THE NEW YORK TIMES 

June 29, 2002
Textbook Publishers Learn to Avoid Messing With Texas
By ALEXANDER STILLE

"OUT of Many," the work of four respected historians,
is one of the biggest sellers among American history
college textbooks in the United States, but it is not
likely to be available to Texas high school students
taking advanced placement history. Conservative groups
in Texas objected to two paragraphs in the nearly
1,000-page text that explained that prostitution was
rampant in cattle towns during the late 19th
century, before the West was fully settled.

"It makes it sound that every woman west of the
Mississippi was a prostitute," said Grace Shore, the
Republican chairwoman of the Texas State Board of
Education. "The book says that there were 50,000
prostitutes west of the Mississippi. I doubt it, but
even if there were, is that something that should be
emphasized? Is that an important historical fact?" 

The publisher, Pearson Prentice Hall, has quietly
withdrawn the book from consideration by the board.
Wendy Spiegel, a vice president for communications at
the company, said it had another textbook that better
fit the state's curriculum. 

Textbook battles are legendary in Texas, where
conservative critics frequently complain of liberal
bias, and liberals counter with charges of censorship.
The latest round, on July 17, when the board begins
public hearings on which history and social studies
books to adopt, promises to be particularly fierce.
Nine conservative organizations have formed a
coalition, recruiting 250 volunteers to vet more than
150 books.

The outcome has far more than regional interest. After
California, Texas is the biggest buyer of textbooks in
the United States, accounting for nearly 10 percent of
the national market. In fact, conservative activists
in Texas say they have already received calls from
leading publishers anxious to discuss the forthcoming
history and social studies adoptions. Many publishers
write their books with the Texas and California
markets in mind, but complain of political pressure. 

"The bottom line is that Texas and California are the
biggest buyers of textbooks in the country, and what
we adopt in Texas is what the rest of the country
gets," said Carol Jones, the field director of the
Texas chapter of Citizens for a Sound Economy, part of
the coalition monitoring books for errors, examples of
political bias, omissions or information that it deems
offensive and that it says gives the texts a
liberal slant.

Peggy Venable, director of the Texas chapter, said
executives at Pearson Prentice Hall withdrew "Out of
Many," because they "wisely didn't want to jeopardize
their larger sales in the state by having that book as
its poster child." 

This year, Pearson Prentice Hall is offering 27 other
books for adoption in Texas, ranging from texts for
first grade social studies to ones for Advanced
Placement world history. The potential prize is great:
Texas has allocated $700 million over the next two
years for textbooks and related materials in history
and social studies — a sizable chunk of the nation's
$4.5 billion textbook market.

Most states, including New York, choose textbooks on a
school-by-school or district-by-district basis, but
Texas and California buy them through a formal
statewide process. The Texas board votes in November,
giving the state's schools lists of approved textbooks
to choose from. 

In 1995, the Texas legislature sought to eliminate
politically charged conflicts by passing a law that
limited the grounds for a book's rejection to physical
defects or "factual inaccuracy." In recent years,
though, conservative groups have become adept at
blocking books by arguing that political bias and the
omission of certain facts constitute "factual
inaccuracy." Moreover, the provision in the Texas
Education Code that textbooks should promote
democracy, patriotism and the free- enterprise system
has been used to attack certain books.

Thus the Texas case raises a series of new questions
about how to write history. What constitutes an
"error" in a history or science textbook?
What facts are central and which can be omitted?
Should history books inculcate patriotism and
appreciation of free enterprise? And most
significantly, who should decide those questions?

The conservative groups are feeling confident after
last year's adoption process for environmental science
texts, in which they succeeded in persuading the Board
of Education to reject two texts.

Among other things, those books were criticized as
"anti-technology," "anti-Christian" and
"anti-American," and for saying there was scientific
consensus that global warming was changing the earth's
climate.

An environmental science book that ultimately won
approval, "Global Science: Energy, Resources,
Environment" published by Kendall/Hunt, was
partly financed by the Mineral Information Institute,
a consortium of mining companies. Duggan Flanakin, who
wrote influential reports on the textbooks for the
Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative
organization, used to work for the United States
Bureau of Mines. And Ms. Shore, the Board of Education
chairwoman, is a co-owner of TEC Well Service Inc., a
Longview, Tex., company that repairs and deepens oil
wells as well as produces gas and oil.

"The oil and gas industry should be consulted," she
told The Austin American-Statesman, a daily newspaper,
at the time of last year's board vote. "We always get
a raw deal." 

One Dallas publisher, J. M. LeBel Enterprises, after
having Jane L. Person's "Environmental Science: How
the World Works and Your Place in It" rejected on Nov.
8, spent most of the next night working with state
education officials to incorporate a series of changes
in this high school textbook suggested by one of the
foundation's critiques. These changes resulted in the
book's approval.

Ms. Venable and other conservative critics insist that
they do not want to edit or rewrite textbooks, only to
assure that they are stripped of ideology and offer a
straightforward, objective statement of facts. 

But René LeBel, the publishing company's president,
deplored the process, even though he maintained that
he did not alter the book's fundamental content. "It
was a book burning," he said. "It was 100
percent political." 

At the suggestion of the foundation, the LeBel company
rewrote the sentence "Destruction of the tropical rain
forest could affect weather over the entire planet" so
that it now reads, "Tropical rain forest ecosystems
impact weather over the entire planet." It also added
these sentences: "In the past, the earth has been much
warmer than it is now, and fossils of sea creatures
show us that the sea level was much higher than it is
today. So does it really matter if the world gets
warmer?"

The foundation also succeeded in having this sentence
deleted: "Most experts on global warming feel that
immediate action should be taken to curb global
warming." 

"We are now telling them what to write and what not to
write," Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democratic member of
the Board of Education, said of authors. (The board
has 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats.) 
But others say this is simply democracy at work. "We
citizens are truly the clients," Ms. Venable said. "It
is our children's education and future at stake, and
our tax dollars are paying for the books. If people
in Texas are more conservative than people in
Massachusetts or New York, so be it." 

Singled out for particular censure at last year's
hearings and ultimately rejected by the Board of
Education was "Environmental Science: Creating a
Sustainable Future," by Daniel D. Chiras, published
by Jones & Bartlett, a small company in Sudbury, Mass.
The book is in its sixth edition and has been used
widely in colleges for the past 20 years.

Professor Chiras, who teaches at the University of
Denver and the University of Colorado, does not
disguise his environmental activism. "Things can't go
on as they have been," he writes in the opening
chapter. "We must change our ways." He criticizes the
"throwaway mentality" and "obsession with growth" in
American life, disapproves of the environmental
policies of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush
Sr. and praises those of Bill Clinton. 

The day before the Board of Education voted, the Texas
Public Policy Foundation distributed a 24-page
critique that listed all of what it called the Chiras
book's errors. At one point, for example, the critique
attacks Professor Chiras for repeating the "oft-used
falsehood that over 100 million Americans are
breathing unhealthy air." It points out that
since pollution levels in most American cities exceed
allowable standards only on certain days of the year,
"on most days, the air in every city in the U.S. is
healthy." But is this inaccuracy or two
different ways of interpreting the same facts? 

"I think it's really dangerous that the Texas Public
Policy Foundation has so much influence that you have
publishers writing to please the conservative right at
the risk of suppressing alternative views and
critically examining the issues," said Dean
DeChambeau, director of development for Jones &
Bartlett. "We lost a quarter of a million dollars'
worth of business. Other publishers, who would lose
millions of dollars of business if they lost an
adoption, are more likely to be influenced by the
groups."

After the battle over environmental science, Ms.
Venable and other activists on the textbook front were
contacted by a number of publishers. Their hope was
that by consulting critics in advance, they might
avoid a battle at the hearings that could lead to
their books' rejection.

"I think there is a very great danger of
self-censorship," said Byron Hollinshead, the
president of American Historical Publications, the New
York company that produced "The History of US," a
middle school textbook distributed by Oxford
University Press. "If a big publisher produces an
edition specifically for Texas and then hears from
these groups that they want a series of changes, they
are going to make them." 

Texas holds adoptions for different academic subjects
each year; it generally replaces textbooks in a given
subject every six years, so that books approved this
time would be in circulation until 2009. 

When Pearson Prentice Hall decided to submit "Out of
Many: A History of the American People," the company
hired a high school teacher to alert it to potential
problems. "They were mostly questions involving
sexuality, homosexuality, AIDS, prostitution, things
like that," said Mari Jo Buhle, a professor of history
at Brown University and one of the book's co-authors.
The teacher suggested, for example, taking out the
paragraphs that dealt with the gay rights movement in
the 1970's and the development of birth control. The
authors agreed to make some concessions by removing
profanity in historical quotations.

But they refused to change anything of substance, like
the subsection on gay rights, the mention of Margaret
Sanger and the development of contraception and the
"Cowgirls and Prostitutes" section. The passages
on prostitution tell about the economic forces that
pushed women into prostitution and the health hazards
they were exposed to. The book's critics felt it had
no place in American history.

"I don't mean that we should sweep things under the
rug," Ms. Venable said. "But the children should see
the hope and the good things about America." 

But it is inevitably tricky to reconcile Texas's
requirement that textbooks promote democracy,
patriotism and free enterprise with the
historian's supposedly disinterested pursuit of truth.
The politics of the day are always going to influence
the presentation of history, said John Mack Faragher,
a history professor at Yale University and the lead
author of "Out of Many."

"There was no women's history until there was a
women's movement, there was no African-American
history before there was a civil rights
movement," he said. "Historical practice is very much
determined by the things that people are concerned
about."

"History is ultimately a moral art, and it is about
values," he continued. "It is not merely about the
collection of facts. It is about the way we put those
facts together and the meaning we give them.
Arguments about facts are arguments about meaning."



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