ublisher (A) decides to create a new high schooltextbook from scratch. Idea lightbulb heats compost

heap of similar textbooks (B), causing them to breakdown into sludge, which is simmered into master list oftopics (C). Redundancies are boiled off (D) and philo-sophy (E) is mixed in. Elixir of topics drains into brain ofeditor, who starts worrying (F) about conservatives inTexas and liberal zealots in California. Editor transformstopics into outline (G), which flows to writers (H), causing them to begin scribbling. Editor begins worrying

about finding name author (I). Text from writers isforced into mold of key curriculum guidelines (J). Stateframeworks for most states (K) are ignored. Tail (L) of key adoption state of Texas wags dog, which respondsby taking textbook-size bites (M) from bales of com-pressed text. Name author (N) is signed to book. Book is reviewed (O). Too much evolution? Conservatives shootit down. Not multiracial enough? Liberals shoot it down.Editor patches up holes and end-runs objections (P).Books finally make it to students (Q).

2004 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER EDUTOPIA 31

SOME YEARS AGO, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary and high school textbooks,filled with the idealistic belief that Id be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that wouldexcite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas.

Not so.I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, The books are done and we still dont

have an author! I must sign someone today! Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment.

Who writes these things? people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, No one. Its sympto-matic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.

Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so onemight assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancingknowledge. In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things.They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the com-post of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possiblyobjectionable before it is fed into a government-run adoption system that provides mediocre material to stu-dents of all ages.

Welcome to the MachineThe first product I helped create was a basal language arts pro-gram. The word basal refers to a comprehensive package thatincludes students textbooks for a sequence of grades, plusassociated teachers manuals and endless workbooks, tests,answer keys, transparencies, and other ancillaries. My com-pany had dominated this market for years, but the brass feltthat our flagship program was dated. They wanted somethingnew, built from scratch.

Sounds like a mandate for innovation, right? It wasnt. Wegot all the language arts textbooks in use and went throughthem carefully, jotting down every topic, subtopic, skill, andsubskill we could find at each grade level. We compiled these

into a master list, eliminated the redun-dancies, and came up with the core

content of our new textbook. Or,as I like to call it, the chum.

But wait. If every publisherwas going through this sameprocess (and they were), howwas ours to stand out? Time tostir in a philosophy.

By philosophy, I mean a pedagogical idea. These conceptual

enthusiasms surge through the education universe in waves.Textbook editors try to see the next one coming and shapetheir program to embody it.

The new ideas are born at universities and wash down topublishers through research papers and conferences. Textbook

editors swarm to events like the five-day International ReadingAssociation conference to pick up the buzz. They all runaround wondering, Whats the coming thing? Is it critical think-ing? Metacognition? Constructivism? Project-based learning?

At those same conferences, senior editors look for up-and-coming academics and influential educational consultants tosign as authors of the textbooks that the worker bees arealready putting together back at the shop.

Content LiteOnce a philosophy has been fixed on and added, we shapethe pulp to fit key curriculum guidelines. Every state has a pre-scribed compendium of what kids should learntedious listsof bulleted objectives consisting mostly of sentences like this:

The student shall be provided content necessary to formulate,discuss, critique, and review hypotheses, theories, laws, andprinciples and their strengths and weaknesses.

If you should meet a textbook editor and he or she seemseccentric (odd hair, facial tics, et cetera), its because this is aperson who has spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing countlesspages filled with such action items, trying to determine if the

textbook can arguably be said to support each objective.Of course, no one looks at all the state frameworks.

Arizonas guidelines? Frankly, my dear, we dont give a damn.Rhode Islands? Pardon me while I die laughing. Some statesare definitely more important than others. More on this later.

Eventually, at each grade level, the editors distill their notesinto detailed outlines, a task roughly comparable to what sixth-century jurists in Byzantium must have faced when they carvedJustinians Code out of the jungle of Roman law. Finally, theydivide the outline into theoretically manageable parts andassign these to writers to flesh into sentences.

What comes back isnt even close to being the book. Thefirst project I worked on was at this stage when I arrived. Myassignment was to reduce a stack of pages 17 inches high, sup-plied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch stack that would sound as if ithad all come from one source. The original text was just ore.A few of the original words survived, I suppose, but no wholesentences.

To avoid the unwelcome appearance of originality at thisstage, editors send their writers voluminous guidelines. I amone of these writers, and this summer I wrote a 10-page storyfor a reading program. The guideline for the assignment, deliv-ered to me in a three-ring binder, was 300 pages long.

Bon ApptitWith so much at stake, how did we get into this turgid mess?In the 80s and 90s, a feeding frenzy broke out among pub-lishing houses as they all fought to swallow their competitors.Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Houghton Mifflin bought D.C. Heath and Co. McGraw-Hillbought Macmillan. Silver Burdett bought Ginnor was it Ginnthat bought Silver? It doesnt matter, because soon enough bothwere devoured by Prentice Hall, which in turn was gobbled upby Simon & Schuster.

Then, in the late 90s, even bigger corporations began cir-cling. Almost all the familiar textbook brands of yore vanishedor ended up in the bellies of just four big sharks: Pearson, aBritish company; Vivendi Universal, a French firm; ReedElsevier, a British-Dutch concern; and McGraw-Hill, the loneAmerican-owned textbook conglomerate.

This concentration of money and power caused dramaticchanges. In 1974, there were 22 major basal reading programs;now there are 5 or 6. As the number of basals (in all subjectareas) shrank, so did editorial staffs. Many downsized editorsfloated off and started development houses, private firms thatcontract with educational publishers to deliver chunks of pro-grams. They hire freelance managers to manage freelance edi-tors to manage teams of freelance writers to produce text thatskeleton crews of development-house executives sent on topublishing-house executives, who then pass it on to variouscommittees for massaging.

A few years ago, I got an assignment from a development

32 EDUTOPIA NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004

house to write a lesson on a particular reading skill. The free-lance editor sent me the corresponding lessons from ourclients three major competitors. Heres what the other com-panies are doing, she told me. Cover everything they do,only better. I had to laugh: I had written (for other develop-ment houses) all three of the lessons I was competing with.

The Cruelest MonthIn textbook publishing, April is the cruelest month. Thatswhen certain states announce which textbooks theyre adopt-ing. When it comes to setting the agenda for textbook publishing, only the 22 states that have a formal adoptionprocess count. The other 28 are irrelevanteven though theyinclude populous giants like New York, Pennsylvania, andOhiobecause they allow all publishers to come in and mar-ket programs directly to local school districts.

Adoption states, by contrast, buy new textbooks on a regu-lar cycle, usually every six years, and they allow only certainprograms to be sold in their state. They draw up the list at thebeginning of each cycle, and woe to publishers that fail tomake that list, because for the next 72 months they will havezero sales in that state.

Among the adoption states, Texas, California, and Floridahave unrivaled clout. Yes, size does matter. Together, thesethree have roughly 13 million students in K12 public schools.The next 18 adoption states put together have about 12.7 mil-lion. Though the Big Three have different total numbers of stu-dents, they each spend about the same amount of money ontextbooks. For the current school year, they budgeted morethan $900 million for instructional materials, more than a quar-ter of all the money that will be spent on textbooks in the nation.

Obviously, publishers create products specifically for theadoptions in those three key states. They then sell the sameproduct to everybody else, because basals are very expen-sive to producea K8 reading program can cost as muchas $60 million. Publishers hope to recoup the costs of a bigprogram from the sudden gush of money in a big adoptionstate, then turn a profit on the subsequent trickle from theopen territories. Those that fail to make the list in Texas,California, or Florida are stuck recouping costs for the nextsix years. Strapped for money to spend on projects for thenext adoption period, theyre likely to fail again. As the cyclegrows vicious, they turn into lunch meat.

Dont Mess with Texas The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In thatelite trio, Texas rules. California has more students (morethan 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texasspends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on itspublic schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicatedchunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money cantbe used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in theadoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular power whenit comes to high school textbooks, since California adoptsstatewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though 8th grade, while the Lone Star States adoption process

applies to textbooks from kindergarten through 12th grade.If youre creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by

scrutinizing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Thisdocument is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts,teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 membersof the Texas Board of Education, currently 5 Democrats and 10Republicans, about half of whom have a background in edu-cation. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entirenation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however,a tail that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows pri-vate citizens to review textbooks and raise objections.Publishers must respond to these objections at open hearings.

2004 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER EDUTOPIA 33

THO

MA

S R

EIS

W ho could have guessed that abook about textbooks wouldturn out to be a page-turner?And yet thats exactly what authors DanaLindaman and Kyle Ward have producedwith History Lessons: How Textbooks fromAround the World Portray U.S. History.Lindaman and Ward, academics fromHarvard University and Vincennes Universityin Indiana respectively, take many of themajor historical events that occupy centerstage in standard U.S. history textbooks andshow how texts from other countriesinvolved recount the same episodes. Onenations glorious war for independence maybe a pesky and pernicious insurrection toanother people. A national leader may beoppressive or divinely guided, depending onones perspective (or on whose Gore wasaxed). And though its often said that historyis written by the winners, losers and bit play-ers write history, too.

In the introduction, the authors state theproblem they seek to address:

Certain societies that could have more eas-ily ignored the United States fifty years agofind themselves today dealing with U.S.corporations, fashion, food, entertainment,and U.S. foreign policy on a daily basis.And this is hardly a one-way street.However, there is one distinct advantagethat these other countries have over theUnited States in this relationship: They areconstantly exposed to the U.S., receiving adaily dose of information on the U.S. and

Americans, studying English at school, andin some cases continuing their studies inthis country. Americans, in sharp contrast,seem to know relatively little about othercountries and cultures. This isolationist ten-dency is nowhere more apparent thanwithin our own educational system.

Few are more aware of this isolationism thanmiddle school and high school teachers,particularly those who teach history usingstandard texts thatnot surprisinglyviewthe signal events of American history with akind of national solipsism. Students in theStates can therefore be forgiven if they thinkthe entire world views these events in thesame way.

To correct this tunnel vision (or, some-times, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision),Lindaman and Ward present a kind ofRashomon world, offering hundreds ofaccounts from foreign history textbooks. Forexample, the authors look at the Spanish-American War through the schoolbooks ofSpain, Cuba, and the Philippines. A reader atleast vaguely familiar with the U.S. highschool textbook versionthe conflictsparked by the sinking of the American bat-tleship Maine, Theodore Roosevelt and theRough Riders, imperial Spain defeated, theoppressed Cubans and Filipinos liberatedand gratefulwill be surprised to see howeach country regards the war a century later.

The Spanish textbook quoted, whichmight be expected to see Spain as anaggrieved party, in fact mostly dwells on the

internal dissension andclumsy colonial gover-nance that led to the warand defeat even thoughthe U.S. hardly had aprofessional army.Significantly, the explosion that sank theMaine and precipitated Americas declarationof war is handled with equanimity: InFebruary of 1898 the North American cruiserMaine, anchored in the harbor of Havana,exploded. The cause of the explosion wasnever clearly explained and the NorthAmerican authorities attributed it to Spanishsabotage.

Perhaps the most surprising version ofthe Spanish-American War appears in text-books from the Philippines, generally thoughtof in this country as a U.S. ally. The islandnations standard history textbook presents adark picture of American motives: TheFilipinos, who expected the Americans tochampion their freedom, instead werebetrayed and reluctantly fell into the hands ofAmerican imperialists. On the sinking of theMaine, the book is angrily adamant:Although the Maine had been blown up byAmerican spies in order to provoke the war,the public was not informed of the truth.

To better understand the world, we owe itto ourselves, and our students, to know thatthese varied national truths are out there.Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward have com-piled the textbook equivalent of the GnosticGospels, a book that every history teachershould be reading. Owen Edwards

What Are They Thinking?A new book surveying foreign textbooks sheds light on how others see American history.History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History / The New Press / $27 / 400 pages

34 EDUTOPIA NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004

In the late 60s a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, fig-ured out how to use their states adoption hearings to put pres-sure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academiccredentials or teaching background, but they knew what theywanted taughtphonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise,creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian valuesandconsidered themselves in a battle against a politically correctdegradation of academics. Expert organizers, the Gablers pos-sessed a flair for constructing arguments out of the language ofofficial curriculum guidelines. The Longview, Texasbasednonprofit corporation they founded 43 years ago, Educational

Research Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobbyagainst liberal content in textbooks.

The Gablers no longer appear in person at adoption hear-ings, but through workshops, books, and how-to manuals,they trained a whole generation of conservative Christianactivists to carry on their work.

Citizens also pressure textbook companies at Californiaadoption hearings. These objections come mostly from such lib-eral organizations as Norman Lears People for the AmericanWay, or from individual citizens who look at proposed text-books when they are on display before adoption in 30 centers

around the state. Concern in California is normally of the polit-ically correct sortobjections, for example, to such perceivedgaffes as using the word Indian instead of Native American. Tomake the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereo-type free: No textbook can show African Americans playingsports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of chil-dren. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enoughdevelops radar for what will and wont get past the blandingprocess of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.

Responding to citi-zens objections in adop-tion hearings is a delicateart. Publishers learn never to confront the assumptionsbehind an objection. That just causes deeper criticism. Forexample, a health textbook I worked on had a picture of agirl on a windy beach. One concerned citizen believed hecould detect the outlines of the girls underwear through herdress. Our response: Shes at the beach, so thats her bathingsuit. It worked.

A social studies textbook was attacked because a full-pagephotograph showed a large family gathered around a dinnertable. The objection? They looked like Arabs. Did we rise upindignantly at this un-American display of bias? We did not.Instead, we said that the family was Armenian. It worked.

Of course, publishers prefer to face no objections at all.Thats why going through a major adoption, especially a Texasadoption, is like earning a professional certificate in textbookediting. Survivors just know things.

What do they know?Mainly, they know how to censor themselves. Once, I

remember, an editorial group was discussing literary selectionsto include in a reading anthology. We were about to agree onone selection when someone mentioned that the author of thispiece had drawn a protest at a Texas adoption because he hadallegedly belonged to an organization called One WorldCouncil, rumored to be a Communist front.

At that moment, someone pointed out another story that fitour criteria. Without further conversation, we chose that oneand moved on. Only in retrospect did I realize we had cen-sored the first story based on rumors of allegations. Our unspo-ken thinking seemed to be, If even the most unlikely taintexisted, the Gablers would find it, so why take a chance?

Self-censorship like this goes unreported because we thecensors hardly notice ourselves doing it. In that room, none ofus said no to any story. We just converged around a differentstory. The dangerous author, incidentally, was celebrated best-selling science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Turn the PageTheres no quick, simple fix for the blanding of American text-books, but several steps are key to reform.

Revamp our funding mechanisms to let teachers assembletheir own curricula from numerous individual sources insteadof forcing them to rely on single comprehensive packages fromnational textbook factories. We cant have a different curricu-

lum in every classroom, of course, but surely theres a way toachieve coherence without stultification.

Reduce basals to reference booksslim core texts that setforth as clearly as a dictionary the essential skills and informa-tion to be learned at each grade level in each subject. In con-tent areas like history and science, the core texts would be likemini-encyclopedias, fact-checked by experts in the field andthen reviewed by master teachers for scope and sequence.

Dull? No, because these cores would not be the actualinstructional material students would use. They would be anal-ogous to operating systems in the world of software. If thereare only a few of these and theyre pretty similar, its OK. Localdistricts and classroom teachers would receive funds enablingthem to assemble their own constellations of lessonsand supporting materials around the core texts, purchased not from a few behemoths but fromhundreds of smaller publishing houses such asthose that currently supply the supplementary-textbook industry.

Just as software developerscreate applications for particularoperating systems, textbook devel-opers should develop materials thatplug into the core texts. Small companiesand even individuals who see a niche couldproduce a module to fill it. None would need$60 million to break even. Imagine, for exam-ple, a world-history core. One publisher mightproduce a series of historical novellas by a writerand a historian working together to go with variousplaces and periods in history. Another might create a map ofthe world, software that animates at the click of a mouse toshow political boundaries swelling, shrinking, and shifting overhundreds of years. Another might produce a board game that dramatizes the connections between trade and cultural diffusion. Hundreds of publishers could compete to producelessons that fulfill some aspect of the core text, the point of reference.

The intellect, dedication, and inventiveness of textbook edi-tors, abundant throughout the industry but often stifled andunderappreciated, would be unleashed withI predictextraordinary results for teachers and students.

Bundling selections from this forest of material to createcurriculum packages might itself emerge as a job description ineducational publishing.

The possibilities are endless. And shouldnt endless possi-bility be the point?d

Tamim Ansary, a columnist for Encarta.com and author of West of Kabul and Eastof New York, has written 38 nonfiction books for children. He was an editor at HarcourtBrace Jovanovich for nine years and has written for Houghton Mifflin, McDougall Littell,Prentice Hall, and many other textbook publishers. Write to edit@edutopia.com.

2004 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER EDUTOPIA 35