A Textbook Editor’s Plea for Citizen Engagement

Summary

A seasoned K-12 textbook copy editor calls for citizen engagement in the evaluation of educational materials, citing pervasive errors in textbooks despite rigorous production processes and the negative impact of standardized testing on young students.

Abstract

The author, a veteran textbook editor, laments the overlooked issue of factual and grammatical inaccuracies in K-12 educational materials, particularly from prominent publishers. Despite the involvement of multiple experts in the content creation process, errors persist, leading to low-quality textbooks. This is especially concerning in early education where the foundations of learning are established. The author highlights the excessive focus on standardized testing, which is often detrimental to student confidence and learning, questioning the effectiveness of these tests and the quality of educational materials used to prepare for them. The call to action is for greater vigilance and engagement from educators, parents, and school districts in evaluating the materials they adopt to ensure they support children's learning effectively and foster a love for education.

Opinions

The author believes that the quality of K-12 textbooks, particularly from large publishers, is generally poor and riddled with errors despite multiple reviews.
There is a strong skepticism about the value and accuracy of standardized testing, with research suggesting it does not effectively measure learning and can harm students' self-esteem and future learning.
The author suggests that the emphasis on testing overshadows the importance of creating educational materials that truly facilitate learning and critical thinking.
A select few publishers are recognized for producing high-quality, engaging, and psychologically informed educational content that effectively supports learning.
The author emphasizes that their meticulous editing work is futile if the end-users—teachers, students, and parents—do not critically assess the educational materials for accuracy and effectiveness.
There is an appeal for increased community engagement in the scrutiny of educational materials to ensure that they are conducive to genuine learning rather than merely teaching to the test.

K-12 textbooks aren’t subject to critical race theory, but they are full of mistakes

When I tell people I’m a freelance editor, they get interested. When I specify that I’m a freelance copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers, their eyes glaze over.

And it’s true, copy editing textbooks is a tedious job. There isn’t a lot of variety. (I wish the moral panic about critical race theory in K-12 curricula had any validity to it; at least then I’d have something else to think about while I’m checking for style alignment and missing commas. But alas, there is no such thing.)

But working in K-12 education at this granular level for the last 20+ years — for every large textbook publisher and many small ones — has given me invaluable insight into the structures and directions of education from kindergarten phonics to high school science.

Most people don’t know much about the publishing process of books themselves, nor is there any real need to, and even fewer probably know what goes into publishing textbooks. There are program developers and researchers, subject matter experts (SMEs) and project editors, writers and more editors, and then freelancers like me.

I come in at the end of the line, close to when the textbook is moving into production. At this point, the facts of the textbook, as well as the style and content, should have been pretty heavily combed over, evaluated and reevaluated, and then fact-checked by people who supposedly know what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, with some few exceptions, I haven’t found this to be the case. Particularly with the largest, best-known publishers, the manuscripts arrive in my inbox riddled with errors.

I can’t tell you how depressing this is, especially at younger grades. I stopped working on math textbooks entirely because their quality was so dismal and there was little I could do to mitigate the problems. One of the last math texts I ever worked on included tests for kindergarteners that had many misspelled words and wrong answers.

Think about that for a moment. The U.S. public school system has gone whole hog into standardized testing starting at very young ages. This means that in most states kids as young as eight or nine have to take extensive and exhausting standardized tests to determine how well they are learning. There is an enormous amount of research both on how poorly those tests tell us anything about learning, and on how detrimental they are for kids’ self-confidence and openness to future learning.

(The most comprehensive article, Peter Henry’s 2005 “The Case Against Standardized Testing,” is unfortunately no longer accessible online, but there are others. Take this article that unravels the mistaken assumption that standardized testing equates to high standards of education. Or this one about how high-stakes testing encourages not improved education but gaming the system. Or this one about how the U.S.’s dependence on test scores as a measure of learning erodes students’ creative thinking and problem solving. Or this one on a study about how No Child Left Behind’s double-down on testing has led to anxiety and stagnated critical thinking in college students.)

But in the context of my job I’m concerned with one thing: We expect children, even five- and six-year-olds, to do perfectly on tests when the people developing, writing, and editing those tests can’t get them perfect even after they’ve been read and reviewed by around six supposed grown-up experts. That’s just unconscionable.

There are some clients I have who develop excellent educational materials. They approach reading with an understanding of phonics, morphemes, and child psychology, relating language, vocabulary, and spelling to kids’ real-world experiences in ways that give lessons meaning and make them stick.

I’ve got enough years under my belt to be picky about the clients I work for, and can spend my time reading manuscripts for those companies that prioritize children as well as excellence.

Students don’t get that choice. It’s up to engaged teachers, parents, and wider school districts to spend more time reviewing the materials they pay for, including (perhaps especially) online programs that might be doing more harm than good.

So maybe this is less about my job than about a certain level of citizen engagement. I do my best. I read manuscripts, correct grammar, and — what I consider the most important part of my job — look at lessons from a student’s perspective, whether they’re in kindergarten or preparing for college, and think about how they receive and process the information in the way it’s presented. But what I do can’t make much of a difference if the people on the receiving end of these products — teachers, students, and parents — don’t look at them with a similarly critical eye. You don’t have to care about missing commas, but anyone can see whether or not lesson explanations and test questions actually make sense.

When your school district buys a new math or reading curriculum and invests in products for their students, pay attention. Are these materials written and presented with a true understanding of how children learn? Are they riddled with mistakes? Are they teaching to the test, or with students’ long-term learning in mind?

Maybe your students aren’t bad at those math problems or failing the tests because they’re “not math people.” Maybe the problems are written so poorly that they don’t understand what’s being asked of them.

Community members don’t need to get riled up in a moral panic to pay attention to their schools. All they need is a little care, and an understanding that kids love to learn. They crave it. And they deserve the most thoughtful and well-designed materials possible to help make their learning happen.