In the first edition of Lies, I pointed out that voting is the one form of
citizenship that the textbooks pushed, yet voting in America was down,
especially among recent high school graduates, and I suggested that the
sanctimonious tinge that social studies and history courses give to citizenship
may help explain why. Recently, voting by young people (aged eighteen to
twenty-four) rose from fewer than 17 percent in 1986 to 24 percent (aged
eighteen to twenty-nine) in 2006. Although more than three-fourths still do not
vote, the increase is heartening. I don’t hold the modest improvements in
history textbooks responsible for it.
28 Roger Farr and Michael A. Tulley offer an overview of adoption
procedures in “Do Adoption Committees Perpetuate Mediocre Textbooks?”
Phi Delta Kappan, March 1985, 467-71. California adopts statewide only for
grades 1-8. However, it has statewide guidelines for texts in the higher grades.
Gilbert Sewall, Social Studies Review, no. 5 (Summer 1990): 2, says
California controls 11 percent of the $1.7 billion textbook market. (In an
earlier copy of this newsletter, no. 1:4, Sewall sets a lower figure, 10.2
percent, for California, but says the top four adoption states—California,
Texas, Florida, and North Carolina—together make up more than a fourth of
the market and exert “enormous leverage” on publishers.) Michael W. Kirst,
Who Controls Our Schools? (New York: Freeman, 1984), 115-20, describes
California adoption and its and Texas’s influence on national texts. See also
Michael W. Apple, “The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook,” in Michael
W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook
(New York: Routledge, 1991), Ch. 2.
29 For fuller treatments, see J. Dan Marshall, “With a Little Help from Some
Friends: Publishers, Protesters, and Texas Textbook Decisions,” in Apple and
Christian-Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook, Ch. 4; Joan DelFattore,
What Johnny Shouldn’t Read; and Michael W. Apple, “The Political Economy
of Text Publishing,” Educational Theory 34, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 307-19.
30 In 1994 I wrote two dozen, but publisher consolidation has narrowed the
options.
31 Farr and Tulley, “Do Adoption Committees Perpetuate Mediocre
Textbooks?” 470; Marshall, “With a Little Help from Some Friends,” 62;
Harriet Tyson-Bernstein, “Remarks to the AERA Textbook SIG” (San
Francisco, March 1989), 10; Harriet Tyson-Bernstein and Arthur Woodward,
“Nineteenth Century Policies for Twenty-first Century Practice,” in Philip