Texas Public Policy Foundation
July 2002
The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is a conservative statewide think tank that, among other things, keeps watch over textbooks being considered for adoption by the Texas public schools. As the second largest of the states that must okay textbooks before they are used in the schools, Texas has considerable influence over the national textbook market-and its State Board of Education, through this mechanism, has considerable influence over what's taught in the state's public schools. Because it was time for the state's periodic review of secondary-schools social-studies textbooks, TPPF empanelled its own reviewers from K-12 and higher education to examine some 26 books. The reviewers were asked to appraise both their "academic content" and "how well the textbooks meet the state requirements for textbook content." In general, the reviewers found very weak history content in these books-and numerous factual errors (96 pages worth!), as well as some evidence of bias and political correctness. In each of 7 categories, however, they found some textbooks to be more satisfactory than others-and TPPF presented that information to the State Board in July. If you're reviewing secondary school social studies textbooks, you may pick up pointers here, although non-Texas readers may be more interested in TPPF's general critique of the historical weakness of most of the volumes they reviewed. You can find the entire review on the web at www.tppf.org.
