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...than at any other time in history. And if President Bush has his way, states will be required to test all students in third through eighth grades - 22 million kids - every year in math and reading. That's big money for K-12 testmakers, a market currently dominated by textbook publishers - but one that ETS is poised to join...
Going by the book may be a dubious practice when it comes to textbooks. A recent study by North Carolina State University documented thousands of errors in 12 of the most widely used middle school science texts: the Statue of Liberty is a lefty? Volume equals length times depth--and never mind height? It was merely the latest illumination of textbook bungling. In 1999 the mathematicians enlisted to review math books submitted for use in California said they were "shocked" by the frequency of mistakes--as many as one on every four pages. Mel and Norma Gabler, the self-anointed...
...date texts--and of kids' having to lug 30-lb. book bags--are almost over. The major publishers, fearful of yet another report slamming their product, have hired more fact checkers and instituted extra layers of review. More significant, this month McGraw-Hill plans to launch its first e-textbooks--online versions of its printed texts, featuring videos, interactive lab exercises and personalized assessment tools. Factual errors, once discovered, will be corrected immediately. Five years from now the visual resolution of handheld text devices should be clear enough--and the prices low enough--that one portable e-textbook containing downloads...
Still, fact checkers and computers can do only so much. It remains difficult to find a textbook, online or in print, that isn't shallow and tedious. Project 2061, the education-improvement initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, examined 10 of the most widely used high school biology texts last year and could not recommend a single one as satisfactory. "Although the textbooks are filled with pages of vocabulary and unnecessary detail, they provide only fragmentary treatment of some fundamentally important concepts" such as natural selection and cell construction, said Dr. George Nelson, the former astronaut...
Peter Jovanovich, CEO of Pearson Education, concedes that "today's textbooks are too big, both physically and in terms of coverage." Why? Because most of the publishers' customers--especially the states that adopt textbooks for all their school districts--want them that way. Ultimate power is in the hands of these states' textbook-selection committees (especially the ones in Texas, California and Florida). The stakes are huge: the $3.5 billion in annual textbook sales is greater than the sales of all hardcover books to adults. Textbooks are superficial in part because they must conform to state standards, which are often...