Writers Hope Text Is Hit on Internet

They say you can get it all on the Internet, from airplane tickets to the lowdown on Led Zeppelin. Now add to the list something a bit more home-grown: An entire series of science textbooks for grades K-6, compliments of a Fountain Valley schoolteacher and a few of her colleagues.

Selling books on the Internet is nothing new. But offering an entire grade-school science curriculum--more than 4,000 pages of textbooks, teacher’s manuals, photographs and drawings, all for free--may well be a first.

Leigh Hoven-Severson, a third-grade teacher at James H. Cox Elementary School, and her co-authors decided to give away their science texts via cyberspace after years of frustration and fights with the California Department of Education.

Though state educators refused to put the books on the approved list of science texts, the local teachers have been using them with good results. For three years running, Hoven-Severson’s classes were state champions in a NASA-sponsored science contest.

Now she and the rest hope they can reach a few more teachers and their students through the Internet. Whether they’re in Burbank or Bermuda, all inquiring minds need do is call up the curriculum on a personal computer and hit the print button.

“We went into this, and it may sound naive, to try to make a change in the way science is being taught,” Hoven-Severson said. “If it takes a different entry door to get to the kids, that’s fine. We’ll take whatever entry we can get.”

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To begin offering their books for free, the teachers formed a nonprofit corporation dubbed Optimizing National Education. Hoven-Severson’s husband, Larry, put together a computer home page, complete with biographies of the teachers who participated in the project as well as the textbooks themselves. The address is https://www.opnated.org.

So far, there haven’t been scads of takers. Since the science books were first offered on the Internet late last year, only a few thousand Web surfers have stumbled upon the group’s home page.

It’s unclear how many of those actually took time to download the text. But the group has gotten feedback. Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, last month noted the efforts of the Orange County teachers during a presentation before the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.

Modest though it is, the teachers’ Internet undertaking raises some pesky issues.

It could mark a new threat to a state text selection process that, though much-maligned, ensures students up and down California share a consistent message in their schoolbooks.

“We have a process for textbook selection, and it’s the information in those texts that is used to access kids’ knowledge,” said Marian Bergeson, state secretary of education. “The most this could be is a supplement. Though it’s hard for me to make a judgment on its worthiness, most teachers will use whatever advantage they can.”

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But the effort also underscores the personal freedom engendered by the Internet, which has let the teachers circumvent a state educational bureaucracy they feel is resistant to fresh approaches.

“This is another example of an old process being tested by the Internet,” said Assemblyman Jim Cunneen (R-San Jose), co-chairman of the Legislative Internet Caucus. “I haven’t seen their curriculum, but this demonstrates how the Internet has become perhaps the most important advancement in human freedom in the modern world.”

The turn to the Internet was the latest of several attempts by the teachers to get their series, dubbed “Exploring Science,” into the hands of schoolchildren in California and across the country.

They decided to begin putting the series together back in 1991. Aside from Hoven-Severson, the team includes Cox Elementary teachers Kathleen Davis Manuel and Carrie Luger Slayback as well as the district’s special projects director, Linnea Nell Haley, and Harriette “Jerry” Bolliger, a veteran teacher who retired in 1992.

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After the final school bell rang each day, they worked for months to write it, then submitted the books to the state in 1992. They figured they had a winner. Their text was considerably less expensive per book than those offered by the big publishing houses and brims with experiments and lesson plans that have been battle-tested in real-world classrooms.

But it flopped with state textbook selectors. They panned Exploring Science, saying it contained errors of interpretation or fact and failed to clearly explain why certain scientific concepts are important. The rejection, which reduced Hoven-Severson to tears, meant Exploring Science was ineligible for most of the state money school districts around California rely heavily upon to buy textbooks, a mortal blow for a small scholastic publisher.

The teachers didn’t give up. Larry Severson, who had left the aerospace industry to market Exploring Science full time, continued to push the texts in other states and got the series into a national catalog of school science supplies. The teachers, meanwhile, haunted educational conferences to pitch the program.

Sales picked up some, but never enough for the teachers to get paid a cent. Everything was plowed back into the costs of producing books and paying overhead. Aside from innumerable hours, the Seversons say they have spent more than $500,000 of their own money on the project, liquidating an inheritance Leigh received from her parents.

More bad news came last year when the national science catalog dropped Exploring Science in favor of a series offered by a big-name publishing house.

Hoven-Severson says she was about ready to give up. But her husband wasn’t. An attorney acquaintance suggested setting up the nonprofit group and giving away the text on the Internet. Severson, an admitted iconoclast, jumped on the idea. He sees it as an opportunity to change education from the outside.

“Schools are a bureaucracy, they’re like a cattle stampede,” said Severson, who doesn’t take a salary for his efforts and has been supplementing the family income by teaching part time. “If you try to turn it another direction from inside the pack, they’ll stomp you. Change has to come from the outside, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

He has other ideas, like repackaging the Exploring Science curriculum into a children’s cartoon show he’d like to call “Sci Kids.” He also talks of setting up a curriculum evaluation program, a sort of version of “Consumer Reports,” giving teachers another measuring stick for textbooks other than the state evaluation process.

With America’s 12th-graders scoring at the bottom in science and math in a recent international competition, Severson and his wife figure they’ll do whatever it takes to help better teach the nation’s schoolchildren.

“We’re on completely uncharted waters with the Internet,” Hoven-Severson said. “I don’t care if we never get back the money we’ve put into this. I’m just looking to get it into the kids’ hands and make a difference.”