The Roosevelt Institution
State textbook process needs an overhaul
by Tracy Steele and Danny Bliss
4/28/06
Opinion
In 1964, renowned physicist Richard Feynman likened California's textbook-adoption process to the search for an answer to an ancient riddle: What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose?
To find an answer, Feynman said, people went across China gathering numerous opinions and then averaging them to come to an "accurate" conclusion. In reality, this conclusion was probably no more accurate than any single person's guess. As Feynman — a member of the 1964 California Curriculum Commission — put it, "When you have a wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at [the situation], you don't improve your knowledge [of it] by averaging."
Unfortunately, not much has changed since 1964.
Monday in Sacramento, the Board of Education voted on the adoption of a curricular framework, a blueprint to institute California state standards in each of six core subjects that will dictate the content of public school textbooks for the next six years.
This year, the subject for review was Reading/Language Arts and a great deal of controversy surrounded 14 amendments proposed by advocates for the nearly 1.6 million English Language Learners in our public schools. In the end, the state Board of Education adopted the recommendations from the Curriculum Commission, which largely rejected the inclusions presented by the advocacy groups.
California's flawed textbook-adoption process, of which Monday's vote was a part, is to blame for the failure of today's textbooks. Instead of a research-based approach, textbook adoption policies smack of political-interest groups and market-driven publishing monopolies. Special-interest lobbies constantly ante up their concerns to the state Board of Education, flexing their political muscles in an effort to influence the content of textbooks.
Meanwhile, publishers fight to include each and every detail hammered out at the state Board of Education, because the adoption of their book means big money — more than $4 billion in national sales to be exact.
Last year history/social science took center stage and the diverse collection of players included the Hindu lobby, which proposed 152 amendments to the framework. In the aftermath of the final vote, according to Hindu Press International, "Hindus were not happy" with the 75% passing rate.
They contrast their hand to an analogous Jewish group, the Institute for Curriculum Studies, which lobbied successfully to have all 256 of their revisions accepted. The fact that history is being written for students in California by political persuasion instead of meticulous analysis of primary documents is backward at best.
Others should be alarmed, too
Historians, though, aren't the only ones who should be alarmed.
Just as illogical a process plagued the 2004 framework review process in science. The "back-to-basics" fad led to the revision of the science curriculum dictating a maximum of 25% "hands-on" instruction. Teachers and researchers were aghast and voiced their concerns. They argued that the 25% was an arbitrary amount, with no scientific basis.
The result? The current framework now demands that publishers include a minimum of 25% of "hands-on" curriculum. Clearly, this minimum is just as arbitrary as the maximum it opposes, and highlights the political battle between extreme viewpoints that have unfortunately come to characterize education in California.
The direct result of this political process of textbook adoption leaves schools looking more like airport terminals as students are forced to wheel their dangerously heavy books to class while publishers happily add pages and pages of more "essential" content, charging the bill to the already overburdened California taxpayer.
It's no wonder that books are getting increasingly heavier and lengthier while at the same time they are losing depth and synthesis. The finished product becomes increasingly more like an encyclopedia of terms and disjointed objectives than a scholarly and instructional tool.
The most quantifiable negative impact of this entire process is manifested in low test scores. In a report on textbook-adoption policies, David Whitman, former researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, expounds upon the results of the 2003 National Assessment of Education (NAEP) fourth- and eighth-grade math scores. Whitman shows that the lowest performing states are consistently those that have textbook adoption processes like California's.
Clearly, California's textbook adoption process needs serious reform. Textbooks are forced to bow to a variety of external demands, and in the end, their primary purpose — to educate students — is largely ignored. As Feynman might have put it, public education in California is far less trivial than the size of the Chinese emperor's nose.
Tracy Steele and Danny Bliss are students at Stanford University and fellows of the Center on Education and Learning for the Roosevelt Institution. The Roosevelt Institution is a national network of student think tanks providing the organizational infrastructure to get student ideas into the public discourse.