Textbook Troubles, by Rebecca Jones
"Open your textbook, boys and girls, to page 1, 276."
If it's been awhile since you've followed a teacher's directions, you might be surprised to learn that a textbook even has 1,276 pages. But wait, there's more: Take a look at the flashy type and colorful illustrations that practically leap off the page.
You might be forgiven for asking: Whatever happened to 350 pages of gray type, bound in a puke-green cover?
Those textbooks are long gone, replaced by 20-pound packages of glitz that lure many school officials and state textbook administrators into thinking they're providing students with the best and latest in curriculum materials. But several recent reports criticize these coffee-table textbooks as shallow, dumbed-down products that waste both taxpayers' money and students' learning potential. Professional textbook-watchers say it's particularly disconcerting that, at a time when the standards movement is demanding more of students, textbooks are delivering less, albeit in ever-larger packages.
Researchers say textbooks need immediate attention because even the best teachers rely on them more than they think. Shadow studies that track teachers' activities have shown that between 80 and 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven. Which suggests that the Big Four textbook publishers -- McGraw-Hill, Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, and Pearson have swallowed other publishing companies and made them imprints -- have established a de facto national curriculum.
A forthcoming book based on research from the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) blames U.S. textbooks for the relatively poor showing of U.S. students on international tests. According to Why Schools Matter (scheduled for publication by Jossey-Bass next year), the content of textbooks in different countries correlates very closely to what children learn in those countries, as reflected in their test scores.
"To me, this is the smoking gun," says William Schmidt, coauthor of the book and national coordinator for U.S. TIMSS. "It shows very clearly that curriculum matters, and in particular, it shows that one of the most powerful aspects in all of this is the textbook. ... [U.S.] books just do not hold up by international standards."
What's wrong with textbooks
A recent spate of newspaper and magazine articles have highlighted factual errors in textbooks. (For the story of one father's efforts to correct errors in a middle school science text, see "Buyer Beware," page 22.) In response to this publicity, some states and school districts have begun charging fines for each error found in a publisher's book, and some publishers have set up web sites to field complaints and disseminate corrections.
"When it comes to textbook accuracy, the publishers are doing a much better job of vetting their books than they used to," says Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council. Without minimizing the importance of accuracy, he and other experts say they're more concerned about other problems with textbooks.
The American Textbook Council issued a report earlier this year criticizing the latest history textbooks for dumbing down and reinventing history. "Content is thinner and thinner," according to the report, and is "increasingly deformed by identity politics and group pieties." Because textbook-adoption committees and teachers look for this sort of thing, the report says, "editors have moved diversity lessons to front and center, at risk to student interest and accuracy." So there are more stories about Sacajawea and fewer about George Washington.
Math and science texts are drawing criticism from Project 2061, an education-reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C., that has issued four recent reports based on five years of evaluating U.S. middle school and high school math and science textbooks. Not one of the widely used middle school science texts passed muster, according to Project 2061, and none of the high school biology and algebra texts received high ratings from the scientists and educators who evaluated the materials.
The biggest problem, says Project 2061 associate director Jo Ellen Roseman, is that texts "ignore the research" on how students are likely to perceive ideas. Research has shown, for instance, that the physical differences between water and ice lead many students to assume they are composed of different molecules. Textbooks feed into this misunderstanding by using different colors in illustrations of water particles and ice particles.
"We know what the students' ideas are likely to be, and yet the materials totally ignore them," says Roseman, explaining that book designers tend to use "color for color's sake," without worrying about (or maybe even understanding) how the colors might reinforce misconceptions.
Textbook authors often make incorrect assumptions about what students know or understand, she says. Several biology books on the market today, for instance, talk about adaptation without ever explaining what it is. A kid who has been told he needs to adapt to a new situation might reasonably expect that individual animals similarly adapt, without understanding that adaptation, as a biological term, occurs in populations, not individuals, over generations through natural selection.
Such lack of explanation can lead to gross misunderstandings. When Project 2061 reviewers asked probing questions of 30 students who had scored well on a multiple-choice science test on natural selection, Roseman says, all but two or three students revealed a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the topic. "When we showed the textbook author some sample student responses," she says, "he was horrified, just horrified. It just never occurred to him that students wouldn't immediately grasp his good writing."
Perhaps the marvel of this story is that Project 2061 was able to identify an author at all. Textbooks are normally created by teams of authors, and publishers whip out new editions so quickly -- after all, no district wants to pay $75 for a textbook with last year's copyright -- that even listed authors often aren't aware when a new, modified version is out. When "20/20" correspondent Sam Donaldson showed a copy of the much-criticized (and now out-of-print) Exploring Physical Science to a woman who'd been identified as the lead author of the book, she said she'd never seen it before.
Some textbooks also list student consultants, and in the spirit of democratization, many school districts put students on committees to help select new texts. This practice makes no sense to Sewall: "Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think students are capable of evaluating their instructional materials. That's why they're students."
Some textbook purists, such as William Benetta of The Textbook League in Sausalito, Calif., contend textbooks should be developed and reviewed only by specialists in their disciplines. "If you think you can put together a biology course or textbook without the help of biologists," he says, "you might as well get a sign for yourself saying 'Dumbbell and Sucker.'"
But Roseman -- who has a doctorate in biochemistry -- says a doctorate does not guarantee an ability to recognize a good textbook for high school students. When scientists look at textbooks, she says, "some of them will say, 'Oh, boy, these are well written.' What they don't realize is that they're able to fill in all the gaps, and they don't have misconceptions. ... But if you really get into the mind-set of a student, you realize that the books don't help -- and they may even confuse."
Darwin and glitz
Publishers say, correctly, that today's textbooks reflect what today's market demands. "The evolution of textbooks is downright Darwinian," says Roger Rogalin, president of the McGraw-Hill School Division. "It is a competitive market, and competitive market pressures push textbooks in certain directions. All the criticisms directed at textbooks are really criticisms about what the market is demanding."
Driving the market are four key states -- California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina -- that provide state funding for texts approved by their textbook-adoption committees. Together, these states accounted for $971 million of the $3.3 billion in U.S. textbook sales in 1998, the most recent year for which sales figures are available.
To meet the curriculum requirements of school districts in these and other states, publishers keep adding topics to their basal texts. "No one punishes a publisher for having too much material in a textbook," says Stephen D. Driesler, executive director of the Association of American Publishers School Division in Washington, D.C. But a publisher can lose tens of millions of dollars in sales if a state adoption committee doesn't find a key word it's looking for in a computerized word search. The fear of missing a key word helps explain why many textbook creators have fallen into the habit of mentioning many terms or concepts without explaining them clearly.
Publishers claim there simply isn't room to explain everything that needs to be mentioned: The curriculum requirements in most states are too vast, and almost everyone agrees that U.S. textbooks are already too big. The TIMSS study established that U.S. textbooks "have more pages in them than any other country's," says Schmidt. "And it's of such order of magnitude as to be obvious ... and pathetic in terms of its impact on kids."
U.S. textbooks often have hundreds more pages than books in other countries, yet an item-by-item comparison of the content shows the material "is not of the same level as [texts in] other countries, especially high-achieving countries," Schmidt says.
How is it possible to have more pages and less content? Besides the mentioning habit (and the repetition of previous years' lessons), there's the glitz factor. Teachers and publishers -- who evidently haven't noticed the pages of plain type in the popular Harry Potter books -- say textbooks need razzle-dazzle to capture kids' interest. So textbook designers use splashy illustrations, large type, short sidebars, and funky headlines, all set off by expanses of white space.
Textbooks in other countries are, to say the least, more subdued. Rachel Foreman, a recent U.S. college graduate now teaching in Japan, is amazed that her students' 170-page chemistry book measures only 5 by 7 inches. "This small book is full of information and doesn't have very many pictures," she reports. "The margins are very thin, leaving very little white space. Because the page size is so small, though, it seems like it would be very easy to move through the book without feeling overwhelmed."
Looking for a readable book
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman described, among other things, his experience on a California textbook-adoption committee. He recalled the high ratings one book received, even though its pages were blank. (The publisher missed the deadline for submitting text, but sent a cover with blank pages so the book still would be considered.) Textbook watchers say many state and district committees still select books without anyone actually reading them.
Harriet Tyson, author of A Conspiracy of Good Intentions: America's Textbook Fiasco, says she has watched teachers on adoption committees examine teachers manuals carefully, but "they don't read the text that the kid's going to read. They aim right for the stuff that's going to help them teach." Then they flip through the students' text -- just enough to appreciate the snappy layouts and colorful illustrations.
"Pictures sell the books," she says. "Teachers don't have time -- adoption committee members don't have time -- to read the book. They flip through the pages -- what the publishers call a flip test."
Key words are boldfaced to catch teachers' eyes. "Whatever fad is sweeping through American education, the publishers exaggerate it and put neon lights on it," Tyson says. "They'd have 'Critical Thinking Skills' as the caption over a list of end-of-chapter questions, and the questions would be things like, 'How many stripes are there in the American flag?' ... They were the same list of questions that had appeared in a previous edition, but now they were relabeled, so the teachers who were sitting in adoption committees would flip through pages and say, 'Ah, critical thinking skills!'"
Tyson says she has seen adoption committees trained to count the number of faces in textbooks that are black, white, Hispanic, male, and female. "The thoughtlessness of all this is what overwhelms me," she says. "There's a lot of sloganeering about putting children first, but in the realm of textbooks, nobody is doing that. Nobody is even coming close to doing that."
So what's a district to do?
Textbook experts are a pretty depressing lot. They say things like, "It's hopeless," "It's very discouraging," and "I'm so disgusted with the whole kit and caboodle." But ask them what school districts should do about textbooks, and they begin to make suggestions:
• Encourage more textbook research. McGraw-Hill's Rogalin contends that textbook criticism is based on "anecdotal evidence or intuitive sense," rather than unbiased research. "I'm a scientist by training," he says, "and I'll tell you that there's little or no scientific research to back a lot of these claims."
Project 2061's Roseman agrees that more research is needed, with tests given to students at the beginning and end of each unit. "For you to decide that a text is successful, you want to see a huge improvement in between," she says. "And if you don't, you want to go back to the drawing board and try it again."
• Be clear about what you expect. Publishers say they pay attention to criticism and need to know what school districts want. "The whole standards movement has been very good at pointing textbook publishers in the right direction," Rogalin says. If states and districts put out bid specifications for more focused, rigorous texts, "publishers will try to meet those demands because they know that's what school boards are going to look for."
• Make sure someone really reads the textbooks under consideration. In most states and districts, the textbook-selection process is "designed so no one produces signed reports," says Benetta, whose Textbook Letter reviews texts. As a result, he says, "group-grope-group think" replaces serious reading and evaluation. His recommendation: Demand individually signed reviews, to make sure the textbooks under consideration are really read. Other textbook watchers beg: Dump the computerized word searches.
• Don't buy inferior textbooks. When Roseman's home school district asked her what to do about its middle school science program, she said, "Well, for one thing, don't buy any new middle school science textbooks." She was told, "But our school board says that every child will have a book that's less than seven years old." She still insists it would have been better to tell publishers, "We're not going to buy any books. We'll declare a moratorium, and we'll use what we've got," supplementing old texts with individual research-based units.
But is it fair to deny children new textbooks? "I would argue that they're not learning anyway," Roseman says. "That's the point. We can't lose."
Some districts are giving up on U.S. math textbooks and buying directly from the Singapore publisher that supplies that country's top-performing students. (For more information on these and other textbook sources, see box on page 20.) The American Textbook Council's Sewall recommends shopping publishers' backlists for history books. For high school students, he especially likes John A. Garraty's The Story of America, still available from Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a division of Harcourt.
• Watch for online developments. The McGraw-Hill Learning Center was scheduled to go online in November with six elementary and middle school science books, all with clickable opportunities for more depth on certain subjects. Rogalin predicts electronic textbooks will replace ink on paper someday, but at age 51, he doesn't expect to see it in his lifetime.
The best hope for the immediate future probably lies in the adoption states. "The quickest, surest way to change the content of textbooks," says Driesler of the Association of American Publishers, "is to get [the big adoption] states to change their requirements. You don't need to get the other 45 states [to change]. You get the top four or five or six, and you'll essentially turn the train."
There are some indications that this might be beginning to happen. TIMSS' Schmidt says he expects publishers to develop more focused, rigorous math textbooks to match the new math standards in California. And Florida's new academic standards have made adoption committees more aware of the need for excellence in curriculum materials, according to Elizabeth Carrouth, director of the state's Office of Instructional Materials.
"Five or six years ago, almost anything could pass," she says, "but not anymore." In October, one Florida adoption committee refused to adopt any health science materials at the middle school level.
"We're learning," she says, "that if we continue to accept mediocrity, that's what we'll get."
Rebecca Jones is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Illustration by Jeff Faerber.