Check It Out

Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms 
by Beverlee Jobrack
Rowman and Littlefield, 2012
Stacks LB 3047 J64 2012
Available for check out for four weeks with your SWC photo ID card

You always knew your textbook was lousy, right? The author claims that despite innumerable educational reforms student achievement has only slightly improved because “…the curriculum, including the textbooks, does not change. Textbooks sell based on design and superficial features, not because they are based on the latest research on how children learn and how well they promote student achievement.” --Publisher

Beverlee Jobrack’s 50 years in education and publishing (which include teaching and developing curriculum for an educational publisher) have given her inside knowledge as to how educational materials are developed, written, sold, adopted, and used. In this book she provides fascinating and damning analyses of these processes and gives her theories on how the instructional materials selection process needs to change in order for reforms to work.

She describes how various factors work against the selection and use of the best materials and how profits rule the development of curricular materials and their publication rather than the quality of the material.

You’ll learn disturbing facts such as:

• “Three companies publish 75 percent of the K-12 educational materials.” 
• “ Those three companies are producing similar programs with the same instructional strategies, none of which require teachers to change their practices significantly.” 
• “Publishers produce textbooks for California and Texas. All of the other markets have to make do with books only superficially adjusted for their states.” --Publisher