Bet you didn't know that Columbus set sail in 1942. That Napoleon won at Waterloo. Or that President Truman dropped the A-bomb to end the Korean War.
But that's exactly the kind of misinformation many American youngsters will be getting when they head back to school this month. For as Reader's Digest alerts parents in its September 2000 issue, numerous textbooks in use today increasingly rate an 'F' -- for flat-out wrong.
Accuracy has taken a back seat to "bells and whistles, arts and crafts, all sorts of irrelevant activities," charge scholars such as Kevin Padian, a University of California biology professor and former middle school teacher.
And as Reader's Digest's William Ecenbarger reports in "Textbooks That Don't Make the Grade," publishers aren't the only ones to blame for the rising tide of fallacy and fluff. The state and local boards that buy the books are also guilty of choosing style over substance -- leaving teachers and students to cope with science experiments that don't work, math problems that don't add up, and feel-good "facts" that don't reflect reality.
Ghost Writers
"Phantom authorship" is one major culprit behind the mistakes and poor writing, textbook critics say. Prestigious experts may be listed on the cover, but someone else is actually doing much of the work.
"Too many texts are being cranked out by writers on the publisher's staff who know little or nothing about the subject matter," says William J. Bennetta, head of The Textbook League, a California-based watchdog group.
The Textbook League's reviewers have flunked numerous titles. Globe Book Company's "Concepts in Modern Biology" (1993) not only "suffers from rampant errors" but also omits "information that every high school student should learn." Prentice Hall's new "America: Pathways to the Present" (2000) is "riddled with errors from cover to cover" and its "Motion, Forces and Energy" (1993) packs a large amount of "misinformation, error and ignorance into a mere 144 pages."
Perhaps most glaring is publishers' frequent failure to correct known flaws. When Brown University professor Kenneth R. Miller was hired to review a high school textbook chapter on photosynthesis, he wrote a "scathing" critique that pointed out serious factual errors. "I figured they would fix it, but instead the book was published pretty much intact -- and to my horror, for each of the next three editions, I was prominently listed as a 'scientific consultant."'
Closer Review
In fairness to publishers, it's often the book buyers -- from state agencies and local school boards -- that choose sizzle over steak. "Content is seldom important as a sales tool," Bennetta laments. "What does sell are sidebars, inserts and other special features," especially if they reflect trendy educational methods or fashionable social and political views.
Amazed at the growing epidemic of textbook errors, some officials have begun exercising more careful review. Texas, for example, is fining publishers who don't make corrections. "We've seen some improvements, but not nearly enough," says textbook gadfly Mel Gabler, who has worked with wife Norma to urge reforms in that state.
California last year set up independent review panels of scholars for various subjects. Panel members found hundreds of blunders in history/social science texts, and the math books fared no better. "There were an endless number of two-plus-two-makes-five errors," says Stanford University professor Jim Milgram.
So if your kids come home and tell you that fish have scales "so they won't leak," or that Jimmy Carter was the first Democratic president since Truman, you might want to take a closer look at the textbooks they're using -- and pressure your local schools to get their facts straight. The September 2000 issue of Reader's Digest tells why the texts they're giving our children often fail to make the grade.
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