Separation of Fact and Fiction

Looks like high school student Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J, has a promising future with the American Civil Liberties Union.

He grabbed headlines last year for recording his history teacher promoting Christian religious beliefs and telling students that there was no scientific evidence for evolution or the Big Bang theory.

This year he called out a textbook for spreading misinformation. The book, American Government, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005 and used in AP classes across the country, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."

Turns out the publishers decided to rethink that statement. The latest edition says "science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is."

In a section about prayer in school, the 2005 text states that the Supreme Court ruled as "unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary or limited to reading a passage of the Bible."

The fact is, prayer at school can’t be state sponsored or led by a teacher, but students can pray privately or in groups as long as they aren’t disruptive and don’t interfere with the rights of others.

"I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong," LaClair told the Associated Press.

Unfortunately, not every student has the same knowledge, and many will accept as fact most if not all of what their textbooks tell them.

How does this stuff get into our schools’ text books? Who gets to write and edit them and who decides which ones to use? Next fall, NEA Today will take an insider look at the text book process, but James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, says that textbook editors try to focus on what has been agreed upon as the “right answer” instead of letting students consider all possibilities.

In American Government’s case, the “right answer” came from the right, but textbooks are also criticized for coming from the left. In an nea.org discussion, educators talk about textbooks, whether or not they use them, and what they think of them in general. Join the debate.