We don’t often vent about our personal experiences on the HP, but the uproar over McGraw-Hill Education’s hideous disregard for historical fact leads us now to do just that.
Note: we are not saying we worked on this MGHE publication, nor are we naming any specific publisher names.
The textbook company is facing outrage over its 9th-grade geography textbook, which in a section called “Patterns of Immigration” has this text: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” See one article on how this shame was brought to light by a student named Coby Burren here.
The truly outrageous thing about this is that we are not one bit surprised. This is the inevitable result of the denigration of education content by U.S. education publishers, large and small. Members of the HP have worked as content producers for many different publishers and we know from bitter, bitter experience that content comes absolutely, completely, unashamedly dead last in their priority list. Content accuracy is about as important to education publishers as yesterday’s lunch. It’s all about the delivery system: see our new software, our interactives, our hardware, our this and that way to access… awful, inaccurate, old, recycled content like the bit about African “workers”. (We attended an event last year where higher-ups from big publishers were chatting about what’s new and someone asked the head of a company we won’t name what was new in education content and he replied, We’re rolling out a laptop.)
Most major U.S. history textbooks proudly boast a scholarly “author” on their covers and a team of scholarly “consultants” on their first pages. But textbooks are written by freelance content writers who make around $18/hour. Many publishers subcontract out the many parts of their textbooks to different businesses called development houses, and dev houses subcontract out the work to freelancers. The editors at the dev house get a laundry list of objectives and standards to meet from the publisher. The editors then give the lists and a deadline to the freelancers.
99% of the focus and instruction to freelancers is on how to format the content to fit the shiny new delivery systems. Accuracy of content is not mentioned. Most editors do not know anything about U.S. history. They work on multiple projects and are not subject matter experts (SMEs); they specialize in publishing production: getting content to fit into the new boxes of online and digital delivery. The majority of freelancers are professional writers, not U.S. history SMEs. Freelancers who do know history, like HP members who have freelanced, raise issues with inaccurate text but are often shunted aside by editors who are already working 70 hours a week and weekends (this is no exaggeration) to make sure the delivery system is coming along and have no time or expertise to do QA on the content. it’s not really their fault that things like African “workers” slip through unnoticed.
If you really argue that something is wrong, it’s like hitting the stop button on a car assembly line. Everything has to grind to a halt and you will not be hired by that dev house again.
Now back to MGHE in specific. In its alleged “apology”, MGHE said this:
“We believe we can do better,” it continues. “To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.”
We “believe” we can do better? Not “we will do better”, “we must do better”, “this is unacceptable”, “this is completely at odds with our dedication to educating Americans”?
And then the double-triple speak of “to communicate these facts more clearly”: what facts? The “fact” that Africans “emigrated” to the Americas to “work”? We will “update this caption”??
This is about more than updating a caption. There needs to be an entire overhaul of how education content is produced in this country. Maybe it’s impossible to envision a day when education content is written by subject matter experts who are decently paid and respected, and content is thoroughly vetted for accuracy, but, as MGHE so weakly says “we believe we can do better.”
So look forward to many, many, many more errors and outright crimes in textbooks for as long as the system honors bells and whistles for delivery and dishonors what is being delivered.
PS—We went to the McGraw-Hill Education website and looked under Press Releases for their official apology letter; not there. No mention of the incident anywhere, in fact. There was a press release from August that was being highlighted at the top of the page about how “old school” textbooks are out and digital learning is in.
Hardly big news in today’s world, but it is yet another sign that delivery systems are the focus and content is just the dumb, unimportant chatter that is delivered. MGHE’s self-description is telling:
McGraw-Hill Education is a learning science company that delivers personalized learning experiences that help students, parents, educators and professionals improve results.
MGHE delivers “experiences”, not content; it makes things happen on a screen, and that’s the most important thing. If what it makes happen is telling people that enslaved Africans were “workers”, so be it.
More people need to a) read the textbooks their children or others in their lives are reading and b) make a roar to end all roars when they find errors. Coby did!
The Historic Present 