Why Approved American History Textbooks Contain Missing Links, Part 1
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
When you’re publishing a book, if there’s something that is controversial, it’s better to take it out.
— Holt, Reinhart, and Winston representative, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read
Throughout my 35 years in the classroom, as I worked with a variety of approved American history textbooks and listened to my students’ textbook frustrations, my concern with the inadequacy of these books sharpened.
Now, as I imagine tens of thousands of students being exposed to all of those textbooks, I fear the results: How many will leave school believing that history is boring or, as Henry Ford said, “History is more or less bunk”?
Since retirement, my criticism of the textbooks that teachers are mandated to use has grown. I have written more than a dozen ScheerPost columns on what I have found missing, or purposely misleading, in a collection of approved textbooks, “approved” being the key word; we’ll get to that in a bit.
It might have been simpler if I had done some of this writing while I was still teaching and being constantly exposed to a wide variety of new textbooks, but teaching high school history, while rewarding, is also relentless and unforgiving. And doing it right can be more than a full-time job.
In California, high school history and English teachers regularly have more than 175 students per semester. spread over In a responsibly run classroom, all of their students write essays multiple times each semester. While being graded, papers would be stacked on my desk and scattered on the floor, hours would pass without my noticing. In the worst of times, when I could barely keep my eyes open, I would hallucinate the piles growing taller.
Missing Links in American History Textbooks
While working, I read multiple studies on problems with textbooks. Now retired, I continue to reflect on those textbooks. I even re-read the two books that I remembered as most accurate. Both focus on American history texts: Frances FitzGerald’s “America Revised” (1979) and James W. Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me”
“America Revised” showed me how and why textbook history has been manipulated for both commercial and political reasons. FitzGerald accurately describes the core problem when she concludes that “History textbooks … are not like other kinds of histories … They are written not to explore, but to instruct, to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country.”
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” contains a detailed analysis of 12 massive American history textbooks, each averaging more than 800 pages. Among other things, Loewen criticizes them for ignoring inconvenient truths, uncomfortable facts and for oversimplifying history as a list of disconnected “things that happened.”
Defining Terms: History and History Textbooks
A long time ago I learned that it is good practice to make sure that everyone in a discussion shares common definitions of what is being discussed. So, I am convinced it is a good idea to define terms before writing about them. What is the difference between academic history and high school history textbooks?
According to British historian E. H. Carr, academic history is constructed through a discourse about the past. “It is the result of the interaction between the historian and his facts, a perpetual dialogue between the present and the past.” Loewen writes that history is the result of “furious debate informed by evidence and reason.”
On the other hand, high school American history textbooks contain virtually no dialogue between the present and the past. There is almost never a discussion of varying interpretations of historical topics. Instead of teaching students to debate the persuasiveness of conflicting evidence, the texts offer a one-dimensional view of almost everything.
One example of this tendency is found in the 1983 edition of “The American Pageant.”
Instead of describing the methods used by colonists to seize the land of the indigenous people, students are told that the American Republic “… was from the outset richly favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely populated by Indians that they could be eliminated or shouldered aside.”
Another example is found in how the origins of the Cold War are presented. In “The Americans,” it is reported that “At Yalta, the United States and Great Britain had insisted that the Soviets allow free, open elections in Poland and other Eastern European nations after the war. Stalin had agreed, but kept his language vague.”
The textbook continues reporting that, soon “the Soviets prevented free elections … Leaving Poland in the hands of a pro-Soviet government.” And students are led to the conclusion that the Cold War was to be blamed on the USSR.
Cornell University Professor Walter LaFeber, however, reports a situation less clear-cut, “Throughout 1943–1944 Roosevelt had indicated he understood the need for a Polish government that would be friendly toward Russia.” Debating the persuasiveness of conflicting evidence should be at the heart of learning history.
Upon re-reading high school textbooks, what stands out most is both what is missing and what is misleading. Not a good start, but I continued to wonder why these textbooks are as they are or, as FitzGerald wrote, why they are “not like other kinds of histories …”
After all, producing and publishing textbooks involves an immense amount of work from numerous presumably well-educated people. I could not imagine that all that effort is meant to purposely produce what students often call boring and research suggests is ineffective.
Self-Censorship and Textbooks
The failure of these textbooks to offer a debate informed by evidence and reason is clearly the product of a variety of factors. One of the most commonly mentioned is self-censorship, born of a desperate need to avoid controversy
Instead of breaking new ground, publishers re-package what has been published before and leave unpublished any information that they fear might be controversial, no matter how indisputable, no matter how important. Understanding that helps explain why textbook publishers avoid using the indisputably accurate and publicly available excerpts from the Pentagon Papers when reporting on the war in Vietnam, for instance.
It explains why, in the newest textbooks, no one will find detailed excerpts from valuable documents released by Ed Snowden on the existence of global surveillance programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency — sometimes alone and at other times with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.
It is also why no teachers can expect any textbook to report the
information leaked by Chelsea Manning detailing American human rights
abuses in Iraq. One might imagine these things to be controversial and
they may be uncomfortable, but they are also accurate. Most importantly they
would help students understand important aspects of our past rather
than simply reading about isolated “things that happened.” Students
might even find them interesting.
The quote at the top of this piece, coming from a representative of a publishing house, is taken from the introduction to Chapter Eight of “What Johnny Shouldn’t Read” by Joan DelFattore. The book, published in 1992, is a revealing exploration of textbook censorship. This excerpt is from the first paragraph of the chapter entitled “The Customer is Always Right.”
The key to the influence of lawsuits on textbook content is not legal outcome, but self-censorship motivated by market forces. That is why Holt edited its Basic Reading Series to make it less “humanistic,” even though the plaintiffs in Mozert [Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools 1986] lost their case. The same thing happened after Smith [Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County 1987] in which the plaintiffs also lost, when publishers announced that their history and social studies books would include more about the positive contributions religion has made to world events, but little if anything about religious wars or persecutions.
All of that leaves me wondering how ingrained the fear of controversy is. If Holt, Reinhart and Winston fears publication of a reading series because they fear being accused of humanism, what’s next?
And while I cannot imagine what might lead publishers to fear printing something about religious persecutions, I do know that the result is highly diminished textbooks and students bored silly.
How are Textbooks Approved? How are they Chosen?
Another serious deterrent to more interesting and relevant textbooks is the complex and time consuming adoption policies that reflect a purpose other than a desire to transform students into “critical thinkers.”
In California there are two documents that play a role in the approval of instructional materials including textbooks. Curriculum Frameworks provide guidance for implementing the California Content Standards adopted by the State Board of Education (SBE). The stated goal of those adoption policies is to make certain that new textbooks cover the criteria in the California Content Standards and the History-Social Science Framework. And in the end, I am convinced that the approved texts do conform, but at what price?
It turns out that what Frances FitzGerald wrote about textbooks might also apply to the Content Standards and the Frameworks. That is, those producing these documents might also suffer from commercial and political concerns and end up avoiding the uncomfortable analysis of events and policies necessary for student understanding.
According to the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit that tracks educational policy, textbook adoption policies differ widely. Nineteen states (plus Washington D.C.) select textbooks at the state level. While the other states leave it to local educational entities such as school districts and sometimes “citizen committees.” Each state has its own course standards.
In general, state boards of education vote on the final adoption, but smaller committees may also conduct in-depth reviews of the materials. Below are a few examples and here is a list of the regulations for each state:
In Texas, “the commissioner of education appoints state review panel members from nominations submitted by state board members, academic experts, educators, parents or educational organizations.”
In Oklahoma, the state’s constitution directs the legislature to authorize the governor to appoint a textbook selection committee.
In Utah, the state board recommends instructional materials, but each school has discretion to select its own.
In California, according to the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education (SBE) has authority to adopt instructional materials for grades one through eight. In grades nine to twelve, the process of approval of instructional materials is directed by local school boards.
There was a brief — and logical — attempt to create national standards in core subjects after President George H. W. Bush announced national education goals in his 1990 State of the Union address. However, that attempt collapsed following accusations that the standards presented “a disproportionately pessimistic and misrepresentative picture of the American past.”
The Review Process in California
I focus on the process of textbook approval in California because California is both the largest state and the largest market for textbooks and also what I am most familiar with. The California State Board of Education decides upon and adopts the content standards for all students, from kindergarten through high school. The review of instructional materials, including textbooks, up to 8th grade is done statewide. In grades 9 to 12, the process of approval is directed by local school boards.
Textbook review, at all levels, can be both thorough and tedious. Thankfully, it is described in detail by Dr. Dave Neumann, a professor in the College of Education at Cal Poly Pomona, who was a participant in the process in 2017. He wrote of his experience in “Textbooks in the Balance: An Insider’s Review of the History-Social Science Textbook Adoption Process in California” published in the journal “The History Teacher.”
Although I am primarily concerned with the approval of history textbooks used in high school, Neumann offers rare insight into the review process itself. The process of assuring that various texts satisfy the content standards is similar for texts at all levels.
Neumann’s article begins with a description of what he was required to do in evaluating one history textbook written for fifth-grade. The details in his description are enlightening. Keep in mind that in the paragraph below he is describing the review of a text meant for the fifth grade. That is, a text meant for 10-year-olds.
I paged through the fifth-grade textbook again, trying to determine if the text met California Standard 5.6.4: “Understand the personal impact and economic hardship of the [revolutionary] war on families, problems of financing the war, wartime inflation, and laws against hoarding goods and materials and profiteering.” The discussion of “personal impact” and “economic hardship” was clear and easy to find, as was text about “financing the war.” With a bit more scanning, I had found brief discussion of laws about hoarding goods. After extensive searching, I finally found an inset feature that explored how inflation affected families. I decided that this text adequately met the standard in an age-appropriate way. So after several minutes of review, I ticked the box on my tally sheet denoting that the publisher had met one standard for one criterion for one grade level.
According to Neumann, two types of panelists were selected to complete the review. One type is referred to as IMRs (Instructional Materials Reviewers). These are mostly classroom teachers but can also include administrators and parents. The second group is composed of Content Review Experts (CREs). As a historian with a Ph.D., Neumann was appointed to be a CRE.
He describes the three stages of his work. First, he attended three days of training. Second, he received and reviewed eight large boxes of materials representing one publisher’s texts. Third, months later, all the CREs spent four days in deliberation to compare findings.
In an article that runs more than 20 pages, Neumann makes a variety of comments about the various responsibilities and challenges the reviewers faced. The most notable was “the sheer scale and complexity of the requirements.” Each grade level had to be evaluated according to 77 separate criteria which amounted to 539 separate criteria in all.
The most controversial criterion, he reports, concerned how each textbook handled the roles and contributions of people from differently defined demographic groups. His panel agreed that each text needed to address the activities of 15 distinct groups.
This prompted a long and agonizing debate about “… what constituted adequacy of coverage.” They also debated how detailed the descriptions needed to be and how many examples were required from each demographic group.
The Process in California for Grades 9-12
In California, each school district with at least one high school approves and adopts the instructional materials, including textbooks, for use in high schools. This review process places some responsibility on publishers to ensure the accuracy of their textbooks in meeting the State Content Standards. Publishers are expected to certify that textbooks submitted for approval have been thoroughly examined and meet the content standards.
According to the California School Board Association (CSBA), in grades 9-12, local educational agencies must set up a process similar to the one described above for grades K-8. In addition, “the California Department of Education recommends that the committee involve representatives of all populations in the district including parents, administrators and teachers.” Local School Boards must certify that materials are aligned to the content standards.
Evaluating the Evaluation Process
Neumann, the Content Review Expert, believes the most positive consequence of the evaluation process is that classroom teachers can be confident that any adopted textbook covers the state content standards, but he also suggests that there are problems needing to be addressed.
Some challenges, he writes, “resulted from the need to weigh competing directives” which he explains in this uniquely labyrinthian paragraph.
[One] criterion requires that textbooks address cause and effect. This undeniably worthy expectation is already mandated by the Analysis Skills in the California State Standards, which indicate that students will “identify and interpret the multiple causes and effects of historical events.” Causation is addressed in another criterion as well. Thus, there is no need for this issue to be called out separately. It might seem that redundant expectations can be easily resolved — if, for example, cause and effect has met one standard, it has likely met the others—and thus will not constitute a burden to reviewers. But the presence of overlapping, separately worded statements with nuanced differences caused some reviewers to expend time and energy carefully parsing the differences between them.
Neumann is rightly frustrated when a single criteria is repeated over and over in the State Standards. He makes a good point, but will he be listened to?
The most significant problem Neumann finds is “the sheer number of criteria [which] makes meaningful discussion during deliberations extremely challenging.” In four days, the panelists must consider hundreds of possible elements. So, he suggests that “a significant reduction in the number of required criteria would allow panelists to devote more time” to each.
He reports that during the adoption of the 2016 California History-Social Science Framework, the state Board of Education received “a record 10,000 emails, 1,000 suggested revisions and hundreds of speakers” in multiple public comment forums throughout the state.
Obviously, this is a result of textbook adoption becoming increasingly politicized. That is, textbook adoption has ceased being a matter of academic discussion, but has also become an argument based on ideological differences. The process that proceeds adoption of a new History-Social Science Framework can stretch over a number of years. Members of the State Legislature occasionally weigh in. The final meeting leading to adoption was held by the California State Board of Education in 2016.
John Fensterwald’s writing for EdSource reported that this final public meeting lasted for five hours and was dominated by “charged disagreements by Hindus, Muslims and others on how their religions and culture should be depicted in California classrooms.” Some of those disagreements reflected those found in the thousands of emails and hundreds of speakers referred to earlier.
Groups sharing deeply held opinions were from a variety of backgrounds. Some from India expressed concerns about references in the framework to their homelands and religions. Some Hindu groups opposed any reference to the caste system while others expressed anger over efforts to whitewash caste persecution. Fensterwald also reported that “Elderly Japanese denied that South Korean women were forced to become prostitutes during World War II.”
The State Board of Education adopted the History-Social Science Framework on July 14, 2016.
Neumann suggests that the process could be depoliticized and rendered more professional by placing checks on the nature and volume of public input and pressure. Panelists, he recommends, should keep in mind two things: Those offering public comment represent only a portion of the state constituency and their opinions may not necessarily represent expert knowledge, and although the panel may consider any input, it is equally under no obligation to accept it.
These two points are important and I believe every district administrator I know would agree, but I want to add a personal note: If indisputably correct information in a textbook is objected to, for whatever reason, then that objection should be rejected.
What makes anyone believe they have a right to deny students historical truth?
Learning to Think Historically
Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”
— Billy Collins (Former Poet Laureate of the U.S.)
The History Teacher 1991
Historical thinking is usually defined as using acquired skills for analyzing and evaluating primary source documents in order to construct a meaningful sense of the past. Accordingly, historical thinking can be directly contrasted with raw content knowledge. It is not memorization. And it is certainly not promoted by the textbooks I have examined.
According to Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg, historical thinking first requires everyone to recognize that they have “an established mode of thinking” which must be set aside in order to avoid what he calls “mind-numbing presentism that reads the present onto the past.”
As a lifelong educator, I am committed to helping others think historically. But to do this, right now, in our high schools we cannot allow anyone to claim to protect students by lying to them or by skipping inconvenient facts that might cause discomfort. We cannot teach, for example, that the Spanish Inquisition was a series of cute questions.
Effective instruction in American history requires open discussion of all aspects of the American past and some of it can, indeed, make a number of us uncomfortable. Nevertheless students cannot escape learning about the historical displacement and murder of Indigenous peoples, race and racism, issues arising from economic inequality, countless schemes to deny voting rights and the history of sex discrimination.
Ominously, these are the issues that some states have attempted to ban. And they justify the bans by suggesting that some issues have the potential to make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” Attempting to protect students by forbidding classroom discussions is the opposite of trying to educate them.
Changes That Should Help
California’s review process is anchored in the State Content Standards and the History-Social Science Framework. I am confident that both were written by intelligent well-meaning people who were trying to make sure that the majority of students will be exposed to lessons that will give them a decent understanding of who we are and where we have been.
Perhaps, because I have never participated in a formal review, when I began this exploration of how instructional materials are approved, I expected to find in the Content Standards and in the Framework a variety of important, interesting and inclusive details that would help define age-appropriate historical scholarship.
Instead, I found a review process that occasionally becomes trapped in a convoluted collection of categories and criteria, which forces review participants to focus on minutiae rather than — to borrow from a phrase from Graham Greene — the heart of the matter.
We need Content Standards and a Framework that demand instructional materials be interesting to read and have been assessed for accurate content, but also for relevance, honesty and inclusivity.
Such a review might include some checklists, but it must also ensure that students graduating from high school will understand that history is more than just a list of facts.
Jim Mamer
Jim Mamer is a retired high school teacher. He was a William Robertson Coe Fellow for the Study of American History at Stanford University in 1984. He served as chair of the History and Social Sciences department for 20 years (first at Irvine High and then at Northwood High). He was a mentor teacher in both Modern American History and Student Assessment. In 1992 he was named History and Social Sciences Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).