Nov 17, 2021 05:33 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 17, 2021 05:40 PM by C C.)
https://www.popsci.com/science/climate-c...education/
EXCERPTS: . . . In some places in the textbook series, climate change seems conspicuously absent. When the books do bring up recent climate change, they tend to provide accurate information cloaked in irresolute language...
[...] For better or worse, textbooks exert considerable power over public education in America. We grow up believing textbooks to be an authoritative source. ... Per a 2018 survey, teachers in just 9 percent of high-school science classes claim never to use a textbook.
There’s a lot of money to be made producing textbooks for the other 91 percent. [...] The market is made up of dozens of publishers, but three dominate: McGraw Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson K12 Learning (now Savvas Learning Company). Together, their products made up 79 percent of the textbooks in middle-school science classrooms in 2018.
iScience was McGraw Hill’s major middle-school science product of the last decade. First published in 2012, the most recent editions have a 2020 copyright. Throughout, the eight-page section with contradictory language on climate change has endured virtually verbatim, even as other parts of the books were rewritten.
How was the distorted language on climate change written into iScience? Getting to the bottom of this question was no small task [...] I pieced together that though iScience was first published in 2012, people at McGraw Hill began work on it as early as 2007. They reviewed the latest state standards and gathered feedback from sales reps and teachers about what should change from their old content. Then they wrote a thorough outline for the books and contracted freelance writers to fill those outlines with content.
McGraw Hill is also marketing and selling a second set of books. In 2019, the publisher announced a new K–12 science series called Inspire Science, designed to align with the Next Generation Science Standards. Sophisticated climate educators could find fault with its treatment of the subject, but it certainly treats the climate crisis far more thoroughly, directly, and accurately than its predecessor.
[...] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s middle-school science textbooks for Texas and Florida, copyrights 2015 and 2019, falsely describe climate change as “one of the most debated issues” in modern science.
[...] Competitor Pearson’s 2015 middle-school science textbook for Texas fails to clearly define recent climate change a single time in more than a thousand pages of text. Pearson’s high-school Earth-science textbooks do something even worse.
The book comes in two versions by the same authors, one for a general-education Earth-science class and the second for an advanced class. The gen-ed version devotes two pages to recent climate change. The advanced version devotes ten pages to it. This bifurcated approach has a bifurcated effect: Advanced students are thoroughly educated about the phenomenon shaping their world, while students enrolled in “rocks for jocks” are asked to decide for themselves if it’s even happening.
Now, a divide is opening. Publishers like McGraw Hill create and market two separate products: One, textbooks like Inspire Science; the other, “legacy” textbooks like iScience. The loose red-blue partisan divide between states whose standards accept climate science and those whose standards avoid it informs the textbooks they adopt.
Ideology trickles from elected officials through education departments and into classrooms. Accurate information about climate change thus becomes the purview of children living in liberal states, while children living in conservative states are frequently provided fodder for denial... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . In some places in the textbook series, climate change seems conspicuously absent. When the books do bring up recent climate change, they tend to provide accurate information cloaked in irresolute language...
[...] For better or worse, textbooks exert considerable power over public education in America. We grow up believing textbooks to be an authoritative source. ... Per a 2018 survey, teachers in just 9 percent of high-school science classes claim never to use a textbook.
There’s a lot of money to be made producing textbooks for the other 91 percent. [...] The market is made up of dozens of publishers, but three dominate: McGraw Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson K12 Learning (now Savvas Learning Company). Together, their products made up 79 percent of the textbooks in middle-school science classrooms in 2018.
iScience was McGraw Hill’s major middle-school science product of the last decade. First published in 2012, the most recent editions have a 2020 copyright. Throughout, the eight-page section with contradictory language on climate change has endured virtually verbatim, even as other parts of the books were rewritten.
How was the distorted language on climate change written into iScience? Getting to the bottom of this question was no small task [...] I pieced together that though iScience was first published in 2012, people at McGraw Hill began work on it as early as 2007. They reviewed the latest state standards and gathered feedback from sales reps and teachers about what should change from their old content. Then they wrote a thorough outline for the books and contracted freelance writers to fill those outlines with content.
McGraw Hill is also marketing and selling a second set of books. In 2019, the publisher announced a new K–12 science series called Inspire Science, designed to align with the Next Generation Science Standards. Sophisticated climate educators could find fault with its treatment of the subject, but it certainly treats the climate crisis far more thoroughly, directly, and accurately than its predecessor.
[...] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s middle-school science textbooks for Texas and Florida, copyrights 2015 and 2019, falsely describe climate change as “one of the most debated issues” in modern science.
[...] Competitor Pearson’s 2015 middle-school science textbook for Texas fails to clearly define recent climate change a single time in more than a thousand pages of text. Pearson’s high-school Earth-science textbooks do something even worse.
The book comes in two versions by the same authors, one for a general-education Earth-science class and the second for an advanced class. The gen-ed version devotes two pages to recent climate change. The advanced version devotes ten pages to it. This bifurcated approach has a bifurcated effect: Advanced students are thoroughly educated about the phenomenon shaping their world, while students enrolled in “rocks for jocks” are asked to decide for themselves if it’s even happening.
Now, a divide is opening. Publishers like McGraw Hill create and market two separate products: One, textbooks like Inspire Science; the other, “legacy” textbooks like iScience. The loose red-blue partisan divide between states whose standards accept climate science and those whose standards avoid it informs the textbooks they adopt.
Ideology trickles from elected officials through education departments and into classrooms. Accurate information about climate change thus becomes the purview of children living in liberal states, while children living in conservative states are frequently provided fodder for denial... (MORE - missing details)
