A Google Alert lead me to: A textbook case of failure: Politically driven adoption system yields shallow, misleading materials. Alex Johnson, a report at MSNBC, details some of the problems with the textbooks public schools are using. This paragraph is a good sample of the message in the article:
"American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history."
Near the end of the article is this sad incident:
"Wang vividly remembers an encounter he had with the board that approves California’s textbooks when he showed up to testify for a book by Saxon. 'I was relating how well students did on state standardized tests' using the Saxon program, he said. The chairwoman pounded her gavel to interrupt the testimony to point out that quality wasn’t part of the discussion, he recalled.'"
And some people wonder why the students in public schools are having trouble getting an education!
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Technorati tags: public schools, education, textbooks
2 comments:
Who would have thought that MATH books have to be politically correct? What a scandal.
"This is why you find 600 page algebra books in the U.S."
And the sad thing is so many of the students don't learn algebra.
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