Posted on 05/16/2006 7:49:46 PM PDT by Zechariah_8_13
At its core, the economic surge in India and China comes down to brains. The industries driving the region’s challenge to American leadership (...) can’t thrive without a steady supply of highly educated, intellectually flexible workers.
This is where the U.S. is falling behind. “Most U.S. high school students don’t take advanced science; they opt out, with only one-quarter enrolling in physics, one-half in chemistry,” the National Science Foundation found. The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching concluded that U.S. students were “devastatingly far” from leading the world in science and math.
President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative put almost every imaginable part of the U.S. education system under a microscope, establishing national standards for teacher training, student testing and basic funding. But glaring in its omission from the program is any significant examination of that most basic of classroom tools, the textbook.
As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal standards, as much as 90 percent of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics at University of Oklahoma.
“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”
...
American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
“They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction.
“As a result of all this, they undermine learning instead of building and encouraging it,” she added.
Textbooks are the responsibility of the state and local DOEs. If they choose text books that are insufficient in educating students to passing Federal standards, that is their fault, and failure will result in examination of why those schools failed, which would eventually bring the curriculum under the microscope.
But the Feds shouldn't dictate textbook choice... And if we ever get to that point where they do, the liberals in the Fed DOE will dictate far reaching social engineering curricula through textbook mandates. And while it won't happen just yet, imagine what will happen if the precedent for such is established.
but they could dictate standards!
Well, most of the people of our USA no longer want textbooks written by analytical, healthy, American, heterosexual adults who reject unhealthy social vanities (romanticism itself, for example). Boys who show such traits are discouraged in elementary schools. They are neglected by divorcing mothers and hated by teachers. I've worked in a public school and seen it. And the few girls who are more objective and analytical (oriented toward the sciences) are re-educated.
Our university departments in the hard sciences are full of foreigners. Most of those foreigners are reared in social atmospheres more like that of our 1700s than since. They would frown on a Henry Beecher or Susan B. Anthony and don't have the culture of serial polygamy rationalized by subjectivity and brought to us by romanticism.
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