From Textbooks to “Managed Instructional Systems”

Abstract

Since the 1991 publication of Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith’s seminal The Politics of the Textbook, public school curriculum has, if anything, become even more corporate and its contents more controlled by large publishing houses and by state- and district-level purchasing bodies. Though rife with the same ideological, political, and economic issues that The Politics of the Textbook described twenty years ago, textbooks now have an even larger pedagogical and indoctrinating role while, simultaneously, classroom teachers have lost autonomy and decision-making power over the use of that curriculum. Under extraordinary financial and political pressure to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) as part of the No Child Left Behind legislation, states have increasingly looked to textbook publishers to produce generic curricula that reduce or eliminate the effects of an individual teacher’s style, creativity, or ability on student performance. Nowhere has this trend been more concentrated or had a more deleterious effect than in the English Language Arts, an area that – due to the far-reaching scope of literature itself and to an almost limitless variety of means of self-expression – previously allowed for significant teacher autonomy in content and pedagogy. ELA teachers could, because of the breadth and depth of their field’s content, choose areas on which to focus. As the following critical policy analysis shows, such freedoms have been supplanted by a narrowing of ELA content, a highly prescribed edagogy, and an associated testing regimen. Unfortunately, the corporatist, assembly-line ideology underlying this new approach to the teaching of the EnglishLanguage Arts limits teachers’ ability to teach to students’ needs, ignores the myriad possibilities inherent within a diverse body of knowledge that is the English cannon, and it leads not to greater student learning (though it may indeed improve student test scores) but instead to paradigmatic and hegemonic thinking.