Educational Research Analysts
What's new? What's next?
The intense national media coverage of Texas' recent rewrite of its Social Studies course standards MISSED THEIR GREATEST SINGLE UPGRADE, which involved World History, not U.S. History. Texas' State Board of Education (SBOE) required high school World History books, not U.S. History texts, to most help students value general, overall benefits of free enterprise. The SBOE should now add that while U.S. History texts must stop ignoring Christianity, high school World History books must cease attacking it. In World History the SBOE should check both militant Islamic cultural jihadists (backed by Arab petrowealth in the U.S. textbook industry), and American academ­ic secularists, in their com­bined assault on Christian­ity in World History classes. Our July 2010 semi-annual newsletter covers both these World History issues.
Recent Additions:

9.7.2010 – July '10 newsletter
  High school World History textbook upheaval

12.9.2009 – November '09 newsletter
  New Texas and California 1st grade Reading programs

See how these Texas programs
compare among themselves
  • SRA IMAGINE IT! – SRA/McGraw ©2010
  • TEXAS TREASURES – Macmillan/McGraw ©2011
  • READING STREET – Scott Foresman/Pearson ©2011
  • TEXAS JOURNEYS – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ©2011
See how these California programs
compare among themselves
  • SRA IMAGINE IT! – SRA/McGraw ©2009
  • HOUGHTON MIFFLIN READING – Houghton ©2010
  • PEARSON READING STREET – Pearson ©2010
  • CALIFORNIA TREASURES – Macmillan ©2010
  • HSP CALIFORNIA EXCURSIONS – Harcourt ©2010
See how the phonics components
of these 4 Texas programs
are superior overall to the phonics components
of these 5 California programs,
on page 2 and page 5 of our newsletter.

English as a Second Language
This November, Texas' SBOE votes on new 1st grade ESL programs submitted for 2010 Texas approval and 2011 local adoption. Our November newsletter will compare the phonics components of 4 of those programs, using basically our same criteria by which we ranked the 2008 California and 2009 Texas regular 1st grade Readers. Texas' rules on phonics coverage in these 1st grade ESL programs are much weaker than for their regular 1st grade analogs, and the overall phonics content of these 1st grade ESL offerings is correspondingly deficient.

Literature
Currently we are finalizing our evaluations of story content in these 7th, 8th, and 12th grade Literature books approved for 2010 local Texas adoption:

Grade 7 – American
  • LITERATURE: TEXAS TREASURES – Glencoe ©2011
  • LITERATURE – Holt McDougal ©2010
  • Prentice Hall LITERATURE – Pearson ©2011
Grade 8 – American
  • LITERATURE: TEXAS TREASURES – Glencoe ©2011
  • LITERATURE – Holt McDougal ©2010
  • Prentice Hall LITERATURE – Pearson ©2011
Grade 12 – British
  • LITERATURE: TEXAS TREASURES – Glencoe ©2011
  • LITERATURE: BRITISH LITERATURE – Holt McDougal ©2010
  • LITERATURE: THE BRITISH TRADITION, vol. I & II – Prentice Hall ©2011

We will complete these reviews some time in 2011 – too late for Texas' local adoption but still helpful for other states. We are finding much better story content in these new 7th and 8th grade programs compared to their 2001 editions, the last time we reviewed them.

2010