Recent media reports should prompt a closer look at the facts surrounding funding for public school textbooks.
Technology has dramatically improved access to information nearly everywhere and lowered the cost of getting it. In higher ed, print-based books face tough competition from convenient, portable, and relatively inexpensive alternative formats. So why has the traditional textbook market seemed resistant to the lower prices that competition, lower-cost technologies, and Internet resources now make accessible?
Parents need to make a concerted effort to rescue factual U.S. history from the make-believe history taught today by revisionists.
LENOIR — Almost all literature created before 1970 does indeed have girls and boys, women and men, speaking and acting in pre-1970 stereotypical ways. Consider any fairy tale, any classic. Moreover, African-Americans and Native Americans were ignored or portrayed stereotypically.
When the state mandates textbooks, it consistently produces second-rate textbooks that replicate the same flaws and failings over and over again. Adoption states perform poorly on national tests, and the market incentives caused by the adoption process are so skewed that lively writing and top-flight scholarship are discouraged.
Good-quality textbooks are the building blocks of a sound education. But evidence abounds that the texts used in our public schools fall far short of a firm foundation.
• Robert L. Tignor, et al: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart; W.W. Norton & Co.; 2002; 462pp.; $62.50
The Independent Women's Forum has released a major review of textbooks used in college Women's Studies departments. The review, authored by senior fellow Chistine Stolba, challenges the "propaganda, not scholarship," being put forth by women's studies textbooks.
