Current mood:	cynical
Entry tags:	curriculum development, paranoid publishing

Constraints
There are a number of factors that determine what children learn in school. There are state and national standards in all subjects. There is a large body of educational research that suggests what children should learn. There is conventional wisdom and there are social norms. There are district-wide and school-wide expectations, standards, curricula, traditions. There are many, many tests that shape instruction in various ways. There are teachers, who were trained at different institutions, have different pedagogical approaches, and have different experiences that they bring to the classroom. And there are books, hopefully lots of books. And these books, they have publishers.

I am not sure I understood until recently the ultimate stranglehold that educational publishing has on what happens every day in schools. I have realized this because we have been fighting with our publisher over their tendency to see everything we write as a safety hazard, or as offensive to someone, somewhere, for some reason. We started out with a set of really interesting children's books that were educationally relevant, enjoyable, easy to read, and taught kids about many different things that they often don't learn about in school. How do we know this? Because we tested them -- in almost 100 classrooms all over the country. And kids learned a lot from them -- and teachers were grateful that we helped them provide their students with something interesting to learn. We have evidence that says this (I'm oversimplifying, of course, but generally it's positive). Our publisher agreed to publish our books and curriculum. Which is all good, because our bright ideas do not help anyone if they're not available to teachers and schools.

But the problem is, the publishing company wants to make money off of us. And, to really make the cash, you have to become a state-adopted curriculum, preferably in a big state, and most preferably in one of the six big states that completely drive the educational market in this country. And to be a state-adopted curriculum, you have to get through all the hoops and checkboxes. So, slowly, they have been trying to sanitize everything we write so that it will end up looking like a textbook from Disneyland. All so we can, as the saying goes, play in Peoria.

Here are some actual examples of things they have asked us to change:

We cannot show a picture of a stapler, because a kid might decide to staple themselves.
We cannot show people at the beach unless they are fully clothed.
We cannot state that it is okay to taste sugar water.
We cannot talk about kids using rubbing alcohol to make a mixture, even if they are fully supervised by an adult in a fictional story -- because some people abuse alcohol.
We cannot say that snails make slime.
We cannot show a picture of anyone eating anything unhealthy. Things on the list of unhealthy foods: crackers, pretzels.
We cannot show any candy, even if no one is eating it.
We cannot say that dirt gets under your fingernails.
We cannot show a picture of earthworms mating, even if the text, very delicately and vaguely, says that this is one of the things organisms need to do.
We cannot say that earthworms can be up to 12 inches long, because that is too scary for kids.

And, I am not sure which one of these was my favorite, because they are both so ridiculous:

We cannot show a PICTURE of a peanut, because some kids are allergic to peanuts.
We cannot say "Earthworms can do something you can't do. They have adaptations that let them live in their habitat. They can live underground." because kids would get the mental picture of being buried alive and would be traumatized.

No wonder no one ever teaches science. It's just full of potential lawsuits. Just raise your kids with cartoon smiles and bright colors and rounded edges, and nothing will ever hurt them.