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Textbooks in the Age of Standards |
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Textbooks in the Age of Standards |
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FREE
NEWSLETTER NEW GREAT
GIFT!
Contents TEACHER
THINKING EDUCATION
MYTHS
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This article is from the November 2002 Focus on Teachers Newsletter, where it is available in printable format. About ten years ago, I added freelance textbook writing to my other educational ventures. To say that my introduction to that world was eye-opening is an understatement. During my years in the classroom, I naively thought that the authors whose names were on the covers of textbooks had actually written the book. The aura of expertise that accompanied a book with the name of a PhD as the author was comforting. Obviously, the book must contain not only accurate content, but the best current educational practices. I should have realized that I was no longer in Kansas when I walked in for a job interview with zero experience in, or knowledge of, editing and walked out two hours later with the job of content editor for an entire textbook. Seems science teachers who could string words together acceptably were not all that plentiful. Many classroom teachers may still believe their textbooks are written by experts—if they think about it at all. I thought it might be interesting to give you a few behind-the-scenes glimpses at the process by which some textbooks come into existence. First of all, let me say that I have
worked for a number of educational publishers who produce educationally sound and
meaningful materials. Some publishing companies focus on what will best serve the
student. However, this example drawn from personal experience indicates what can
happen to textbooks in this era of standards. In recent years, state textbook adoption committees, particularly those in large states such as California and Texas, have become the “target audience” for new K-12 textbooks. If the committees don’t approve, the teachers in that state can’t use the book and the publisher will have spent a lot of development money for nothing. Publishers listen very carefully to what those state adoption committees say they want. In fact, publishers monitor every
sentence in the book to avoid the possibility of offending decision makers. Case
in point: I recently wrote a sentence that began, “Humans, like other animals,
...” The publisher’s editor told me I couldn’t say that because “Some
states don’t want humans referred to as animals.” I
have to wonder how far publishers are willing to go in “modifying” scientific
definitions to satisfy the requirements of every belief system. Second, textbooks must be “aligned” to the myriad state standards documents. Each state has its own group of ‘experts’ in each content area whose responsibility is to write the benchmarks and standards. If you’ve read Teaching in Mind, you know that a teacher’s personal preferences play a large role in what that teacher does or doesn’t teach. The people who populate these committees are no different. If one state says that “students will build a battery out of a lemon,” publishers feel they must include that activity or risk losing that state's approval. The effort to include requirements from all states is like trying to build a sound structure out of parts salvaged from multiple buildings. A little art deco here...a little gothic there. For example, when rewriting several chapters in a world history book, I was instructed to go through a 75 page printout of the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) objectives, and to document which objective went with every paragraph in the chapter! And that’s only one state! Can you imagine what it’s like to ‘align’ a textbook to the objectives from all 50 states as well as the national standards? After considering all these requirements from various adoption committees and state standards documents, publishers create an outline for the book. It is not uncommon for them to begin, as do many standards committees, by getting copies of all the comparable textbooks on that subject presently on the market. Choices of what to include are based on what other publishers include. One wonders when and by whom the initial choices were made. Many of the textbooks we see today, while having glitzy pictures and "modern" examples, have the same underlying content of textbooks from fifty years ago. Educational theorist Marion Brady
suggests that, “Nothing
evades our attention as persistently as that which we take for granted...In our
schools, we teach what we think is important, and we think it is important because
it is what we were taught. No one has bothered to point to the circularity of this
type of thinking. What gets taught, with minor variations, is what was taught last
year.... The decades roll on without even the suggestion that the whole matter
must be rethought.” Getting
Down to Details After
the outline has been written, there is a matter of guidelines and a prototype.
What will the pages of this book actually look like? How will the information be
presented? How many key ideas must be in each section and where must they appear?
How many vocabulary words? What features will be included to “enhance” the
content? How will understanding be assessed? There are requirements for the number of characters per line and lines per page.
Over the past several decades, many textbook publishers have moved away from pages of unbroken text.
Each page must have one or more pieces of art, and content must be broken into
relatively short paragraphs and sections. Beginning a new page without a head
(title) of some kind is frowned on. The goal in many cases is to make it easy to
skim the text and immediately locate important content without actually reading.
(More on that later.) Guidelines
also address
reading level and the “tone” of the book— friendly, chatty, academic, etc. “Use the word
‘you’ to draw students into the subject.” “Begin each topic with a
familiar example.” “Don’t assume students know anything.” (I’m not
making this up.) Many
textbooks address “process skills” and “critical thinking” by including
questions and activities that supposedly require those skills. Writers must
include assessment questions that begin with the words predict, measure, infer, formulate
a hypothesis, draw conclusions, compare and contrast, solve
a problem, evaluate, apply concepts, make judgments.... you get the idea. Presently, lists run to 25 or more such
skills. Although these categories of thinking rarely occur in isolation, dividing
up human thought processes this way makes it easier to use a checklist to demonstrate that a book “teaches” thinking. Oops. I have three “infers”
and only one “analyzing data”—got to even those up. Concerns
about “thinking skills” rarely extend to making the book itself more
“inquiry-oriented.” In fairness to publishers, attempts to produce books based
on unifying themes or real-world issues have not been profitable. The idea may
have support in research and even appeal to teachers, but their comfort level remains with textbooks filled with
“facts.” All
of this and more goes on before a single word is written with the exception of a prototype chapter. And you thought someone just sat down and wrote a book, right? Development Houses Putting together a textbook is a
very complex process that requires writers with some expertise in the subject area
(or excellent research skills), a cadre of copy and content editors and
proofreaders, people with expertise in the acquisition of photographs and
illustrations, designers and layout artists. While some publishers do all this
work in-house, many others contract with companies called “development houses”
to do some or all of the work of putting together a textbook. Development house
may do everything from getting the book written to the final layout just before it
goes to press. All the publisher does in those instances is the original outline,
guidelines, and prototype, one intermediate edit, and approval of the final edit
and layout. Many of the larger development
houses have a stable of freelance writers in various content areas. When the
company receives the contract for the book, they divide up the chapters among
those writers. It is rare that a single writer will ever write an entire book.
They not only don’t work together, they rarely know one another. Chapters go from the writer to
development house editors to the editors from the publishing house—and back.
During each step of the process, the copy is refined. However, there are numerous
opportunities for errors to creep in because of the number of fingers in the pot
and the lack of content knowledge among some editors.
Textbook development of this type has always reminded me of the definition of a
camel (or giraffe)—a horse designed by a committee. Proliferation of Content I recently completed work on a
project in which the outline called for 49 discrete concepts to be “taught” in
a 30 page chapter. After deducting pages already earmarked for other
“features”, there were 19 pages left for the content. On eight of those pages,
I was allowed only 20 lines of text—30 on the others. Three more pages were largely
taken up with required activities. Keep in mind that this was a high school text
in a major subject area, not an elementary “picture book.” Ultimately, there were considerably
less than 400 lines of text in which to cover 49 concepts. For a sense of what
this is like, select a concept, such as one of the amendments to the Constitution,
one of the laws of motion, percentage in math, or the background of the present
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Set the margins of your word processor for a 4 inch
line of 12 point copy. Then “fully explain” the concept in 9 lines! Why so many concepts? Because 1.)
they were in all the other books; and/or 2.) they were present in one or more
state standards documents. The text had to “cover” them or risk being thrown
out by state textbook adoption committees. (See the article on metaphors for more
on “coverage” as a critical metaphor in teaching.) Far from being grounded in the best
available research and practices, the content of textbooks is increasingly
counter to research recommendations. The Third International Math and Science
Study (TIMSS) involved more than half a million students in 45 countries. 30,000
U.S. students took part. The Department of Education and the National Science
Foundation sponsored the U.S. testing, conducted in 1995 at grades 4, 8, and 12,
and the subsequent analysis. The recommendations of this wide
ranging study have been available for several years and, in fact, have been
published on government websites. TIMSS recommends “more treatment in depth of fewer
topics.” In fact, TIMSS documents
have said that U.S. textbooks are "a mile wide and an inch deep." In this light, it
is difficult to understand why the government continues to support the more than
4,000 separate benchmarks that “every child should know and be able to do.” Limiting Beliefs Another writer and I recently met
with a Senior Editor from a major K-12 publishing house. The editor felt it was
important for us to understand the “pedagogy” behind the textbook design
before we embarked on writing. Here is the quote with which the editor began the
presentation. “Kids don’t read!” This will probably come as a surprise to J. K. Rowling and the owners of the more than 100,000,000 Harry Potter books that have been sold worldwide since 1997--including the fourth book, which ran over 700 pages! Not only is this an unfounded generalization, but it is an extremely limiting belief that could be a poster child for “low expectations.” Nevertheless, this belief is the driving force for the self-described “pedagogy” of this textbook. If the statement were made as
an observation—Some kids don’t
appear to be reading textbooks, so how can we make the book more relevant or more
interesting?—it might have some merit. Instead, it was simply accepted as fact
and the textbook was designed to make it as easy as possible for kids to NOT read
and still get something out of the book. 1. The important facts from each
section of the text are put at the beginning of the section in a bulleted list. 2. When each of those facts is
addressed in the text, the type is bold-faced. 3. Just in case that isn’t enough
to tell the “non-readers” that this is something important, a little
“icon” is put in front of the bolded statement. If this trend continues, we
may see a little computer chip inserted under each important concept to read the
statement aloud to the student when they press the page! After all, “kids
don’t read!” 4. In the questions at the end of a
section or chapter, all questions must be asked in the order in which they appear
in the text—to make it easier for students to find them. We sure wouldn’t want
students to have to actually search through a lot of words to find an answer.
“Kids don’t read.” 5. On the off-chance that some
student does decide to read, the reading level in many textbooks is often several
grade levels below the grade at which the text is used. This was once true only in
so-called “remedial” texts. Now it’s standard practice in any text up to and
through so-called “average” classes. The editor explained, “These classes
aren’t likely to have any advanced students in them.” Another unwarranted generality. Just because people don't read something doesn’t mean they can’t. How are we short-changing interested students by this approach? How can it possibly be in the students’ best interest to expect little if anything from them? Yes, there are some students who would not choose to read on their own, especially “school” books. Rather than trying to understand why and address the issue, it’s apparently easier to just cave in. Why should students read if they’re not expected to? Has the day arrived when making it "easier" for students becomes the major design element for curricular materials? Isn’t that a perfect example of what President Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”? A distressing number of educational
publishers have an extremely low opinion of students...and they don’t think much
more highly of teachers. In fact, I’ve been told that writing a book for
teachers was doomed to failure because “Teachers don’t read!” ***** Despite all the research on
constructivist learning, many textbooks are repositories of factoids that give
students the impression that knowledge is fixed and immutable. As the number of “required”
concepts increases, many high school textbooks are now well over 1,000 pages with
no increase in depth of coverage. Textbook publishers don’t lead the field...they follow. And what they follow is the money. They want to sell books! It’s difficult to fault a publisher for giving those who hold the purse strings what they ask for. What state textbook committees and standards writers ask for arises from what the government supports financially. Money for compliance to the government's education plan is a huge motivator. Once again, teachers are charged with carrying out plans and decisions made without their input. Barbara Kelley was the opening
speaker at the teacher education conference I attended in Birmingham last month.
Barbara chairs the Board of Directors of the National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards. In “real life,” she is an elementary P.E. teacher. She
explained that one of the goals of NBPTS is to help teachers gain the recognition
they deserve as leaders in their field. “Board certification,” they hope, will
confer the same dignity and perception of expertise on teachers that it does on
other members of other professions. Barbara mentioned that she’d just
come from a high-level policy-making conference on education in Washington, D.C.
There were 300 invited guests at the conference. Barbara admitted that she was
there only because of her position with NBPTS. In addition to Barbara, only two
of
the other attendees were K-12 classroom teachers! Draw your own conclusions. There is, of course, no simple answer. The message that I’ve tried to send in Teaching in Mind and on this website is that little will change unless and until teachers assert their expertise and demand a role in the decision making process. Many teachers continue to be part of a “silent majority” who speak out forcefully only among themselves. If that continues, education, the future of young people, and the responsibilities of teachers will remain outside the control of those with the greatest expertise and experience. The choice, as always, is yours.
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