In Oakland, a Textbook Case of Trouble : Education: Some 4th, 5th and 7th graders lack history and social studies books after activists complained about the lack of racial sensitivity. Teachers are forced to use makeshift materials.

Two months into the new school year, thousands of Oakland fourth-, fifth- and seventh-graders have no history or social studies textbooks.

Teachers are scrambling to devise makeshift textbooks with material from old texts, paperback biographies, famous speeches and lessons written by everybody from UC Berkeley professors to community activists.

“We’re creating a curriculum from scratch,” said one seventh-grade teacher.

This often chaotic situation has resulted from an Oakland school board decision last June to reject the state-approved Houghton Mifflin history and social studies materials for kindergarten through the eighth grade.

The Houghton Mifflin series was created to meet California’s demanding new history and social studies curriculum, which places special emphasis on such previously slighted subjects as geography, Muslim and Far Eastern history and the role of religion in world history.

The books throw out the old “melting pot” concept of American diversity taught to generations of students in favor of the “salad bowl” approach. U.S. history is presented through the eyes of American Indians, African-Americans and other racial minorities, not simply from the point of view of predominantly white European immigrants.

Although the textbooks have been widely praised by some historians and teachers, both for their content and multicultural approach, they have also been criticized by various religious and racial groups for inaccuracies and for not going far enough in presenting particular points of view.

The Oakland school board rejected the books after several groups of African-American and Asian-American community activists argued that the books still have a white, European-centered perspective that is not appropriate in a school district that is 91% minority, 57% black and in which 52% of the pupils come from families on welfare.

“These kids need to know they are not born and will not die as slaves,” said Toni Cook, a school board member who voted against the books. “They need to know, in spite of slavery, that their people made some contributions, that their history is not the history of dope dealers. I felt the books fell short of doing that.”

Board President Wilma Chan said: “They are better than what we had but they are not good enough.”

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said he is worried about the harm that students will suffer because they must try to learn without textbooks. “They are the ones who are going to lose,” he said. “This was a bad decision, a political decision, and kids are going to get hurt.”

At a raucous meeting June 5, the board adopted alternative materials for some grades but nothing for grades four, five or seven, leaving about 12,000 Oakland pupils without textbooks.

“We’re trying to keep one step ahead of the students” by assembling materials for immediate classroom use, said board member Jean Quan.

Elsewhere in the state, almost 600 school districts have adopted the Houghton Mifflin series, in whole or in part. Oakland and Ravenswood, a predominantly African-American and Latino elementary school district in East Palo Alto, are the only two districts in the state that have rejected the books.

Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other districts have required that supplementary material from particular racial or religious points of view also be taught.

The San Juan Unified School District in the Sacramento suburbs adopted the books with the understanding that sixth-grade teachers would present information to counterbalance what some Jewish groups have seen as one-sided treatment of Judaism and early Christianity.

Early reaction to the books has generally been favorable.

“For the most part, they have been received enthusiastically” by teachers in the 300 or so Los Angeles elementary schools and junior high schools that are using them, said Sheridan Liechty, secondary education curriculum coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Jean Stenquist, a third-grade teacher in the Richmond school district, which is close to Oakland and also has a large minority enrollment, has found that teachers and their students are “thrilled about these books. My sixth-grade daughter and I enjoy reading her book together, which is certainly unusual.”

But the negative reaction in Oakland has been just as strong.

Chan, a Wellesley College graduate who has been school board president since June, said the books contained some “historical inaccuracies” and “were not inclusive enough.” She cited the treatment of Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans as especially inadequate.

Harsher criticism came from Kitty Epstein, professor of education at Holy Names College in Oakland and a member of the Bay Area Coalition of Education Activists, who called the Houghton Mifflin texts “racist and disrespectful,” especially in their treatment of blacks.

“I think racism is the most critical issue in American education right now,” Epstein said. “These materials do not adequately treat the African-American struggle for justice in a system that has been, and continues to be, racist.”

Honig disagreed.

He said Epstein and other critics “believe all you can say about this country is it’s illegitimate, racist, sexist. . . . That’s basically the message they want the books to convey. They are hostile to anything that says there is a common American heritage.

“They’re entitled to that point of view,” Honig continued, “but they’re not entitled to foist only that point of view on our kids and say everything else is illegitimate.”

Chan, Quan and Epstein criticized the textbooks because their four principal authors are white.

“I was surprised that, although the company was selling to California, they didn’t include among the authors any persons of color,” said Chan.

Charlotte Crabtree, a UCLA education professor who chaired the Curriculum Commission subcommittee that recommended the state’s adoption of the Houghton Mifflin series, called that response “nonsense.”

Gary B. Nash, professor of history at UCLA and one of the authors of the books, said he “tried to reach out to scholars of all races. Maybe, in the 1990s, that’s not enough. There are some folks who won’t even bother to get past the skin color of the author.”

Nash said it may not be possible to “write a single book in the future” for history or social studies students.

In the San Diego school district, which is testing the books in 20 schools, “there is a feeling that if we adopt this book, it might be the last time we ever adopt a single book” for history or social studies, said Frank Till, assistant superintendent of schools. “In the future, we might go to a different approach, with varied materials.”

It is not likely, however, that many school districts will want to repeat Oakland’s experience of creating a new curriculum at the 11th hour.

After voting down the Houghton Mifflin series, the Oakland school board ordered that new material be prepared for the fourth, fifth and seventh grades.

Almost 100 volunteers worked through the summer, under the direction of Robert Newell, associate superintendent of schools for instruction, and Shelly Weintraub, social studies coordinator.

Newell and Weintraub praised some of the material as educationally sound. But they said that other material contained a heavy dose of political orientation.

A six-week lesson plan submitted by the Bay Area Coalition of Education Activists instructs teachers to “heighten awareness of the racism and racial prejudice inherent in traditional views of history, as well as present-day society” and to “heighten awareness of the racism and racial prejudice in the everyday behavior of both students and adults.”

“We are concerned that some of this material is biased and doctrinaire,” Newell said. “It is trying to indoctrinate students to a particular point of view.”

Newell and Weintraub said they doubted that views such as these will become part of the permanent course of study. However, the final decision rests with a districtwide committee of teachers, parents and others.

While school board members, school administrators and community activists wrangle over what should be in the curriculum, teachers in grades four, five and seven must decide, on their own, what to teach.

“This whole thing is a farce,” said Pam Johnson, a seventh-grade teacher at Bret Harte Junior High School. “You have 500 teachers desperately trying to put together materials in their spare time, each with a different program. There’s no standard.”

“It’s not fair to the teachers and it’s not fair to us,” said a seventh-grader at Bret Harte Junior High. “There are certain things you need to know you can only get from textbooks.”

Said another: “We’re not going to know what’s on the tests and other students will get better scores than we do.”

Good teachers have been able to improvise interesting lessons that meet the requirements of the curriculum framework. But some less able, or less experienced teachers are floundering.

“Many of them are in great need,” said historian Matthew T. Downey, who teaches in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. “Some of them seem fairly desperate.”

But Oakland school board member Toni Cook said that rejecting the textbooks was the right thing to do.

“The debate is greater than just the kids,” she said. “If Oakland has been responsible for stimulating some creative thinking about these materials and the way they are taught, then I’ll take a bow.”