For those who don’t know, there is basically only one textbook company left—Pearson. So there are far fewer choices for a text than there was when I began teaching, a while back.
There was, maybe 15 years ago, a move to ‘free’ the class from the textbook and to use teacher-created resources, and today, there is now a huge move to have kids watch stuff from the internet. Some of it is quite good, but it’s not like kids are being starved of screen time.
Half of my work in teaching history was to get the kids to read the d**n book. I had kids for three years and by the end of 8th grade I had maybe 2/3rds of them actually reading the text. Their high school teachers were amazed to have kids actually read.
And with No Child Left Behind and Common Core, there is a definite trend away from history as a subject. My last few years I was told that my 1st priority as a history teacher was to support the learning of reading and math—the subjects that counted since they were the state’s tests. Since I had tenure, was considered pretty good at my job, and was the only history teacher, I was pretty much free to ignore what I was told.
It seems to me, that the more ‘improvements’ that are made to the curriculum and to the preferred methods of teaching, the poorer the results have become. My parents got a better education K-12 in the 20s and 30s than I did in 50s and 60s. And my education was much better than what kids get now.
Obama paid (incentivized? bribed?) school systems millions to adopt Common Core through its “Race to the Top” program. Once Common Core was adopted, all materials had to be bought through Pearson. It would be interesting to see which politically involved people are making money off of Pearson.