A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks

February 26, 2004

by Diane Ravitch

A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks is a summary review of 12 widely used U.S. and world history textbooks. To access the underlying reviews (each U.S. history reviewer's individual evaluation of each textbook) click here. For each world history reviewer's individual evaluation, click here.

To read the press release for this publication, click here.

Contents

• Foreword, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. (PDF version )
• Introduction (PDF version )
• American History -- A summary of reviewer findings (PDF version )
• World History -- A summary of reviewer findings (PDF version )
• Conclusions and Recommendations (PDF version )
• Appendix A -- American History Criteria per Textbook (PDF version )
• Appendix B -- American History Textbooks by Criterion (PDF version )
• Appendix C -- World History Criteria per Textbook (PDF version )
• Appendix D -- World History Textbooks by Criterion (PDF version )
• Appendix E -- American History Overall Grade by Reviewer (PDF version )
• Appendix F -- World History Overall Grade by Reviewer (PDF version )
• Detailed Criteria and rating for judging history textbooks:

Foreword, by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

PDF version

Within days of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, major textbook publishers began scrambling to revise their high school history texts to include information about 9/11. An understandable, even commendable impulse, but it went badly. Because these hasty updates or supplements had to be written by early 2002 in order to be included in the 2003 editions of the textbookspublishing timelines are nothing if not long and slowby the time they reached classrooms just about all the information in them was obsolete.

 

Far more troubling, because textbook publishers bend over backwards not to offend anybody or upset special interest groups, the 9/11 information, like so much else in today's history texts, was simplified and sanitized. The reader would scarcely learn that anybody in particular had organized these savage attacks on innocent Americans and citizens of 80 other nations, much less why. The impression given by most textbooks was more like "a terrible thing happened"reminiscent of the two-year-old gazing upon the shards of his mother's shattered glass vase and saying "It broke."

 

I've dubbed such verb usages the "irresponsible impersonal" voice and, regrettably, they're more norm than exception in U.S. history textbooks. As with the vase breaking, things happen in these books (though not necessarily in chronological order), but not because anybody causes them. Hence, nobody deserves admiration or contempt for having done something incredibly wonderful or abominably evil. No judgments need be made. (To judge, after all, might upset a person or group who disagrees with the judgment or dislikes the way it makes them or their ancestors look.) The result: fat, dull, boring books that mention everything but explain practically nothing; plenty of information but no sorting, prioritizing, or evaluating; and a collective loss of American memory.

 

World-history texts present similar problems. It's hard to name a culture or era that doesn't turn up somewhere in these sprawling compilations, but no real story is told. There's no thread, no priorities, no winnowing of the important from the trivial, the history-shaping from the incidental. It's as if a car's chrome trim and speaker system were equivalent to its chassis and engine.

 

Why does this matter? Some successful countriesJapan and Singapore come to mindget by fine with slender curriculum guides rather than enormous textbooks. That's because their teachers are subject-matter experts in fields like history and, when supplied with guidance about what state or national standard-setters deem most important, can easily generate their own lessons and find their own materials. They don't depend on textbooks except as reference works.

 

That's not true in the United States, where few history teachers ever learned much history themselves. More than half of high school history teachers did not major or even minor in history in college. Instead, most studied education or psychology or sociology, perhaps with a focus on "social studies education." As a result, teachers charged with imparting essential information to young Americans about the history of their country and world must rely heavily on the textbooks available to themoften textbooks that teachers themselves had little to do with selecting. Because these texts end up serving as students' primary sources of information, it's vitally important that they be accurate and interesting, and that they establish a narrative of events with a strong sense of context. They must tell "the main story" without neglecting lesser stories that form part of an accurate picture of the past. What they must not be is sprawling, drab assemblages of disjointed information in which everything matters equally and nothing is truly important.

 

How manyif anyof today's textbooks live up to that obligation? Unfortunately, few independent reviews of textbooks have been conducted to help answer that question. Hence, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, as part of our broader effort to strengthen history education and breathe new life into the moribund field of social studies, judged that it was time to look closely at widely used high school level textbooks in American and world history. In the spirit of being constructive as well as critical, we judged that a competent appraisal would provide practical help to educators tasked with the selection of history texts, to parents concerned about their children's education, to policymakers,

and even to publishers eyeing improvements in their products.

 

Our Approach

 

To lead such a project, we turned to the best qualified person in America, our long-time colleague Diane Ravitch, who is both a distinguished historian in her own right and a close and critical reader of textbooks and other instructional materials. Her recent book, The Language Police, electrifiedand alarmedthe education world with its vivid depiction of the pressures on textbook publishers that have now been internalized as self-censorship regimens that squeeze all the juice out of instructional materials before students get anywhere near them.

 

To conduct the present review, Ravitch brought together a panel of experts in U.S. or world history to evaluate six widely used high school U.S. history texts and a like number of world history texts. Working with her advisors, she developed a dozen criteria by which each text would be appraised. (Those criteria are explained on page 17.) They emphasize a book's historical accuracy, coherence, balance, and writing quality.

 

The reviewers themselves span a wide range of political perspectives, professional experience, and ideological viewpoints. They include scholars, writers, school administrators, and history teachers. They submitted their individual evaluations to Dr. Ravitch, and she compiled them into this summary report. It is, to our knowledge, the first time a group of independent reviewers, all experts in history, has undertaken a comprehensive review of some of the textbooks that high school social studies teachers are most apt to assign and that high school pupils are likeliest to read.

 

Like all book reviews, such judgments are inherently subjective, and the eyes of different beholders often see dissimilar virtues and vices in particular texts. The reviewers of these volumes sometimes conferred sharply different ratings on various criteria, ratings that inevitably reflect the readers' historical priorities, education beliefs and literary preferences as well as the quality of the book under review. The diversity among reviewers is occasionally reflected in their diverse ratings of the same text. Because any effort to construct an average or total score from such disparate ratings risks dulling the reviewers' edges and masking their differences, we also provide each reviewer's rating of each book on every criterion, as well as the totals and averages. (You can find these online at http://www.edexcellence.net/institute.) All the edges are there for inspection.

 

In reading the reviewers' observations, we were struck by the similarity between a group of reviewers rating a textbook and a group of otherwise unconnected authors, editors, or contributors writing that book in the first place. Almost all the texts examined here are group products from the pens of multiple authors. Several name no author at all. Such a book appears to be the fruit of an anonymous groupthink process involving many participants, more an orgy than a marriage. Inevitably, that kind of "authorship" does not just blur differences and dull edges. It also yields a bland consensus product, the least common denominator of the participants' views. How could such a creation possess a "story line"? How could it be gripping? How could it embody clear views on controversial topics or winnow the major events and actors of history from the inconsequential? And when the groupthink of a statewide textbook adoption process is superimposed upon group authorship and then subjected to multiple rounds of "bias review," how could the result be anything but a big, dull mass of themeless information about everything imaginable? It is what some post-modern writers term a "social construction" that includes much that lacks importance, excludes muchfor space reasons as well as groupthinkthat would capture the interest of young readers, and glosses over much that is controversial. The writing and editing are done with one eye on the marketplace, the other on sundry interest groups.

 

Findings and Policy Considerations

 

Diane Ravitch's own sober conclusions and thoughtful recommendations begin on page 63. They deserve the reader'sand policymaker'sundivided attention. Allow me here simply to share a few reflections of my own.

 

The books reviewed in this report range from serviceable to abysmal. None is distinguished or even very good. The best are merely adequate. In the hands of a competent teacher, they could get the job done, but not much more than that. No textbook scored better than 78 percent overallthe rough equivalent of a C+ grade. Five of the twelve earned failing marks. Despite their glitzy graphics and vivid pictures, they all suffer from dull prose and the absence of a "story." Is it any wonder that most students rank history or social studies among their least favorite subjects in school? What a crashing bore it must be to try to learn something from tomes like these.

 

The underlying process of textbook creation, publication, and selection is sorely flawed. Unless it is radically overhauled, we cannot reasonably expect much better textbooks in our children's schools.  And that means we probably cannot expect much better education there, no matter how hard states and Uncle Sam push on standards, tests, and accountability.

 

What is to be done, besides counseling conscientious teachers to depend as little as possible upon these textbooks? The reforms that I would undertake parallel those that Diane recommends:

 

" First and foremost, the more thoroughly teachers know their stuff, the less will they depend on textbooks and the better equipped they'll be to judge and criticize the materials available to them. In other words: better and more subject-centered teacher preparation is essential. High school history teachers should have solid preparation in the history they teach, either an undergraduate degree in history, a graduate degree in history, or credit for passing a rigorous history exam.

 

" Second, statewide, even district-wide, textbook "adoptions" should end. Individual schools or teachers should select the textbooks they prefer from among all publisher offerings. This is no recipe for chaos so long as every school must attain state or district academic standards and be monitored by state or district assessments. Within that results-based accountability framework, a teacher or school history department should be free to choose whatever books, software, and supplemental materials they believe will assist them to get the job done. This will also liberate the textbook market from the handful of multinational publishing houses that dominate it today and encourage "boutique" publishers to bring more history texts (and other materials) to market. And one hopes it will encourage outstanding scholars to write such books, as was done in earlier generations when widely used U.S. textbooks bore the names of such world-class historians as Richard Hofstadter, Charles Beard, Henry Steele Commager, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Oscar Handlin.

 

" Third, teachers should have the option of using their "textbook budgets" for alternative materials if they would rather assemble their ownfrom the Internet, from television, from a variety of publications, and from their own brains and knowledge base. A dazzling array of options present themselves. A teacher should be free to minimize her dependence on conventional textbooks and substitute other instructional materials. This, of course, means empowering individual schools and teachers with budgetary control.

 

" Finally, with such a wealth of materials available, those doing the choosing need access to expert reviews. America today has only a couple of small textbook-reviewing organizations. We need many more. It should be as easy for a teacher to obtain multiple reviews of textbooks and instructional materials as of novels to take to the beach, movies, and restaurants for Saturday evening, or colleges that one's students should consider.

 

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This is the fourth in a series of reports published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Institute as part of "Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies," which aims to revitalize the subject with renewed focus on serious content, high standards, effective teaching, and sound instructional materials. The first two, Where did Social Studies go Wrong? and Terrorists, Despots and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know, identified shortcomings in social studies and provided suggestions for teachers. The third, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card, evaluated state standards for their treatment of U.S. history. (You can find these three volumes on our web site at http://www.edexcellence.net.) Taken together, we believe, this quartet of reports and others to follow serve to highlight the problems with social studies and to provide teachers, textbook authors, education leaders, policymakers and concerned parents with guidance on how to infuse American classrooms with high-quality history courses and instructional materials.

 

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation made this projectand this reportpossible, and we're deeply grateful to that grand organization for its continuing engagement with the oft-daunting challenge of giving history its due in U.S. schools. We are profoundly appreciative of Diane Ravitch's work, not only on this project but also her steadfast leadership, courage, and insight these past 25 years and her tireless commitment to reviving the proper teaching and learning of sound history in American classrooms.

We also thank her expert reviewers. In American history: Morton Keller, Jeffrey Mirel, John Pyne, and Edward Renehan. In world history: Marc A. Epstein, Margaret C. Jacob, Walter Russell Mead, Theodore Rabb, and Lucien Ellington. Janice Riddell, too, has earned our appreciation for helping in so many ways with the project's complex logistics. At the Fordham Institute, I thank associate research director Kathleen Porter, who steered a steady course, Emi Ryan for designing this volume, and Carolyn Conner for parsing the data and making it accessible to analysts, educators, and ordinary mortals.

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute seeks to improve the quality and effectiveness of American elementary and secondary education and to deepen the understanding of educators, policymakers, journalists, parents and the general public with respect to the problems that impede high quality education in the United States, and to provide possible solutions to those problems. It shares staff, offices, and trustees with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and is designed to advance the education reform ideas that it also shares with the Foundation. Further information can be obtained from our Web site http://www.edexcellence.net/institute or by writing us at 1627 K Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20006. The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.

 

Chester E. Finn, Jr.,

President

Washington, DC

February 2004

 

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