DUH!

MSNBC.com today posted an article entitled A textbook case of failure - Can America Compete? that discusses the issue of poor textbooks in American schools. Texas and California basically dictate which texts are used in the country and neither state apparently does a very good job of selecting those texts.

In Texas, the Board of Education is dominated by political conservatives who are heavily lobbied by conservative activists,

In California, by contrast, the controlling forces are “social content standards” that insist that the state’s textbooks — even those in math and the sciences — portray ethnic groups, women, the elderly, the disabled and religious groups in precise proportionality

In light of this article, I wonder if recent proposed changes in California's textbooks are going to help at all.