A nice companion piece to my (I hope polite) rant about the effect of quotas on the materials presented to California school children shows up in this Daniel Golden article about how school textbook publishers are desperate to meet their quota requirements. After describing the nice wheel and crutch props Houghton Mifflin Co keeps on site for able bodied kid models to use for photo shoots, Golden has this to say:
Houghton Mifflin’s little-known stratagem illustrates how a well-intentioned effort to make classroom textbooks more reflective of the country’s diversity has led publishers to overcompensate and at times replace one artificial vision of reality with another.
To facilitate state approval and school-district purchasing of their texts, publishers set numerical targets for showing minorities and the disabled. In recent years, the quest to meet these targets has ratcheted to a higher level as technological improvements enable publishers to customize books for individual states, and as photos and illustrations take up more textbook space.
Although publishers describe these numbers as guidelines, many people familiar with educational publishing say they are strict quotas that must be adhered to. Moreover, in filling these quotas, publishers screen out a wide range of images they deem stereotypical, from Asian math students to barefoot African children.
Some educators complain that, at best, the efforts reflect political correctness gone awry — and, at worst, that publishers are putting politics, and sales, ahead of student learning.
“There’s more textbook space devoted to photos, illustrations and graphics than there’s ever been, but frequently they have nothing to do with the lesson,” says Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and author of “The Language Police,” a 2003 study of textbook censorship. “They’re just there for political reasons, to show diversity and meet a quota of the right number of women, minorities and the disabled.”
Hat tip: Independent Women’s Forum
Filed under: Education, Political correctness
From the a href=”http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html”>City Journal is a piece that could be parody, but unfortunately isn’t. It’s unthinkable that the same radicals who destroyed our schools are still at it. We’ve not won the battle and being polite, while the desired norm in most of the time, may not be the way to win this fight.
I literally got sick reading this article.a
Sorry, here’s the link: City Journal
All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.
Can’t have a revolution without guns. Which is why they try their hardest to get the weapons away from our side, and we try our hardest to get them to disarm themselves.
[...] Right about now, of course, you should be asking “Who is Guy Gabaldon?” His name is not turning up in all the PC, multi-culti quota materials our children are getting. It turns out, though, that Gabaldon was quite a guy. When only 18, using a spectacular bluff, he was able to persuade over a thousand Japanese troops to surrender to him — and he died the other day: Guy Gabaldon, who as an 18-year-old Marine private single-handedly persuaded more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender in the World War II battle for Saipan, has died. He was 80. [...]