Monday, May 21, 2001

The Standard: Don't Know Much About a Science Book Why do our eighth-graders do so poorly in
math and science compared with students
around the world? Why is it that 80 percent
of U.S. high-school graduates never go on
to take a college physics course? Why do so
many American graduate schools attract
more foreign students than U.S. citizens to
their science and engineering programs?

One reason is that the science textbooks found in most American classrooms are, in a word, atrocious. They are riddled with errors, sloppy thinking and glitzy illustrations that illustrate little in the way of actual science. We shouldn't be
surprised that American children are turning away from science when their introduction to it is at best incoherent.

Final Report
Without a clear-cut author or pair of authors to “define” the text or give it direction, these texts fail miserably. Committees produce mush and it is very difficult to find anyone with the authority to make corrections. Instead of being able to deal directly with authors we dealt with “editors” and got answers to our concerns about inaccuracies such as “Well we have to make the science simple,” “We don’t think that your qualifications are good enough,” and “Our experts disagree with you.”

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