Hooray for Texas (Really!)

Once again, the Texas State School Board has allowed the ideology of its members to dominate its discussions, leading to the curricular version of a witch hunt. Last week it was revisionist history, last year it was questioning modern science. Denying the work of generations (literally) of scientists, historians, and other thinking people, they have once again revised the standards that govern what gets taught in Texas. Since Texas is so big, it buys a lot of books, and the common wisdom is that as Texas goes, so goes the rest of the country. Major publishers need a major market and even the ones who refuse to be stooges for ideology will dumb down their materials, eliminating potentially controversial ideas, appeasing a radical minority whose ideas have little or no academic credibility. There has been a predictable amount of hand-wringing over this, but I think there might be a silver lining, at least for those of us who don't live in Texas.

I posted a link to Seth Godin's self-described rant on textbooks before. Science textbooks have repeatedly been reviewed by people without a vested interest and found wanting in both accuracy and pedagogy. They reduce complex relationships to simple lists of jargon and definitions, they cannot respond to a student's existing knowledge, and in order to sell well, they are replete with multi-color diagrams that have repeatedly been shown to confuse rather than enlighten students. Finally, in a desperate attempt to produce a book that could meet all of the mind-numbing diversity of standards in our locally-controlled education system, they are all bloated tomes, three or four times the length of comparable grade textbooks in other developed countries. They then become the de facto curriculum with teachers rushing to "cover" every chapter.

These shortcomings of science textbooks have been widely documented for some time and yet it remains an implicit assumption of American schooling that students must have textbooks and so schools continue to invest millions of dollars into a failed system making publishers wealthy, but adding no value to students' education. More enlightened districts still feel they need them, but they "buy them for use as a reference." Why buy a reference you know is inaccurate? Why pay $ for a reference at all? Excellent reference materials, from Wikipedia to the web pages and lectures of leading scientists are all available online for free. Of course, we need to teach students some media literacy to separate authoritative materials from bunk, but we need to teach them that anyway.

Back to Texas. An excellent way to begin to teach information literacy is to teach students to identify and reject sources of information that are tainted by bias. Any textbook rewritten to conform with the new Texas standards surely meets this criterion. This is where Texas may have done science education a huge favor. In the storm of publicity surrounding the effects of the new standards on textbooks, I have begun to see thoughtful science teachers questioning whether they really want their district to buy them new books next year. If Texas can finally wean education from textbooks, then hooray for Texas!