Are America’s Textbooks Inadequate?

MSNBC.com has a very interesting report on the quality of America’s textbooks. According to scholars and specialists that they interviewed, there are some serious problems with the textbooks that are currently being used in schools around the country:

“If America’s textbooks were systematically graded, Wang and other scholars say, they would fail abysmally.

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.”

It’s a thought provoking piece and a conversation that has been thus far muted by arguments over things like school vouchers and the No Child Left Behind program.