Textbook analysis coming soon

The following information is presented here as an information service to our members only. We neither endorse nor oppose the views of this particular group, but seek merely to inform social studies teachers of the current controversy concerning many of our most popular texts. Act for America is the not-for-profit organization managed by Brigitte Gabriel. (the Editors) Textbook Analysis Project Coming Soon! click here to download article for better viewing. We have received a lot of emails asking when our textbook analysis project will be completed. If you’re not aware of this, 18 months ago we launched an in-depth analysis of thirty-eight 6th through 12th grade textbooks, to see how they treated the subject of Islam. The research has been completed, and what we have found will shock you. The historical falsehoods, bias and other misrepresentations of Islam in these textbooks are egregious and persistent. We are currently completing the writing and final edits to the report, which will document over 245 errors in these various textbooks. Here’s a small sample of what we found. “In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills. He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.” McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin, World History - Patterns of Interaction, 2007, p.265. This is patently false. The Jews of Medina rejected Muhammad as a prophet, and as a result he drove two of the Jewish tribes out of Medina and exterminated the third one. “Shari’a law requires Muslim leaders to extend religious tolerance to Christians and Jews.” McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin, World History - Patterns of Interaction, 2007, p.268 This is so preposterous, so lacking historical justification or support within sharia law, one wonders how it ever got into a textbook. “The Eastward Expansion of Islam: In the early eighth century, Islam became popular in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. …” Glencoe/McGraw Hill, New York World History, 2008, pp.285-286 “Became popular” sounds more like a description of a new dance than what happened to the Hindus of India. Tens of millions of Hindus were slaughtered during the many jihad campaigns launched against it. Rather than release this report as we enter the holiday season, we have decided to hold off until early next year. At that time we will mail an Executive Summary to every state and local school board member in America—over 70,000 people. We will then post the Executive Summary and the full report online for downloading, and we will send out national emails with talking points on how to approach your local school board about the findings in this report. Stay tuned!

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ACT! for America Education
P.O. Box 12765
Pensacola, FL 32591
member@americancongressfortruth.org
http://www.actforamericaeducation.com/

FCSS Ex Dir Trimble on Textbook Changes!

April 8, 2009

Dear Senator Wise,

As a long time Social Studies Teacher and Supervisor and a former participant or chair of three state social studies adoption committees, I would like to express my concern regarding current plans to extend the adoption cycle from 6 to 8 years. My concerns focus on four issues:
(1) Content of the material - new discoveries and developments, changes in curricular focus and events make science and social studies materials very time sensitive. Although technology has been of assistance in providing current information, its accessibility, format, and readability for students make it less valuable than current information in a basic textbook.
(2) Pedagogy - ways of organizing and presenting material in texts are constantly evolving. Students today are exposed to a greater range of media than students in the past and need the most interesting and stimulating instructional materials possible. Format alone changes drastically in an 8 year period.
(3) Physical practicality - 8 years us a long time for a book to last, with 8 to 16 users, depending on its use in an 18 or 36 week course. As textbook conditions deteriorate, so does the care students utilize, further impacting durability. From a fiscal standpoint, districts will often have to spend money at the six year point to replace unusable books, which will then have a shelf life of only 2 years before needing to be replaced in the new cycle.
(4) Fiscal practicality - the possibility of maintaining the same price for an 8 year period is unlikely. Although on rare occasions, costs go down, more commonly they increase, resulting in the state paying more money for a product that is as much as 8 years behind the current best methodology in textbook production.

Your assistance in opposing the effort to change the adoption cycle would be appreciated. A short term budgetary downturn should not translate into an 8 year impact on Florida's students. In spite of efforts to change classroom environment and improve
tools available to teachers, the textbook still remains the basic tool of teachers.

Theron L. Trimble,
Executive Director, Florida Council for the Social Studies
Chair, Fund for the Advancement of Social Studies Education, National Council for the Social Studies