Proposed Textbooks Rife With Errors…What Is The Real Root Cause?
Perhaps this is the real reason Speaker Tom Craddick is having such a hard time finding workers to staff the new Midland Cracker Barrel eateries:
Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase – 109,263.That’s the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008.
There is no excuse for this kind of error rate–even in draft text books. However, I believe there is something significant in play when it comes to all of the problems with Texas’ textbooks: Publishers are too busy trying to make sure there is enough abstinence education, morals education, Jesus, and creation theory in textbooks to actually worry about accuracy.
Let’s face it: the State Board of Education has, in the last decade, been far more concerned with depictions of homosexuality, safe sex, and evolution being in Texas text books than they are with errors.
Publishers have simply followed the SBOE’s lead. After all, Texas is one of the top three markets for textbooks in America. In order to get text books approved by the SBOE (meaning that textbook publishers get to rake in cash), publishers have to write textbooks suited to the right-wing dynamic of the wingnuts on the State Board of Education, whose philosophy is, essentially, “so what if 2 + 2 doesn’t equal five–at least condoms and dinosaurs aren’t in our textbooks!”
Sad, sad, sad.
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