Last Thursday I was down at central office evaluating language arts texts that the school district is considering adopting. I was asked to do this because I’ve been around for a long time. After you are at the job so long that you feel like part of the corporate furniture, people let you offer an opinion. Actually anyone can offer an opinion on the new text materials.

There is little difference between one company’s textbook and another. They come with literature anthologies and workbooks and teachers manuals that guide the busy teacher through all of the facets of teaching reading and writing. The implied message for teachers is that reading is a complex subject that requires you to keep track of many things, and in order not to miss any important skills you need to be told what to say, what the kids might say, and what to test them on. I got a couple of laughs when I referred to these publications as “the ones that come with wheelchairs and oxygen tanks,” meaning that teachers are assumed to be cripples who are not capable of making instructional decisions without this kind of support.

One publisher, though, had a very streamlined package. There was one teacher resource manual that had a section that explained the textbook’s theoretical assumptions about reading processes and suggestions for various ways of engaging kids in reading. Then it had smaller unit manuals that went with (here’s the novel idea) Real Books. The teacher’s manual also had a bunch of templates and graphic organizers that could be used to help students to think about and respond to the reading in a variety of ways. The people behind this effort call it Pegasus II. I liked it.

One of the things that I appreciated about this publisher is that the theoretical assumptions were explicitly stated. There was another one, Trophies, that did so as well. However, I disagree with their assumptions. The most valuable thing I got out of graduate school was an awareness of the impact of ideology in research. There are two main camps in education these days. One of them holds that education is a social practice that is linked to culture and linguistic processes (my preference); the other interpretation of schooling is based on behaviorism and treats learning as a matter of skill acquisition (conventional practice). When an author is open about theoretical bias, the reader can at least evaluate what they have to say in light of who they are. Some people might read a research report and think, “Oh, so that’s how it is,” believing that claims to scientific truth are automatically valid. That’s not necessarily so, but at least when the author is clear about their bias it’s out in the open for discussion.

One of the things that I like about the more constructivist program (Pegasus) is that teachers can exercise more instructional control over reading lessons. In my opinion, this will give teachers more of a sense of actually doing the teaching. One of the effects of the standards movement has been to encourage people, even teachers, to view education as a science that has a “best” method. Curriculum materials are designed to be “teacher-proof” so there can’t be any screw ups. Sure!

The problem there, of course, is that the people who wrote those books never meet the kids who are the beneficiaries of their design decisions. And what happens in practice when the design fails? Improvisation. But what the practicioner is left to improvise with is an inflexible mammoth that is hard to adapt to the needs of kids who can’t read the stories or do the activities. Better to design the system to be flexible to begin with. The problem with top-heavy design is exemplified in my 2003 SUV. That car can do almost all of your thinking for you. It locks your doors and warns you that your wiper fluid is low. It even tells you if there is ice on the road. I hate all that stuff. It’s going to break and be expensive to fix. But that’s the trend in modern design. I hope that we get the chance to use textbooks that let the teachers do the teaching.