Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy The New York Times, OCT. 5, 2015
Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves. He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni DeanBurren, along with a text message: “we was real hard workers, wasn’t we.” Their outrage over the textbook’s handling of the nation’s history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as “indentured servants” but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school’s teachers to use other materials in the class. “It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.” Ms. Dean-Burren cataloged her objections to the caption last week in posts on Facebook and Twitter. The posts, along with a video she made while flipping through the book, were widely shared, catching the attention of the #blacklivesmatter movement as the video alone reached nearly two million views. Texas textbooks — and how they address aspects of history, science, politics and other subjects — have been a source of controversy for years in part because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a social-studies curriculum that put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, including emphasizing Republican political achievements and movements. State-sanctioned textbooks have been criticized for passages suggesting Moses influenced the writing of the Constitution and dismissing the history of the separation of church and state. “It’s no accident that this happened in Texas,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that has criticized the content of state-approved textbooks. “We have a textbook adoption process that’s so politicized and so flawed that it’s become almost a punch line for comedians.” Officials with the Texas Education Agency did not respond to requests for comment. The World Geography textbook was used by Coby, a student at Pearland High School in Pearland, Tex., a city of 100,000 about 20 miles south of downtown Houston. In a section of the book describing America as a nation of immigrants and called “Patterns of Immigration,” the text with a map of the United States reads: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” The authors, on the page next to the map, wrote of “an influx of English and other European peoples, many of whom came as indentured servants to work for little or no pay,” but made no mention of how Africans came to the country. After Ms. Dean-Burren’s social-media posts, McGraw-Hill Education said in a statement posted on its Facebook page Friday that it would change the caption in the digital and print versions of the book to describe the arrival of African slaves in the United States as “a forced migration.” In a memo sent to employees, David Levin, the president and chief executive of McGraw-Hill Education, issued an apology, calling the caption “a mistake” and saying the company was reviewing its internal procedures and increasing its list of textbook reviewers to reflect greater diversity.
