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The Politics of Textbook Adoption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Virginia Currey*
Affiliation:
Southern Methodist University

Extract

An implicit understanding, seldom bluntly articulated, has come apart. The federated sovereign states, nearly four centuries in building since the first European colonizations, are grappling with a dilemma not only in institutional processes and structures but also about consensus on dominant ideology.

Nothing illustrates the strange unraveling of federalism's implicit and pragmatically informal truce better than the present Great Textbook Controversy. In essence, it is a new states' rights fuss about super states versus small states versus a national insistence on uniform high standards in public education.

Public educational institutions have long represented the American Dream to our nation of newcomers and ever-mobile population. The First Amendment's No Establishment “Wall” meant that parents of diverse value systems could build a new community consensus around common needs at the school. By mid-twentieth century the U.S. high school had become the most important rite of passage into full U.S. citizenship and adulthood. No wonder, then, that each “blow” to the most cherished and legitimizing institution of individual communities has aroused such emotion. The local high school was the way into the great continental economy and culture.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1988

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References

Notes

1. Farr, Roger, Tulley, Michael A., and Rayford, Lawrence. 1987. Selecting Basal Readers: A Comparison of School Districts in Adoption and Nonadoption States. Journal of Research and Development in Education 20(4): 5672.Google Scholar

2. State Board of Education Meeting, Minutes, July, 1983, and personal papers, Virginia Currey, Arlington, TX.

3. Texas Administrative Code, Title 19, Chapter 81, Section 81.71, sub-section (a)(5), (A), (B), (C).

4. Tulley, Michael A. and Farr, Roger. 1985. The Purpose of State Level Textbook Adoption: What Does the Legislation Reveal? Journal of Research and Development in Education 18(2).Google Scholar