WASHINGTON, April 25 (UPI) -- Conservative and liberal special interest groups have hijacked the process of designing textbooks and standardized tests in the United States, in the process effectively lowering the quality of much of the education materials produced for American schoolchildren, according to education policy experts.
In a speech at the New America Foundation on Thursday, Diane Ravitch, a senior fellow in education policy at the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution and a research professor of education at New York University, said the problem can be traced to the state and federal government committees charged with handling special interest concerns about what is said in public school textbooks and standardized tests.
"I stumbled across what I think is a major crisis in education," said Ravitch. "It involves censorship, and special interests, and big business, and state policies that allow censorship and the political actions of pressure groups that end up dumbing down texts.
In her new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," Ravitch explores the evolution of the system of government sensitivity committees, which originally were established to help eliminate stereotypes and biases in school materials regarding gender, race and occupations. She concludes that the publishers of textbooks and standardized tests now self-censor books and other materials in an effort to avoid the high costs of making last-minute changes to please state education officials and special interests.
She said that states -- such as California and Texas -- that purchase education materials en masse for their public schools rely on anti-bias and sensitivity guidelines to oversee their decisions, including lists of taboo words, subjects and concepts. Ravitch said that many companies that produce these textbooks and standardized tests have adopted similar guidelines in an effort to avoid producing material that state education authorities will not buy.
"The one way to get a textbook killed is to become controversial," she said.
Charlene F. Gaynor, executive director of the Association of Education Publishers, told United Press International that although the problem is most evident in the textbook and standardized test sections of the industry, self-censorship to avoid confronting issues sensitive to special interests is rampant throughout the educational publishing field.
"It is absolutely a problem," said Gaynor, whose trade group represents the interests of both large and small publishers of supplemental educational materials. "It has become part of the business. You need to be aware of them (pressure groups and their standards) if you want to be able to sell the product."
Ravitch, who was assistant secretary for educational research and improvement in the administration of George H.W. Bush, said that her experience as a member of the U.S. National Assessment Governing Board's reading committee led her to investigate the issue. The board oversees the design and administration of the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress test, or NAEP, which tests academic achievement in various subjects for student in grades four, eight and 12.
Ravitch said she has seen passages selected for inclusion in the NAEP tests ultimately rejected by the board's bias and sensitivity committee for troubling reasons. For example, a reading passage about George Washington Carver was rejected because a tale about the inventor of peanut butter was deemed insensitive to children allergic to peanuts. Another scientific passage concerning owls was rejected because birds are taboo to some Native American tribes. A National Assessment Governing Board official did not return calls for comment on this story.
Andrew J. Rotherham, director of the 21st Century Schools Project at the liberal-centrist Progressive Policy Institute -- which is affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council -- said that intellectual McCarthyism remains alive and well in the United States education system. He added that people have long vied over public school curricula and that censorship in the American educational system should come as no shock.
"This is the story of public schools, in that there has long been a vying for dominance of the curriculum in terms of content. This is one of the definitive stories of education history," said Rotherham. "Public schools are one of the most direct manifestations of how we instill values, so this is always controversial."
Ravitch noted that the wants of the conservative and liberal pressure groups fall into specific categories. Conservatives tend to embrace an idealized version of the past and object to depictions of disobedience, family conflict, sexuality, evolution and the supernatural in education materials.
Liberals, on the other hand, encourage stringent controls on the use of language and images that could be deemed sexist, racist or otherwise offensive as a means to counteract past problems in society. She added the texts that result when these ideas are taken into account are sanitized, often historically inaccurate, and typically boring.
Ravitch's book includes a large glossary of banned words, usages, stereotypes, and topics culled from the lists of various states and major book and test publishers. Taboo items include references to blizzards (because they are regionally insensitive) and dinosaurs (because they reinforce the theory of evolution). Depictions of men as being physically stronger than women or African Americans living in urban ghettos are also deemed unacceptable.
The list of banned words she found runs to over 500 and include terms like "American policy" or "American economy" (because they are too ethnocentric), and "founding fathers" and "Cassandra" (because they are deemed by some as sexist).
"We end up with this very odd situation ... with this cotton-candy world (view) where there is no differences (between people)," she said. "Everyone has to be (portrayed) as being part of the American mainstream and all other distinguishing facts are to be eliminated. It is like everyone has to live in the suburbs and be very happy all the time and the only difference among them is a slight color hue."
Education experts say these restrictions are enforced not only for the original text of the educational materials but are also often applied to whatever literature or historical writings the publishers adopt from existing sources. Stories containing such ideas or words are even altered to avoid their usage. Ravitch said all these restrictions typically result in literary textbooks for school children that do not present good writing, and history textbooks that are riddled with sanitized half-truths about historical events and key figures.
A spokesman for the American Association of Publishers said that textbook publishers do have to deal with the issues raised by pressure groups, but that they remain strongly opposed to censorship. She added that the bottom line is that publishers must conform to guidelines created by the states.
Frederick M. Hess, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed with Ravitch that the effort to balance sensitivities has clearly gone over the edge of reasonableness. Nevertheless, he said it is understandable that companies would self-censor their materials given the financial stakes involved in publishing.
"They are not controlling language for its own sake," he said. "What they are doing is trying to do is avoid pushing buttons."
Ravitch said that the best way to end this problem would be to end the state purchasing of textbooks and other materials and return control to the local level or even to teachers. This is unlikely to happen given the realities of running public school systems, but she said even an opening-up of the process to greater public scrutiny would go a long way toward addressing the problem.
However, Hess and Rotherham both said that even ending the mass purchase of textbooks by states would not curb propensities so entrenched in American society.
"We take this (political correctness) for granted in daily life," said Hess. "This is part of the ongoing balancing act we have in American life to protect freedom of expression without going too far. What Ravitch shows makes me uncomfortable, but this is part of our national fabric."
