Special Focus

Textbooks: Influences on Selection

Volume 6 / Issue 1 / Fall 2005

The new school year means new and not-so-new textbooks coming home to be wrapped in protective coverings. While they’re within reach, familiarize yourself with their content and organization, educate yourself on how they ended up in your child’s book bag, and find out how they will influence curricular content throughout the year.

Textbooks determine the content for 75–90 percent of classroom instruction across the United States. Two models for textbook adoption are practiced nationwide: state-level selection, which results in fairly consistent and complementary materials, and local-level selection, which allows for a much broader selection of materials for classroom instruction. In 2001, 23 states used state-level committees to create approved lists of instructional materials, including textbooks, to be passed on to local-level committees for final selection; 27 states left the decision entirely in the hands of local-level committees.

California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, the largest states with statewide adoption policies, account for roughly one-fourth of the nation’s schoolchildren. Textbook publishers tend to tailor their products to the curriculum standards of these states, in effect setting standards for other states that adopt their texts. Furthermore, powerful political and religious special interest groups lobby selection committees for control of textbook content.

Proponents argue that statewide adoption plans reduce costs, regularize textbook selection cycles, and enable more consistent teaching and learning. However, local-level advocates argue that the only significant difference is in costs. The most important factor in adopting textbooks is the need to ensure that students receive the most relevant, thorough, and effective educational materials available.

Significant weaknesses in the textbook selection process nationwide include inadequate criteria for analysis and evaluation, minimal training among committee members charged with evaluating materials, and insufficient time for the evaluation and selection process.

Evaluation instruments should incorporate both content and pedagogical criteria, and committees should include both subject matter experts and educational instruction experts. Factors to consider, aside from the breadth and depth of the content itself, include how concepts are sequenced and linked, how the context for information is presented, and how the text allows for review. Training in using evaluation instruments and analyzing texts should be provided well ahead of time to committee members, who too often must rely on a preestablished checklist approach that circumvents the thorough analytic examination necessary for choosing the highest-quality materials. The adoption process should follow a one-year timeline and incorporate release time for teachers on the committee.

Other elements that affect textbook selection are budgets, teacher preferences, and student population needs. In addition, most systems acquire several levels of difficulty in each topic to accommodate a broad range of student abilities. To learn more about how your child’s textbooks are chosen, visit the Web site of your state department of public instruction or that of your local school district. Check with your system’s curriculum specialists to inquire about criteria involved in textbook selection.

So what about those textbooks your child just brought home? Though they often drive curricula, and vice versa, textbooks are only one component of your child’s battery of educational materials. The quality of textbooks and the uses made of them are certainly critical factors in your child’s education. But an innovative teacher will supplement textbooks with a wealth of resources and thus provide a variety of learning experiences for students; an innovative parent can do the same. Library books, specialized encyclopedias and other reference books, magazines and journals, credible Internet sites, educational games and software, museums, and local experts can enhance the content of a textbook and allow for broader, deeper, more meaningful learning experiences than any text alone can provide.
—Sarah Boone

Sarah Boone holds a master’s degree in teaching and is certified in gifted education. She teaches at Meredith College.