teachers need the flexibility to do what their class needs for learning to take place. Part of this includes adapting materials and curriculum to the needs and interests of students.

People are not manufactured goods, and education can’t be approached from a factory perspective. Which brings me back to the emerging theme in my understanding of textbook content processes--that in focusing on the inclusion or exclusion of this word or that opinion, we are missing the bigger picture. There's no way we're going to see it if we continue to devote entire state school boards (like Texas) to blatantly injecting ideologically derived information into our nations textbooks.

Savage Lies

Savage Inequalities is blowing my mind. Stories of children in East St. Louis who literally live in toxic waste sites, and pictures of schools where everyone--students, teachers, principals, parents--know they are getting the short end of the proverbial stick literally bring me to tears. It feels frivolous that so much time and energy is expended on the particulars of textbook phrases when there are schools that don't even have toilet paper.

But then....

Lies My Teacher Told Me is also blowing my mind. The author shares an anecdote from when he was teaching a freshman class at Tougaloo College, a predominantly black school in Mississippi. When he asked the class what they knew about Reconstruction at the beginning of a unit on the era, here is what he found:

"The class concensus: Reconstruction was the time when African Americans took over the governing of the Southern states, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they messed up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the state governments.

I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement that ti was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never took over the Southern states. All governeors were white and almost all legislatures had white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African Americans did not 'mess up'....For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their past seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, wince their race had 'messed up' in its one appearance on American history's center stage. It also invited them to conclude that it is only right that whites be always in control. Yet my students had merely learned what my textbooks had taught them."

To me, this drives home the point that what is in our textbooks really truly does matter. It is not simply an intellectual exercise. What people learn about their past has a direct impact on their present and on their future, a legacy seen all too clearly in the disparities between impoverished East St. Louis/ and wealthy school districts across the nation. If textbooks reinforce the status quo, it will never change.

Don't Mess with Texas

There is a reason that Texas is at the center of so many textbook battles:

Oh yeah. Your green friend and mine: money. Texas and California are responsible for the largest shares of textbook sales in the nation, so naturally textbook companies are going to adhere to whatever requirements they have in place. Which, in Texas, is a three-step process besieged by zealots and salesmen where the question of what is going to be the best tool to help students learn does not seem to factor into the equation. It also, horrifically, results in some very disturbing revisions to history such as giving Jefferson Davis (leader of the Confederates during the Civil War) equal space to Abraham Lincoln (you've heard of him, right?). The most recent round of revisions by an avowedly right-wing state school board are detailed here.

*Shudder*

Love, savagely

Oh yes. It's that time again.

That inglorious manufactured holiday where retail exonerates you to spendspeND SPEND otherwise you must not truly love your boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/husband/wife/whatever and schoolchildren get hopped up on fifty different kinds of sugar while engaging in blatant popularity contests over who gets the most Valentines.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan. I did go out to eat with my honey, but only because we are broke and had a Groupon to spend at the restaurant. The rest of the night I spent curled up with Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, which I've gotta say is a total mood-buster.

I can't even count how many times this book has already made me cry, and I'm only on the second chapter. Urban, minority school districts in toxic vicinity to industrial plants who can't even afford toilet paper much less textbooks are so far removed from the heated battles that rage in the bureaucracies of Texas and California. Entire school boards, administrative bodies, and citizen organizations are devoted to nitpicking every single element of textbooks. Yet as many critics note, even with this level of scrutiny textbooks lack a coherent voice or any level of compelling dialogue. And then there exist schools who will never get their hands on those hotly contested books, who need to deal with issues like sewage buildup, who are serving teen moms and gang members. What a disconnect between different sectors of America's education system. It seems like as a whole, there are a bunch of disparate groups running around hyper concerned with particular elements of education (textbook content! curriculum reform! school vouchers!), each of which are just tiny bandaids for a system in need of massive overhaul.

Textbook Commerce

A lot of my reading the past couple of weeks has dealt with the business of textbooks. It's pretty simple, really: publishers need to make money, so they want to produce what consumers (schools) will buy. This means producing materials that are in line with state textbook parameters, which are largely dictated by the two largest consumer states--California and Texas. However, a lot of the readings I've been using are from the mid-80s to early 90s, and it occurs to me that the commerce element of textbook publishing (and book publishing in general) is changing radically right now. It makes me wonder--how relevant will textbook content processes even be ten, fifteen, twenty years from now?

Students can already do independent research on the internet. With the increasing popularity of electronic books, the range of choices and resources available to students will only expand more. That is, available to students who have access to the technology, which of course is closely related to affluence. As the resources available to rich kids broadens, I fear that means that kids in poverty will be even more limited by the constraints on materials made by bureaucrats who put political interests ahead of kids real educational needs.

Who Do We Think We Are?

I'm currently researching California's textbook adoption process, and stumbled across a fantastic report from the Fordham Institute titled "The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption." There is a whole section devoted to California's "social content standards" which were implemented in 1976. As far as I can tell, these standards are implemented by a bunch of bureaucrats who are trying not to offend...well, pretty much anyone.

Now, I am all for fair representation of the glorious diversity in the good old U.S. of A. But, ummmm....have you met America? We are a pretty divided place. There is an interest group for everything, and they often have opposing viewpoints: Feminists vs. Fundamentalists; Homos vs. Homo-haters; Evolutionists vs. Creationists...etc. Even if there aren't opposing viewpoints, how is it even remotely possible to satisfy everyone's interest? Gender balance, equal representation of people with disabilities, various ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic status....I just don't see how it's realistically possible for one textbook to incorporate all of these various stakeholders (or at least satisfy their interest groups) into a quality textbook that is (gasp!) a quality and compelling text for students.

This kind of reminds me of a conversation that I had with a classmate of mine once upon a time. We were talking about test scores and how different regions of the U.S. stack up against each other (urban vs. rural, east coast vs. west coast, etc), and also how the U.S. stacks up against other countries. I brought up Finland, which generally speaking blows the U.S. out of the water on most standardized metrics. My classmate immediately shot back that Finland is extremely homogeneous, making it much easier to develop a national school system that works for everyone.

Oh.

Duh.

Finland =
US =
Right. There are simply more complexities when you are trying to do something on a national scale in a place that has a plethora of different backgrounds in its social fabric.

Now, just to be clear, I firmly believe that children and teenagers should be exposed to the rich diversity of our country and the world. I just as firmly believe that children and teenagers deserve a quality education. What I'm seeing in the California system of implementing diversity in teaching materials doesn't seem to accomplish either of these things. Textbook editors have scrubbed their materials of anything that might be controversial. Which equals BORING, and what a shame! Controversy has shaped us, and kids should get to know about it!

What really gets me, though, is that in all the reading I've done about these social content standards and various review panels, it is often several paragraphs, pages, or even chapters before I see the words "students" and "needs" put together. It's like we can't see the forest for the trees. And who, exactly, do we think we are that by wordsmithing texts to their graves we can indoctrinate children into a way of thinking deemed correct by some bureaucrat somewhere? The more I read about these tedious processes where the goal of educating children is completely lost in the shuffle of people making themselves feel important, the more I tend to believe that maybe we're going about this all backwards. Maybe state panels and bureaucracies should have less control in regulating textbooks or materials instead of more. Maybe teachers, who know their students, should be more entrusted to provide students with what they need. Or maybe--and this is pretty radical--we can give students more freedom to explore the topics of interest to them, thereby developing a more authentic understanding of the world. After all, are we trying to produce robots who can regurgitate facts as approved by some panel somewhere? Or is our goal to develop nimble leaders of a dynamic and shifting world?

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Michael Apple seems to be one of the big names in educational theory as far as the politics of textbooks go. I'm reading about three of his books right now, including Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class & Gender Relations in Education. So far I'm loving it--and even though it was published in 1986, it feels just as relevant today as it must have 25 years ago. Take this little nugget as an example: when talking about how teaching, a profession dominated by women in the 20th century (especially at the elementary level), is increasingly controlled and managed by male administrators (i.e. superintendents, principals, and curriculum designers), Apple observes

It is the history of the state, in concert with capital and a largely male academic body of consultants and developers, intervening at the level of practice into the work of a largely female workforce. That is, ideologies of gender, of sex-appropriate knowledge, need to be seen as having possibly played a significant part here. The loss of control and rationalization of one's work forms part of a state/class/gender 'couplet' that works its way out in the following ways. Mathematics and science teaching are seen as abysmal. 'We' need rapid change in our economic responsiveness and in 'our' emerging ideological and economic struggle with the Soviet Union.

Whoa. Substitute "China" for "Soviet Union" in that excerpt, and it could have been written yesterday. Even putting the global superpower competition element aside, the very same conversations are had in education today about our woeful inadequacies in teaching math and science (which, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time observing math classrooms recently, I have to say is completely warranted). How much are these inadequacies tied to the fact that (mostly women) teachers are constricted by the texts and curriculum they are required to follow by (mostly male) administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians, rather than exercise their professional expertise in guiding classes according to the needs of their students? A lot, in my opinion!

Teachers, moral codes, and women

I am a feminist.


Yep, I said it. I am also gay, pro-choice, pro-environment, and pretty progressive on most contemporary issues. The fact that American textbooks gloss over facts and circumstances that I find to be critical--say, for example, the genocide of Native Americans, or the fact that many Founding Fathers were slaveowners--was the impetus for my project on the politics of textbooks. But NOT because I want to brainwash my students with my way of thinking; rather, because I want factual information to be shared, and critical thinking skills fostered, among students.
I am proud of the fact that I'm an opinionated person, but I already know that's not going to be a centerpiece of my classroom. I know that I'll have to be out as a gay teacher, because that's just who I am. But I'm perfectly aware that could be an issue, probably not so much with my students but possibly with their parents and/or with my administration. Teachers have, for a long time, been held to a somewhat different moral standard than the general public...which probably has something to do with the fact that they're mostly women.

Exhibit A:


It's not showing up so well, but this is a teacher's contract from 1923 which stipulates, among other things, that the teacher agrees

-Not to get married
-Not to keep company with men
-To be home between 8pm-6am
-Not to loiter in downtown ice cream shops (after all, we all know how smarmy ice cream shops are!)
-Not to leave town without permission from the Board of Trustees
-Not to smoke or drink
-Not to dress in bright colors
-To wear at least two petticoats at all times (!)

Etc, etc ad nauseum. Ugh! How is it that there's any level of expectation that a teacher's life outside of school is anything other than their own?