Browsing by Author "Menegas, Niko"

Education in the United States is a highly decentralized system, with many powers being devolved even beyond the typical state level down to local governments and school boards. Despite this, many states still wish to maintain influence over the education that their students are receiving, due to the high amount of political attention the topic gets. The States do have some methods of exerting indirect influence and control over lessons, through the creation of state standards and adopted textbook lists, which can influence textbook publishers to create lesson materials that are more in line with the priorities of the state. This paper investigates whether such influence is sufficient to have an impact on the contents that students are receiving, and what specifically the differences are between the primary materials available in different state schools and private schools is. To do this, a textual analysis of three textbooks, one published in and adopted by the state of Texas, one adopted by the districts of the state of California, and one private, Christian school textbook, comparing the coverage of key topics in world history that are related to issues of modern political discussion, like the origin of civilization, ancient Greek and Roman democracies, communism and the Soviet Union, and the rise of totalitarianism in 20th century Europe. The coverage of these topics in the textbooks will be compared both to each other and to the particular standards the textbook is operating under. This paper concludes that the content present in the textbook is aligned with the standards of the State it is adopted in, but that no causal relationship can be concluded without further data. Additionally, the content and framing of the two State textbooks were far more similar to each other than either of them were to the Private school textbook, which was consistently of a lower quality. The policy implications of this are that current methods of influencing school content through standards and textbook adoption are sufficient to create the result that states want, but that in some cases standards should be made more specific to leave fewer content decisions in the hands of the publishing companies and textbook authors.