State Textbook Selection Laws Come Under Attack

California’s textbook adoption laws, considered by many to be a cornerstone of the state’s recent curriculum reform efforts, have come under legislative attack from textbook publishers and other critics.

So far, defenders of the present system, led by California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, seem to be winning the legislative battle.

“We beat it back,” Honig said confidently last week, referring to what Honig called an attempt by publishers and others “to basically do us in and cut the process way down.”

But others say the skirmishing continues and the final outcome is not certain.

Publishers and other critics say the California process is lengthy, cumbersome, arbitrary and capricious and does not, in the end, produce better books and other instructional materials.

“It’s a six-month process and then they go into their little box and tell you somebody’s accepted and somebody’s not but you never know why,” said John B. Mockler, Sacramento lobbyist for the Assn. of American Publishers, the textbook publishers’ trade association.

The publishers group is supporting a bill by state Sen. Ken Maddy (R-Fresno) that would shorten the textbook adoption cycle from seven years to two, require the state Board of Education to give specific written reasons for rejecting text materials and change the composition of the state Curriculum Commission, among other features.

In this form, the legislation is more or less acceptable to Honig and other state education officials, but as originally written it was not acceptable.

Initially, the Maddy bill would have required the state Board of Education to approve all instructional materials submitted by publishers within 90 days, if they met certain minimum standards. If materials were rejected, a special panel of experts would have had to provide a “detailed explanation of the reasons why.”

“This reversed the process and put the burden of proof on the board, not the publishers,” said Dan Chernow, state Curriculum Commission chair. “It was an obvious attempt to dismantle the process.”

The original Maddy bill “sent shock waves through the educational community,” said Charlotte Crabtree, professor of education at UCLA and co-author of the state’s much-praised new social science-history framework.

“The feeling was that, nationally, educators were looking to California to lead the way . . . to continue the curricular reform movement and this bill would weaken our ability to do that,” Chernow said.

At the behest of Crabtree, Honig and others, nationally prominent educators wrote to Gov. George Deukmejian and to legislative leaders to protest the Maddy bill.

The effect of the bill, and similar legislation sponsored by Assemblyman Bob Epple (D-Norwalk), “would be to undermine one of the most promising education reform efforts anywhere in the land,” Chester E. Finn Jr., professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and a key aide to former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett, wrote in a typical letter.

Faced with this barrage of criticism from the education community, Maddy and the bill’s supporters began to negotiate a less drastic measure with Honig and other officials of the state Department of Education.

California is only one of 22 states with statewide adoption policies but accounts for about 10% of national textbook sales, so materials selected in California often influence the national market.

The state Constitution requires adoption of instructional materials for grades one through eight. Local school districts must use the state-approved list for 80% of their textbook purchases if they want to be reimbursed by the state.

The yearlong process that leads to state adoption begins with scrutiny of new textbooks by Instructional Materials Evaluation Panels, made up of classroom teachers, “master teachers,” curriculum specialists, and college and university professors. These panels make recommendations to the Curriculum Commission, which then proposes a list of five to 15 texts in each subject area, and for each grade, to the state Board of Education.

‘Dumbing Down’

Many educators believe that textbook quality declined in the 1960s and 1970s, as publishers deliberately engaged in a “dumbing down” process that was supposed to make the books more readily understandable to the increasing number of poorly prepared pupils who were entering the public schools.

When Honig was first elected state superintendent in 1982, he pledged to set tougher standards and to improve the curriculum, including better textbooks.

At his urging, the Curriculum Commission and the state school board have insisted that biology texts do a better job of explaining evolution and human reproduction, that mathematics books relate the teaching of math skills to real-life situations and that reading materials stress literature as well as phonics and other basic elements of instruction.

In this process, many textbooks have been rejected and others have had to be substantially revised, much to the annoyance of the publishers.

Open Court, a Chicago publisher, was especially outraged when both its reading and mathematics books were rejected in California and the president of the company, Andre Carus, “vowed then that they were going to put forward a bill to change the process,” said Glen Thomas, who directs the state Department of Education’s textbook evaluation efforts.

To the publishers, this seemed an especially good time to try to change the California laws because in 1990 the state will adopt new social science and history textbooks, based on a startling new “framework” written by Crabtree and by Diane Ravitch, adjunct professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

No current history text is thought to be in tune with the new framework, which Ravitch has characterized as requiring “vivid narrative accounts of American history and world history,” treatment of “major events in depth” and “well-written biographies” of historical figures.

“It was simpler for the publishers to lobby to revise the process than it was to provide better books,” Crabtree said.

In the meantime, Washington education writer Harriet Tyson published a 1988 book that was sharply critical of “America’s textbook fiasco” and of the statewide adoption processes that Tyson believes encourage publishers to produce bland books.

In a telephone interview last week, Tyson accused Honig of grandstanding in his denunciations of textbook publishers and their products and said California “is not leading us all into the sunlight” of better instructional materials.

In fact, publishers are reluctant to produce new books for California, Tyson added, because of “feelings that the product may not be chosen for reasons of merit” but for “political reasons” or “because of deals of one kind or another.”

Tyson’s book was published by the Council for Basic Education, a Washington-based organization that has been instrumental in the national curriculum reform movement of recent years. The council, which usually does not engage in direct political activity, then decided to lobby for legislation that would change the California adoption process.

The council hired Sacramento lobbyist Jack C. Crose, who arranged for a meeting between Tyson and Maddy--and the legislation was born.

“I had thought earlier this would be a good way to get quality textbooks in California,” said A. Graham Down, executive director of the Council for Basic Education. “Now I think it probably was an error to get involved there.”

The council was blasted by those educators who believe that the California adoption process is one of the few bright spots in a generally bleak textbook scene.

“The council certainly picked the wrong state at the wrong time,” wrote Gilbert T. Sewell, director of the American Textbook Council, in a typical comment.

Faced with this kind of criticism and a split among its trustees (who had not approved the lobbying effort in the first place), the Council for Basic Education withdrew support of Maddy’s bill, leaving the textbook publishers, represented by John Mockler, as its leading backers.

This is probably why Maddy decided to remove the most controversial part of the bill--requiring the state Board of Education to prove that submitted materials were not good, instead of requiring the publishers to prove that they were--although it is hard to be sure because Maddy did not return several telephone calls seeking his views.

Both the Maddy bill and the Epple bill still contain several important features, including:

- A “rolling adoption” process that would allow publishers to submit new materials every other year, instead of every seven years, as is the current practice. However, Francie Alexander, the associate superintendent of education who supervises textbook adoption, said only books that are “really new and different” would be considered between major adoptions, which would still take place every seven years.

- If materials are rejected, the state school board must provide a “written explanation of the reasons why.”

- The books should be factually accurate and should use “teaching strategies generally recognized as effective. . . .” Alexander said the state school board and the Curriculum Commission have been using these criteria but they have not previously been written into the state education code.

- At least seven of the 13 public members on the 18-member Curriculum Commission should be full-time classroom teachers for grades one through eight and all of the commission’s subcommittees also should have a majority of full-time classroom teachers.

This issue is of concern to teacher organizations more than textbook publishers. “The individual classroom teacher is the most qualified person to select instructional materials which meet the diverse needs of the learner,” said Len Feldman, communications consultant for the California Teachers Assn.

But Thomas, of the state Department of Education, said it is difficult for a full-time elementary school teacher, who usually must teach several subjects, to develop enough expertise in any one subject to be a good judge of textbooks.

As amended, the Maddy and Epple bills have been approved by the education committees of both the state Senate and the Assembly. Maddy and Mockler, representing the publishers, are still discussing the language in the Senate measure with state education officials, but it is possible that Maddy’s bill may reach the Senate floor in the next two to three weeks.

No one can be sure until the process is over, but it appears that the publishers and other critics are expected to get only minor changes in the California textbook adoption process.

Taken together, the proposed changes would “open up the process a little bit” and give the local school districts more choice of materials, said Donald A. Eklund, vice president of the school division of the Assn. of American Publishers.

But the drastic changes that were contained in earlier versions of the legislation have disappeared.