Dissent Greets Choice of S.D. School Texts

A $5.2-million purchase of textbooks from the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing house was approved Tuesday by the San Diego city school board to serve for at least seven years as the cornerstone of its radically changed elementary reading program.

But complaints by several teachers from Central Elementary School, who questioned the selection process, left a sour taste to the adoption, which is a major component of the district’s switch to the new program that emphasizes the use of literature in teaching reading skills, rather than starting with the skills themselves.

The Central teachers said a majority of the 42 district teachers who made a first choice after trying out three competing texts for the new program preferred the Houghton Mifflin Reading/Language Arts, by a 22-17 margin, over Imagination, and by 22 to 15 over the Laureate text, also published by HBJ.

Yet the 52-member district committee of teachers, principals, administrators and parents established last year to recommend a single text voted by a margin of 88% for the Imaginations text after reading summaries of experiences by the pilot teachers and after their own reviews.

Central teachers said that only eight of the pilot teachers served on the district committee and that they were unrepresentative of teachers as a whole because they preferred Imaginations.

“Why was there no input or vote from the remaining pilot teachers?” asked Pat Thomas, a second-grade teacher at Central. She said teachers believe they should have the major voice in selecting texts because they are the ones responsible for using them successfully in the classroom.

Both she and Central teacher Jennifer Newton said that Central teachers found the Houghton Mifflin text easier to use and easier for children to understand.

But school trustees voted 4 to 0, with member Kay Davis absent, to go ahead with the Imaginations text after hearing testimony from teachers at other schools who praised it and from other administrators who said the text was the most challenging book to carry out the new “whole language” program.

In particular, trustees were impressed by testimony from special-education and second-language representatives, who said the Imaginations text brought significant gains in student self-esteem and achievement in their pilot classes. Both the special-education and second-language committees had said they would not go along with a district adoption of the Houghton Mifflin book because it would not work well for their students.

“I particularly noted the testimony that special-ed kids achieved with Imaginations,” said board Vice President Shirley Weber, a strong advocate of more demanding material for students. If special-education children can benefit from the material, then students in regular classes should be able to gain even more from the text, Weber said.

Both Weber and fellow board member Jim Roache said after the meeting that their main concern is the achievement of students, adding that the comfort of teachers, while important, should not outweigh the potential benefits to children from a more challenging text.

In addition, Roache said that while teachers have a larger say in textbook adoptions than in the past, “restructuring does not mean that they make the decisions but that they have involvement in the decision, along with principals, parents and everyone else who have a strong stake in education.”

All 70,000 students within the San Diego Unified School District--the nation’s eighth-largest urban system--will participate in the new curriculum, beginning with the 1990-91 school year.

The curriculum, based on a framework provided by the state Department of Education, merges reading, writing and discussion of a story along with the associated skills, rather than having students work separately on grammar, on sounding out word parts or on answering multiple-choice questions on a story’s theme.