Does California's legislature think it can improve education by shortening textbooks?
The California Assembly is betting that kids learn more with small books. Lawmakers voted Thursday to ban school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages. The bill, believed to be the first of its kind nationwide, was hailed by supporters as a way to revolutionize education.Critics lambasted Assembly Bill 756 as silly...But Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, said critics are thinking too narrowly.
Well, yes, you could consider this "revolutionary" in the same way that banning textbooks altogether would be. That is to say, it could have a profound effect, and not necessarily for the better.
So where are all those excess pages going to go? Why, they've become URLs:
AB 756 would force publishers to condense key ideas, basic problems and basic knowledge into 200 pages, then to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information.
Doesn't this assume that every kid in California has free and easy access to a computer? Doesn't this mean that only those kids with the access and the desire will be exposed to that extra knowledge? Why not let kids stay home and have all the classes and textbooks online, while we're at it?
The Mercury News is incredulous:
...Who knew that making a textbook longer than 200 pages was such a bad idea that there needs to be a law against it? Well, 42 Assembly Democrats knew. On Thursday they approved AB 756, a bill by Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, that says: Neither the State Board of Education nor a local school district "may adopt instructional materials that exceed 200 pages in length.'' Textbooks, the bill's supporters argued, should sum up the basics and then refer students to the Internet and to libraries for the rest. Plus, shorter is lighter and cheaper.Maybe. Their assumption doesn't seem that obvious to us. It seems like something that ought to be decided -- just brainstorming here -- by actually reading each proposed textbook, as opposed to laying down an arbitrary limit.
The bill doesn't jibe with other instructions (some from the Legislature) that textbook publishers have been getting to avoid textbooks that are just dry columns of words. They must be full of pictures and charts. And in each subject, they have to cover the state's comprehensive curriculum requirements. This makes them longer.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call this silly bill "bookburning," but the Claremont Institute is doing so:
Following the Sacbee report, other reports on this bill have referred to its "textbook" restrictions in length, while the bill's text refers more broadly to "instructional materials." Thus, books of American political or historical documents, short stories, poems, or memoirs more than 200 pages in length would be forbidden. The number of books that could not be purchased by the California public schools would be rather impressive: Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, virtually any classic novel one can think of, and any book by Winston Churchill and any other great history.
One of Joanne Jacobs' commenters had this to say about Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, the sponsor of the bill:
Only a teacher in L.A.(like me) who for years watched the inane and harmful Jackie Goldberg poison the LAUSD with her Leftist dogma and idiotic motions...then to be elected to the state Assembly, to continue with her thumbing-the-nose and giving-the-bird to Calif. taxpayers, parents and students....can just smile painfully and wonder why the morons in her district keep reelecting her. Dumbing down the textbooks is just the tip of the iceberg...
What else doesn't Jackie Goldberg like, in addition to long textbooks? "Redskins" as an athletic team name, the Iraq war (which she protested after the Iraqi elections were held), gun safety education in schools, and bills that would prevent minors from getting body piercings without parental consent.
Her statement in the body-piercing article is priceless:
Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, cast the lone "no" vote on the bill. Requiring parental consent takes away one of the more innocuous ways for teens to rebel, she said. The government should not be stepping in to tell children about body piercing, Goldberg said, and lawmakers should be more worried about other issues, such as funding schools."It will probably get signed ... and it will sound like we will be protecting kids," she said. "We just get too carried away in telling everyone what to do."
But she has no problem with telling every school in California to limit instructional materials to 200 pages, it seems.
(Via Captain's Quarters.)
Update: Quincy has more over at News, The Universe, and Everything:
Ms. Goldberg’s argument has constructivism written all over it. “No need to learn it, you can always look it up!” The basic problem with this is that doing all that websurfing takes time. The reason textbooks exist in the first place is to collect a lot of useful information in one volume that is readily accessable. It takes but a second to say, “Turn to page 201.” Imagine the time wasted if teachers had to send their kids to the web to download and print their math exercises, rather than simply turning to the page in the book?Posted by kswygert at May 31, 2005 07:15 PM