NEWSSTUDENT TEXTBOOKS

[This guest post comes from Christine George, who has worked as a teacher in Virginina and Arizona. She has six children. --Eds]

I am a mom.  If you ask me who I am or what I do, that will always be my first answer, because “Mom” is my most important job.  I am also a Cub Scout volunteer and a former teacher and school administrator. But first and foremost, I am a mom of six wonderful boys ages one to eighteen.  Part of my job as their mother is to ensure their safety, security, health, and happiness.  So when I learn that a company that we, as parents and educators, have trusted for decades is willingly selling their impressionable little minds to the highest bidder, I get angry.  And so should you.

Scholastic is the world’s largest distributor and publisher of children’s books and an industry leader in educational technology and children’s media. Their corporate philosophy starts with “Kids love us, parents trust us, teachers depend on us...”  And they’re right, with good reason. Scholastic does a great deal to promote literacy and education worldwide.  They are the leading operator of school-based book fairs and clubs in the United States.  They provide books, magazines, reference materials, educational technology and curriculum materials to schools and libraries across the country.  Having been a teacher, I really do appreciate all they do to provide reading materials to students and schools alike.  As a result of the good work they do, they enjoy a unique position of trust in our schools.  But they are abusing that trust to surreptitiously influence the minds of our children.

In addition to hefty tuition hikes at public universities and community colleges, one more factor persists in limiting student access to equitable education: the staggering cost of textbooks. The average college student spends $900 a year on required texts -- often nearly a third of community college tuition -- and that number is not getting any smaller. (Prices of textbooks have been rising at four times the rate of inflation for the past twenty years, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups.)

Good news is, students are fighting back.

In Arizona, for instance, activists are still wrapping up events and initiatives from the Affordable Textbooks Day of Action, where they asked faculty to consider open-source textbooks and other less-costly options. More than 90 faculty members at Northern Arizona University have already signed a pledge to do so, Robyn Nebrich, interim executive director of the Arizona Students’ Association, told Change.org. Across the nation, 2,500 faculty members have done so, she said.

Children today spend as much time consuming media as they do sleeping, so it's probably not surprising that children find it easier to identify the image of Ronald McDonald than Jesus.

Research has shown that children can identify child-oriented brands by the age of three, but that doesn't mean they're equipped with the ability to analyze advertisements.

Corporate advertisers are finding new and intrusive methods to influence children to buy their products, which, like McDonald's food, is often damaging to their health and mental well-being. Our cash-strapped public schools have become an increasingly tempting target for advertisers, especially the peddlers of unhealthy sugary foods.

Most recently, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood disclosed a disturbing partnership between Scholastic Inc., a global book publisher known for education materials, and SunnyD, the purveyor of the sugary orange-like drink that's loaded with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  The SunnyD Book Spree encourages teachers and parents to have their students collect SunnyD labels  in order to exchange them for up to 20 free books.  In the Scholastic web site's tips for parents, it encourages them to organize SunnyD parties to spur label collections, start SunnyD Book Spree groups on Facebook and post SunnyD fliers at grocery stores and local libraries.

Labeling it "pornography" that had no place in schools,  Missouri State University professor Wesley Scroggins called last month for a ban of Speak, an award-winning novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that deals with sexual assault.

Apparently, he thinks there's something sexy about rape. Far from pornography, Speak teaches teens about the importance of speaking up against sexual assault. (Full disclosure: the book is one of my favorites.)

Parents, educators, authors and readers slammed Scroggins' comments. Anderson's publisher, Penguin Young Readers Group, even ran a full-page ad in the New York Times defending Speak and challenging readers to "Read the book. Decide for yourself. Speak Loudly."

But more than a month later, the school district in Republic has yet to make a public statement about the future of Speak on its bookshelves. Anderson herself contacted the school district but hasn't heard back about whether they'll succumb to fear-based demands or stand up for teens who need quality education about rape prevention.

You can sign a Change.org petition calling on the Republic School District to take a stand against censorship. Meanwhile, there's something encouraging that has come out of the publicity surrounding censorship of Speak.

Most historians will tell you that the story of African Americans fighting for the South during the Civil War is just a myth, told by some groups who want to gloss over America's dark history of race relations and downplay slavery's role in the Civil War.

But in Virginia, fourth-graders are learning that thousands of African Americans pulled on Confederate uniforms and fought on the side of the South in a new textbook called Our Virginia: Past and Present, the Washington Post reports.

Where'd the textbook writer get that information? The Internet. Upon investigation, the Post found that her "proof" came from none other than the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose website refers to the Civil War as the "Second American Revolution" and argues that "the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight." The preservation of liberty, freedom, and, oh yeah, slavery. A group dedicated to the "defense of a Confederate soldier's good name" might not be the the best source of information for a history textbook.

Virginia education officials are already telling teachers not to teach the passage, which also makes up the existence of two all-black battalions under famed Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. (While there may have been a handful of African American soldiers on the Confederate side, there's no solid proof.) Kudos to them for owning up to the mistake, but there's a bigger issue at play here. 

Anyone who's suffered through a winter in Chicago knows this old joke: "Chicago has only two seasons: winter and construction." It's only October, but nighttime temperatures in the Windy City are already down to the 40's.

Which is why it's unbelievable that last week, the Chicago Public School system  turned off the heat on parents camping out to demand a school library for their children. Since September 15, a group of parents in Pilsen, a largely Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago's Lower West Side, have been running a sit-in at the Whittier School field house. 

The small, one-story field house is a long-time community center and after-school hangout for the children of Whittier Dual Language Elementary School. Chicago Public Schools has called the building unsafe and has earmarked $356,000 to demolish it, making room for "green space."

Whittier doesn't need an athletic field, parents say. It needs a library. The stand-off between the school system and parents escalated last month when a group of largely Hispanic, working moms organized an around-the-clock sit-in to prevent the building from being demolished. Arguing that neighbors will donate labor and time to make the necessary repairs, they've held a protest at the field house they have nicknamed "La Casita" since September 10. They are blaming Chicago's city government for mismanaging more than $1 million in funds that could have been used to repair the building, they say. And they will not rest until their children have a library.

Attention, medieval Christian Crusaders: the Texas Board of Education has your back.

The famously backwards-thinking education board is engaged in its own battle this week. Members are debating a resolution that seeks to keep "pro-Islamic" and "anti-Christian" language out of Texas Social Studies textbooks.
Accompanying the resolution is a line-by-line list of examples of "distortions" that board chairwoman Gail Lowe told the New York Times show "some bias against Christianity."

Included in the list is a 1999 world history textbook that "charged medieval Christianity with sexism." There's nothing like defending the behavior of medieval Christians when it comes to preparing students to operate in today's global society.

Another textbook from the same year is cited for devoting 176 lines of text to Islamic beliefs but merely 139 lines to Christian beliefs. There is no mention of the number of lines devoted to Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

There's no question that some of the references in the books do seem to be ne