So! How Are The Children?

I'm currently reading about constitutional challenges to textbook content. There are multiple court rulings affirming the right of local school boards to determine the permissibility of materials used in class. Parents are most often the source of court challenges, when they read their children's school books only to find the content offensive to their moral or religious beliefs. The article I'm reading posits that this is likely because texts provide the only hard evidence of what their child is being taught in the classroom, which really made something click for me.


It's been really hard to find research sources about textbook content that is less than 15 years old. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but the idea that textbooks are somehow the only way for parents to keep up with what's going on in their kid's classroom seems really dated to me. Most of the teachers that I know maintain websites for their classes, send home some sort of e-newsletter or hard copy newsletter in addition to the school's regular communication, and regularly attempt more personal contact (such as conferences or phone calls) with parents. Building parental relationships is a major focus of my graduate teaching courses. It seems to me that in a well run classroom in 2011, parents have multiple opportunities to find out what's happening in their child's classroom. Maybe that is why textbook controversies don't seem to be as big of an issue in the education/academic world. Of course, battles still rage in some states (i.e. Texas, which is nothing to sniff at given its role in determining textbook norms for the rest of the nation). In my estimation, however, given everything else that schools are dealing with, the content of textbooks seems to rank pretty low on the list of priorities.