Last week, the Press-Enterprise ran a special section on education.  I didn’t see it at the time, but my good friend and occasional FR contributor Lance Izumi just forwarded his contribution to the special section.  Izumi is director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco.  Here’s an excerpt of his op-ed, along with a link so FR readers can read the entire piece.

Political correctness distorts too many California textbooks

By LANCE T. IZUMI

When "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno asks young people simple political or historical questions during his popular "Jay Walking" segment, the confused answers are every bit as sad as they are funny.

How is it that seemingly affluent twentysomethings in Los Angeles think that the New Deal refers to a hamburger commercial? One major factor may be the textbooks that teach more about multiculturalism than about our nation’s history.

Though California has a strong set of academic content standards for core subjects, the textbooks are of varying quality. Especially in history, issues of political correctness often blur the objective presentation of facts. A major tool of the politically correct crowd is California‘s social-content guidelines, which require positive portrayals of racial and gender groups.

According to New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, because of these guidelines, "California‘s textbooks and other materials must instill a ‘sense of pride’ in students’ heritages and may not include ‘adverse reflection’ on any group." Ravitch, who served on a California state panel in the 1980s that tried to improve the history curriculum, also notes that the state Legislature required equal gender portrayals in textbooks.

Click here to read the entire op-ed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.