While California, Florida, and Texas still complete statewide textbook reviews that can sway the entire market, fewer than half of all states now conduct independent reviews, diminishing the industry’s oversight. The textbook adoption process can be dictated by a few large states books can take years to complete and are typically in schools for a decade or longer, and the quirky nature of approval means that sometimes outright falsehoods are presented as facts. It’s no secret that there are obvious problems with the $5 billion-a-year K–12 curriculum market. Students treat its information like the answers in the back of an algebra book.” Imagine a high school student encountering a textbook written as the authoritative word, says Bob Bain, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. “They are meant to be authoritative, but textbook authors are subject to the same biases that all of us have. “Students should be expected to believe what’s in textbooks,” says Mark Schulte, the education director at the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit that supports journalism and works with schools and universities to bring issues and reporters into classrooms.
POTOMAC ABC TEXTBOOKS TRUTH UNVEILED VERIFICATION
As fabricated stories and accusations of fake news, valid or not, have proliferated in the last five years, teachers and librarians are finding ways to get students to extend their verification skills to textbooks and learn to question all the information they consume-whether it’s from social media or a seven-pound textbook that has been written, edited, and state-adopted. In high schools throughout the country, that unquestioning acceptance is starting to change. “It was hard for incoming students ,” she says.
She explained to them that although textbooks include information and facts, the material was still written by people, so it can be subject to the same biases that might affect, say, a newspaper story or a tweet. But when these same students encountered material in a textbook, it was as though their critical thinking skills shut down: They accepted the information without question. As the academic liaison librarian at Johns Hopkins University, she knew her students were sophisticated at finding information on a topic and that they possessed the basic skills to vet information for bias and veracity. Young Magnet High School in Chicago with printed sections of the New York Times 1619 Project.
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