I Wish They All Could Be California Text Books
A California state senator has submitted legislation that would not allow newly approved Texas social studies text books in the Golden State. The senator said:
“While some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years, California should not be subject to their backward curriculum changes. The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation’s diverse history.”
Though publishers say that the Texas curriculum will not cross state borders due to enhancements made in digital publishing, their track record is not that great. Legislation like this is warranted and should be implemented in the First State. feel free to mess with Texas.
h/t Dispatches
I like it! Make Delaware a Texas Free Text Book State!
Here is a list of school boards in NCC. Please add more, and write to them asking to make DE a Texas Free Text Book State!
http://brandywineschools.org/16021021976140/site/default.asp
http://www.redclay.k12.de.us/board/boardmembers.shtml
http://www.christina.k12.de.us/SchoolBoard/Members.htm
http://www.colonial.k12.de.us/boardmembers.shtml
Note: Why does the Colonial School District’s website stink?
And here’s Appoquinimink
http://www.apposchooldistrict.com/schoolboard/directory.cfm
Let’s get it started in here! I’m writing now!
This is a great idea. Textbooks and their publishers have been controlled for years by California and Texas standards, but the recent Texas dust-up has been insane. Remaking history for the future…
I hope some Delaware legislators will sponsor this for a statewide bill. We can’t affect what they do in Texas, but we certainly need to let textbook publishers know that we care about this. Let some small Texas state companies publish Texas’s
textfiction books.I think this is something the State Board of Education should adopt. I wouldn’t trust local boards to do this.
If you assclowns actually knew how the textbook industry works, you wouldn’t write crap like this.
The books are already written. They will be tweaked slightly to align them with the Texas standards, with a few picture changes and a few different text boxes. They will even be labeled as a “Texas Edition” and include the new standards in the front of the book. But the reality is that the next set of textbooks to come into my classroom will be little different than the set that was adopted a decade ago — and what many of the changes that are made will likely be in the books that are adopted in all 50 states because they will not re-write the entire textbook for outside of Texas, even if some state says it does not want to adopt the Texas textbooks.
On one hand ANM seems to be saying, “Don’t worry, this is just a Texas thang.” Then ANM says that in 10 years all the books will have changed to the Texas standards. (At least that’s how I understood it.) This post has to do with state’s protecting themselves from a backwater way thinking. If Texas wants to raise a crop of morons that’s their choice. It should be the choice of every other state not to wallow in Texan stupidity.
Let’s clarify what I am saying:
1) The books are written. They are already in our classrooms.
2) The changes that will be made to the book are going to be little tweaks, not major revisions.
3) The difference between the books that go into my classroom and those that go into a classroom in Delaware will be mainly cosmetic, and notable mostly for what is in the Instructor’s Edition (state standards and the like).
4) Because of the influence of the Texas market, the textbooks that are available outside of Texas will include many of the Texas revisions, which will likely be virtually unnoticed by anyone — but they will not be “Texas textbooks”. For example, expect to see “free enterprise system” and “trans-Atlantic slave trade” as terminology in books purchased by your local school in 3 or 4 years. Expect to see information about Soviet spying on the US presented along side the traditional treatment of Joe McCarthy. And possibly expect to see some of the Founders other than the “Big Six” (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton) discussed more in depth than in the past (heck, including their names would be more in depth than is traditionally done).
By the way, I repeat a question I’ve asked repeatedly — how many of you have actually read the standards that were proposed (the final standards are not online yet)? I don’t mean a liberal group’s press release or the AP article based upon it — I mean the actual standards? In other words, do you actually know what you are talking about, or am I the only individual in this discussion who isn’t talking out of his/her ass?
By the way, let me say for the record that I am unhappy with some of the final changes that have been reported regarding these standards.But even with those in the curriculum, I’ll stand up and state that I do not believe the final standards to be anywhere near as atrocious as reported in the media, and I do not expect that there will have to be major changes in what is taught in Texas classrooms from what is currently taught in classrooms in all 50 states.
1. Of course text books are already written. Some text books will be written in the future. Just because Texas doesn’t have any money to buy textbooks in the near future, doesn’t mean other states will have to suffer the slings and arrows of the ignorant.
2. Did you read the proposed changes? I did. Your definition of little tweaks is not the dames as mine. The tweak in muckrakers is just freaking stupid and absur.
3. Cosmetic? That’s what you call changing historty?
4. The publisher quoted in the articled specifically said this won’t happen. However a state senator from California does nit believe them. And neither do a great many of our readers.
Let’s try again.
The books we will have with these standards will be virtually the same as what we already have. Just like the last time we adopted textbooks. I was on the district review committee for the current texts — the only real difference between the book adopted and the previous one were cosmetic (the cover, some of the pictures, and the color scheme) — otherwise they were nearly word-for-word identical. I’ve also seen the edition of that same book that my niece in Oregon uses. Again, the differences are cosmetic — it is not called a Texas edition, but it is essentially the same book, with a nod to the standards in that state.
And have I read the changes — Hell, I’ve been reading the various proposals since the process started. FYI, that would mean going back well before you got the talking points from some liberal group and started spewing them like they dropped from heaven bound in calfskin with goldleaf on the edges, key phrases highlighted in red like the Words of Christ in a Bible.
Bookbanners usually wait until the books are published.
Well, that’s the thing with “progressive” bookbanners — they believe they are so advanced that they ought to be allowed to ban books based upon what they believe they will say, and to exercise prior restraint upon speech that they think they will object to before it is even uttered.
And why not? If parents should have a say in the schools their kids go to, certainly those parents should be able to weigh in on the books their kids read and get taught by.
But since you don’t believe in parental choice in education, stop the hypocritical pronouncements, Cassie.
A Nony, I read every word on your blog. I brought up some issues here. I’ve read other discussions and critiques of the changes. I use textbooks with all kinds of publication dates, myself, and I’m familiar with the state content standards of more than one state.
I say that the changes requested for these textbooks are far more than the usual fascination with font change and the regrettable modern taste for putting anything they’re planning to test in bold in a box. I have no way of knowing how much these standards will actually impact the publishers… because i don’t know why they don’t just buy Bennett’s k-12 nonsense and a few ABEKA books and call it a day, if their taste is for Christian dumbed down material. But if it has ANY impact on the publishing, I believe the impact will be negative. They will render any child educated with them less able to interact competently with the modern world, and that’s bad.
I get my spelling tests straight out of the McGuffy reader. I’m all about solid standards. This undermines them.
And you, Brooke, are likely the only one who did look at the standards. And to be honest, I don’t like all the changes — but I believe you overstate their impact, not the least because I know how they will be taught by folks like me and my colleagues.
Well, and that’s the other half, of course, who gets to decide? If your state sets nonsense standards, are teachers really entitled to teach something else?
Burn those books. B.C and A.D are horrible references for time periods.