A Textbook Case of Stupidity : Oakland school board denies books to students

Faced with crushing and demoralizing cutbacks and ever-rising student enrollments, today’s teacher is a man or woman caught in an agonizing squeeze.

But as difficult as it may be for teachers here in Los Angeles to imagine, some teachers in Oakland have it even worse. There, highly emotional school-board and community politics has left many teachers without even essential textbooks.

FORBIDDEN BOOKS: Fourth-, fifth- and seventh-grade teachers are being forced to make do with homemade materials or old, discredited textbooks--or are furtively lining up to photocopy chapters from the state textbooks that the school board has barred from being purchased.

It’s absurd, and worst of all, it’s utterly unnecessary.

The background is this: After years of hard work, the State of California approved a new set of history and social studies textbooks for kindergarten through eighth grade.

The Houghton Mifflin texts sought to embody new sensitivities and understandings about the contributions of women, blacks, Asians, Latinos and religious groups. The textbooks attempted to present history honestly and accurately within a context that did not exclude, minimize or degrade--as have past textbooks--the experience of anyone who wasn’t a white, Christian male.

In general the new textbooks were received with great enthusiasm nationally by a wide variety of educators.

The consensus was that while they still were not perfect they were superior by light-years to existing texts. The new books were a sincere effort to improve education. But very good apparently was not good enough for the Oakland school board.

Last spring it voted to reject these texts for use in certain grades at the behest of vocal critics of the books’ supposed “Eurocentrism.” Not only is that charge unfair, but the result is that the good has been sacrificed on the altar of the ideal.

And who pays the price? The innocent students who are expected to get by with often outdated and clearly inferior books. Some teachers are going ahead and surreptitiously using copies of the banned texts. The small but vocal opponents of the new books won; but what a hollow “victory” for the largely black student body.

SHORTCHANGED KIDS: Children must learn of the contributions of all peoples to the development of world and U.S. culture. But to irresponsibly snub books that make real progress toward true multicultural education--in order to make a misguided point about black pride--does nothing for the Oakland public-school children who need good learning materials--now.

Certainly the textbooks that are being used by most school districts, while good in content and engaging in presentation, could stand some improvement. But how foolish to demand that any single set of elementary school textbooks tell histories of every group just as each group wants it told. The Oakland school board should be ashamed of itself.