Thread: Immigration: Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy

Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and CHRISTINE HAUSEROCT. 5, 2015

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The page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves. Credit Coby Burren Advertisement

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HOUSTON — Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves.
He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, along with a text message: “we was real hard workers, wasn’t we.”
Their outrage over the textbook’s handling of the nation’s history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as “indentured servants” but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school’s teachers to use other materials in the class.
“It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.”
Ms. Dean-Burren cataloged her objections to the caption last week in posts on Facebook and Twitter. The posts, along with a video she made while flipping through the book, were widely shared, catching the attention of the #blacklivesmatter movement as the video alone reached nearly two million views.
Texas textbooks — and how they address aspects of history, science, politics and other subjects — have been a source of controversy for years in part because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a social-studies curriculum that put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, including emphasizing Republican political achievements and movements. State-sanctioned textbooks have been criticized for passages suggesting Moses influenced the writing of the Constitution and dismissing the history of the separation of church and state.
“It’s no accident that this happened in Texas,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that has criticized the content of state-approved textbooks. “We have a textbook adoption process that’s so politicized and so flawed that it’s become almost a punch line for comedians.”
Officials with the Texas Education Agency did not respond to requests for comment.
The World Geography textbook was used by Coby, a student at Pearland High School in Pearland, Tex., a city of 100,000 about 20 miles south of downtown Houston. In a section of the book describing America as a nation of immigrants and called “Patterns of Immigration,” the text with a map of the United States reads: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” The authors, on the page next to the map, wrote of “an influx of English and other European peoples, many of whom came as indentured servants to work for little or no pay,” but made no mention of how Africans came to the country.
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After Ms. Dean-Burren’s social-media posts, McGraw-Hill Education said in a statement posted on its Facebook page Friday that it would change the caption in the digital and print versions of the book to describe the arrival of African slaves in the United States as “a forced migration.”
In a memo sent to employees, David Levin, the president and chief executive of McGraw-Hill Education, issued an apology, calling the caption “a mistake” and saying the company was reviewing its internal procedures and increasing its list of textbook reviewers to reflect greater diversity.
“We are deeply sorry that the caption was written this way,” Mr. Levin wrote to employees. “While the book was reviewed by many people inside and outside the company, and was made available for public review, no one raised concerns about the caption. Yet, clearly, something went wrong, and we must and will do better.”
In an interview, Mr. Levin said the textbook, which spans more than 800 pages, does not sugarcoat the issue of slavery and includes more than a dozen references to the capture and enslavement of Africans. He said the caption was written in 2012 and had been posted, along with the rest of the book’s content, on a Texas website as part of the state textbook adoption process for almost a year. No objections to the caption were raised, he said.
There were more than 100,000 copies of the textbook in the hands of Texas school districts. Mr. Levin said the company was in touch with districts and was offering to replace the textbook, provide a sticker with the rewritten caption to cover up the old one or supply a lesson plan free of charge to teachers on cultural sensitivity “to create an opportunity for a richer dialogue.”
A spokeswoman for the Pearland Independent School District said high school social-studies teachers would not use the textbook when teaching that part of the class until the publisher made the updates. The teachers will use “different resources in teaching that content” in the meantime, said the spokeswoman, Kim Hocott.
At Pearland High School, nearly 800 students use the World Geography textbook, the latest edition of which was put into use this school year. In addition to the online versions of the textbook the students used, there were 244 print-edition sets at the school, said Ms. Hocott, who suggested that it was the teachers and not the textbook that guided the instruction in the classroom.
“In Pearland I.S.D., textbooks are used as a resource and do not drive the curriculum,” she said in a statement. “We’re proud that our teachers serve as the primary resource for information on the curriculum in which they teach.”
It was unclear how many other districts planned to respond to the problem with the caption. At one district in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas called the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo I.S.D., a spokeswoman said that students there used the textbook, but that the section with the caption was not part of its curriculum.
Ms. Dean-Burren, a former English teacher at Pearland High who is pursuing her doctoral degree in education at the University of Houston, said her son had told that her he chuckled to himself after he read the caption last Wednesday, but did not bring it to the attention of his teacher.
The teacher had not yet lectured on the chapter, she said. In the video she posted online, she pointed out the sections of the textbook that listed the many academic consultants, teacher reviewers and members of a state advisory board who approved the book.
“These are all people, all professionals, who said ‘yes’ to this book,” she said in the video.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us..._1=253730&_r=0

Unbelievable. Shameful. Trying to erase history by redefining it.