A Debate over "Dumbing Down"

By Ezra Bowen

Textbooks, using formulas for simplicity, produce perplexity

Tap, tap, tap. See me work. I make I good things. See the red ones. See the blue ones. See the yellow ones. No, no, no. I do not want red ones. I do not want blue ones. I want green ones."

Question: What article is being manufactured in the above passage? Too hard? Try these selections, then. What stage of a frog's development is being described in the following excerpt: "A new frog is like a fish. He must stay in the water. You may have seen a little frog as he hopped out of the water. Then you may have seen him hop back in again." In American history, how true is it to say that former President Richard M. Nixon became enmeshed in Watergate because "he tried to help his friends"?

Readers who are perplexed by this quiz can thank the stars if they are no longer in school. For these samples come from standard texts and other reading used by millions of American youngsters in elementary and secondary grades. Bonnie Armbruster, a researcher at the University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading, last month ran an experiment in which she gave a group of adults 20 paragraphs from sixth-grade texts. "Their instructions," says Armbruster, "were to underline the main idea--if they could find it--and if they couldn't, then to write one of their own." The grownups flunked on both counts: the content was so disjointed they could not pick out a main idea. "They couldn't believe these excerpts were from real textbooks," Armbruster adds.

But the books are real, and they are the product of a process that outgoing Secretary of Education Terrel Bell has labeled the "dumbing down" of study materials for U.S. classrooms. Significantly, in a study at Harvard of sample texts and standardized test scores for Grades 1,8 and 11, Reading Expert Jeanne Chall discovered a correlation between textbook quality and learning. "We saw that in the years SAT scores went down," she says, "the year before, textbooks had also declined," The roots of dumbing down go back to the 1920s, when schools began systematic testing of students and concluded that the curriculum was too hard. "They made the curriculum easier," says Chall, "and they made it easier, and they made it easier." The principal target was the textbook, which provides from 75% to 90% of the curriculum content. A key instrument was a set of readability formulas designed to measure the difficulty of a text. Most of the formulas are based on three factors: word length, sentence length and the number of uncommon words. For example, a 15-word sentence or a three-syllable word may be rated too tough for first grade.

No sooner were the formulas created by reading specialists than the details hardened into a doctrine by which educators judged the books they would allow in classrooms. Moreover, the formulas hatched lists of specific words and sentences deemed inappropriate. Subordinate clauses and connectives became no-nos up to certain levels; even topic sentences vanished. Textbook Expert Harriet Bernstein of the Council of Chief State School Officers points out that the word because does not appear in most American schoolbooks before the eighth grade. "And," she adds, "you can imagine what that does to the text."

What these rules do to a text is create horrors like Modern Curriculum Press's "Tap, tap, tap . . ." story for first-graders, an adaptation of the classic fairy tale The Shoemaker and the Elves, in which the words elves, shoemaker and shoes do not appear. In the same way, the frogfish, from Ginn & Co.'s Across the Fence, is a creature of formula writing, whose intent may be simplification but whose consequence is too often mystification. That mystification is compounded by ethnic, religious, political and other groups that have lobbied their attitudes and taboos into texts. In Maryland, Tom Sawyer no longer says "honest injun." Just "honest." And the bland Watergate reference from McGraw-Hill's fifth-grade social-studies textbook United States is a result of the almost universal avoidance of controversy in textbooks.

Most critics of dumbing down have found it easiest to blame publishers. But the fact is that publishers try to produce what their customers want. Twenty-two states, including Texas and California, whose combined purchases account for nearly 16% of the $1.1 billion market, have statewide adoption codes weighted with formulas and taboos. Since it may cost up to $20 million to to develop a major, text-based study program, publishers have to cater to the rules of the big states. Moreover, much of the pressure for simplified texts has come from overworked or undertrained teachers who need something easy to handle in class. This is particularly true in such states as California and Texas, with high percentages of foreign-born or ghetto students with poorly developed language skills.

In San Francisco last month, Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, voiced the wide spread frustration with the textbook dilemma when he asked a convocation of 43 educators and 50 representatives from 16 publishing houses, "Who is in charge?" The answer is everybody and nobody. Certainly not Honig, though his voice has been one of the loudest and most persistent calling for textbook reform. In his own state, below fifth grade a zoo story may not include such words as beaver, parrot, goat -- and zoo. A California anti-junk-food lobby's taboo still limits references to ice cream, cake and pie. "I'm all for good eating," says Illinois Reading Specialist Jean Osborn, "but for a child in a story not to be able to have a birthday cake?"

Honig remains confident of impending change. At the conference he told publishers of new, higher standards, outlined in two pamphlets approved by the state board of education. But industry representatives are skeptical. "We've heard a number of times that things were going to change," says Roger Rogalin, editor in chief of D.C. Heath & Co. Yet the formulas remain in place. "It's a catch-22 situation," sums up Bernstein. "Until the states stop requiring readability formulas, publishers won't stop using them to write and edit texts."

-- ByEzraBowen.

Reported by Teresa Barker/Chicago and Dick Thompson/San Francisco

With reporting by Teresa Barker, Dick Thompson