Book-banning used to take place most often at a very local level. Even then it would make headlines if a classic work of literature was banned or removed from a school's curriculum or library. In more recent years, curriculum rules for public schools have been established at the state level, often by elected officials or board members appointed by elected officials. Many of them are reluctant to be associated with book-banning or other broad curriculum changes that might attract the attention of the press and more moderate voters, as what happened with the Kansas State Board of Education in the run-up to the 2006 election.
Instead, many states have instituted a textbook adoption system in which school books must be on a state-controlled and -approved list before any public schools in the state can purchase them. Often, the boards of education of states with larger populations and larger textbook budgets are able to exert financial pressure on textbook publishers to make changes to texts to guarantee approval within those states. While these forced changes don't attract the same kinds of national attention that outright banning does, they amount to de facto book-banning at the line item level, often requiring publishers to rewrite classic works of literature included in anthologies or even rewrite history itself.
To shed some light on this practice, I spoke with Joan DelFattore, a professor of English and of legal studies at the University of Delaware. She is also the author of several books on the subject of book-banning and censorship, including "What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America."
How does the textbook adoption process affect what is taught in schools?
DelFattore: Texas, California and Florida are what they call textbook adoption states. I think about two-thirds of the states are in that category and what it means is that unless the book is on the state-approved list, districts are not allowed to buy it or, in some states, they are simply not allowed to use state funds to buy it which amounts to the same thing. So the publishers have a big stake in having their book on the state-approved list.
Well, Texas, Florida and California tend to be particularly aggressive about this. When text books are written or proposed for use by the schools, the publishers give out advanced copies so the state can say, "We'll put it on our approved list if you change this or that." For a literature anthology, they would insist that they take out lines from a play or lines from a novel as a condition of approving that book for use. It's not book banning technically.
It seems to me that a state like California and a state like Texas might have very different ideas about what is appropriate for a textbook that tend to offset each other.
DelFattore: To give a couple of examples: Texas would come in with "It's not patriotic enough," or "It's disrespectful of authority," or "It promotes evolution," or "It promotes premarital sex," disrespect for parents or that sort of thing. California tended to emphasize things like it's racist, it's sexist, or safety was a big thing where they'd say they didn't want anything in the stories that would have the children doing risky things. There was even, or I guess there still is, a junk food provision in California state law where they didn't want the textbooks to promote junk food. You might think that while that was going on, it would promote balanced textbooks, but what happened is the publishers would take out anything that offended either state, and the result would be extremely watered down.
Over time, the conservative protestors in California found they weren't getting anywhere with the educational establishment, which did tend to be fairly liberal, but the state legislature in California is now very conservative. So they are getting state laws passed in California that require the school officials to do things with the textbooks that are not what the school officials themselves would have wanted to do. They are much more on the conservative side. So now the three states are pretty much aligned.
Does the movement toward electronic textbooks help alleviate that watering down by allowing districts access to different versions of textbooks?
DelFattore: Yes, even before the movement toward electronic textbooks, there was a period when some publishers offered modular textbooks. I think it just kind of came and went because, as you say, the whole electronic thing just swamped it. What they were doing was saying, "Okay, we'll offer three versions of the chapter on the Vietnam war. One chapter says that the U.S. was in the Vietnam war for economic reasons, another version says it was to fight communism, and another version says 'what Vietnam War?' " So you get to pick and choose which version of that you want. You get to pick and choose which version of the Civil War you want, which version of the New Deal you want, and so each state or each district could choose which version they wanted. With the electronic textbooks, you have something similar to that. If they simply put a textbook in electronic form, it's not going to make any difference, but if they offer options, which a number of them are, effectively you're saying to the school boards, "Tell the kids as much of the truth as you feel like telling them."
Some of what is going on in the textbooks is actually demonstrably inaccurate, and yet, it's what people want to hear and so the publishers are offering it. If you talk to the publishers, which I have done quite a bit, they will tell you that they are a for-profit business and that if they were to take the position that it is up to the textbook publishers to tell school districts what to teach, they would be, quite rightly, criticized for that. So they see it as perfectly acceptable to come up with a product that is what they're biggest customers want.
What if a school board wants to remove books already in a school library because they object to the content?
DelFattore: The school district has the right to decide what books it puts in the library, but there was a case called [Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico] several years ago in which the Supreme Court said that once you put the book in the library, you cannot remove it for ideological reasons. What happened in that case, basically, is that the school board wanted to go through the library and remove any books that the school board didn't like. The U.S. Supreme Court said essentially, you can't do that, because, if the book is simply in the library, the student can check it out or not check it out. You can have parental controls. It's not the same thing as teaching it to the whole class at the same time and having everyone discuss it.
Has there been any significant attempt to ban certain books or influence curriculum at the national level?
DelFattore: There really isn't any mechanism by which you could do that. The one thing that has happened at the federal level is that there have been attempts to tie federal funding to certain kinds of curriculum.
The most recent one was during the George W. Bush administration when they made a terribly large pot of money available to the school districts on the condition that the school district was using abstinence only sex education. Basically, the federal government doesn't have the ability to tell school districts "You can't teach this," or "You have to teach that," but they have almost complete control over the purse. They can say if you want this money, you have to agree to this condition -- the same way they do with the highways.
As far as the federal level, I don't know of a specific book they wanted to ban, but they are trying to influence curriculum in those ways. You know the money is fungible, so if the federal government gives the school the money to run a sex education program because it teaches abstinence-only, the school now has its own money that it would have spent on sex ed that it can now spend on whatever it wants.
Author's conclusion:
It is unlikely to the extreme that we will ever get everyone to agree on exactly what should be taught in schools. Indeed, there are several schools of thought on who should ultimately set curriculum. Some would argue that professional educators are best equipped to design curriculums and decide which books are best-suited for their classrooms. Others say that parents should have absolute control over what their children are exposed to in school. I'm somewhere in the middle. I firmly believe that professional educators as a group are the most qualified to decide what should be taught in our schools. Parents, on the other hand, are responsible for providing children with a foundational belief system that allows them to decide, together with their parents, what the information presented at school means to them. Frequent discussions at home about school lessons, means that parents can interpret whatever curriculum is being taught in the context of the core values of the family.
Brad Sylvester is a freelance journalist and writer whose interviews with experts on far-ranging topics are frequently published at Yahoo! News. You can follow him on Twitter @Sly102.
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