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Re: improving textbooks -- some modest proposals



John Clement wrote:
...
There are already PACs that are pressuring states to omit evolution from
bio. texts. I doubt that you could get the public excited over textbooks.
The public will get excited when they think that they might die or have to
pay too much for health care, but accuracy of textbooks????

Harumpff!!! It's our job to make them care. They
ought to care. Here's why:

People are worried about their retirement. They're
afraid that the social security trust fund won't have
enough money in it to support them. What they usually
forget is that money is TOTALLY artificial. If the
goods and services that retirees require are not being
produced, it doesn't matter how much money is in
circulation. They can't buy something that doesn't
exist. (What will happen is that prices will inflate
to the point where the richest get what they want, and
everybody else does without.)

Guess what, folks: Todays students are tomorrow's
workforce. They are the ones who will be producing
those goods and services. If you want to be able
to retire, you'd better do a good job of educating
the kids. Not just your own kids, all the kids.

I think the first step would be to put together a professional committee
from AAPT members

AAPT is too narrow. The same structure needs to deal
with biology, chemistry, "earth science", history,
and everything else.

that could carefully scrutinize every new MS and HS textbook

That's not practical for new textbooks. Too much work.
That's why it would make sense to let teachers use a book
for a year. Then you can evaluate whether you want to buy
any more of them. During the course of the year, the
teachers (with the help of the kids) will find out which
homework problems are absurd, and which experiments don't work.

There are a thousand details to be worked out before
this simple proposal grows up into something serious.
For one thing, it's true that middle-school teachers
don't necessarily moonlight as rocket scientists. They
have misconceptions, and we should worry that a book
that pandered to their misconceptions might be more
popular than one that didn't. But we can deal with
that threat. For one thing, there are getting to be
more and more standardized tests, and if the correct
concept is on the test, the teachers will figure out
how to teach it. Obviously, teachers are under pressure
to teach to the test. Whether that's a good thing
or a bad thing depends on the test!

Some of this has been done by Project 2061 www.project2061.org and by the
Hubisz report.

The Hubisz report didn't even offer a usable summary, let
alone any recommended action items. Major action is
required, and diffuse whining about this or that book
just isn't going to have any real impact.

The one thing that might
improve the situation would be to have state education agencies out of the
textbook selection process.

That's unlikely to happen. The agencies
are not just going to roll over and play dead.
There will be no good outcome until people who
care about accuracy (and the other critical issues)
figure out the _entire_ ugly process and engage
the stakeholders at every step of the process.

If there were to be a federal mandate it
...
might expose the flaws in existing texts.

Exposing the flaws is easy but uselessly negative.
It does not naturally lead to any improvement, because
of the other forces at work. The people who set those
regulations in place didn't understand the consequences.
They're not going to read any exposé of specific texts, and
even if they did, they wouldn't understand the connection
between that horrible problem and their well-meaning
regulations.