The Language Police

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education at New York University and former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, argues that an elaborate, largely hidden system of censorship has been imposed on American textbooks and standardized tests by pressure groups from both the political left and right. Ravitch contends that what began as a reasonable effort to eliminate racist and sexist language has expanded into a sweeping regime of content restrictions that strips educational materials of anything thought-provoking, historically accurate, or literarily significant.

Ravitch traces her discovery of this censorship to the late 1990s, when she served on the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), a nonpartisan federal body that oversees national educational testing. President Clinton had proposed voluntary national tests in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics, and Ravitch served on a committee that reviewed reading passages for the fourth-grade test. The committee approved passages it found clear and engaging, but Ravitch later learned that the test contractor, Riverside Publishing, had submitted those passages to a separate "bias and sensitivity review" panel, which recommended eliminating several for reasons the committee found absurd. A passage about the nutritional value of peanuts was rejected because some people have allergies. A historically accurate passage about women's quilting on the western frontier was rejected for portraying females as "soft" and "submissive." A true story about a blind man climbing Mount McKinley was rejected for "regional bias" and for implying that blindness is a disadvantage. A biography of Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, was rejected because the monument is considered offensive to the Lakota people. The NAGB committee unanimously rejected the panel's recommendations, but Ravitch recognized that the panel's reasoning reflected industry-wide standards.

She examines Riverside's written bias guidelines, which define "bias" as anything that might distract or upset a student. The guidelines ban an extensive list of topics, including evolution, religion, magic, death, divorce, politics, and personal appearance, largely to preempt complaints from the religious right. They impose strict rules about "representational fairness," requiring proportional representation of all demographic groups, and categorize stereotypes into types including emotional, occupational, and role-based. Ravitch argues that no educational research supports these prohibitions and that the rules exist because certain topics upset adults who assume children will be equally disturbed.

Ravitch demonstrates that these guidelines pervade the educational publishing industry. Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley's 161-page guidelines dictate that African "huts" must be called "little houses," that the word "dialect" may not be used, and that textbooks must promote the historically dubious claim that the U.S. Constitution was partially modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy. McGraw-Hill's guidelines ban all words containing "man" as a prefix or suffix and instruct illustrators to replace stereotyped images, such as showing mothers fixing roofs instead of fathers. Houghton Mifflin's guidelines direct editors to base literary selections on census data and to avoid stories about slavery and the Underground Railroad. Ravitch argues these guidelines function collectively as censorship codes that guarantee the exclusion of imaginative literature from textbooks.

Testing companies employ the same practices, supplemented by a statistical technique called differential item functioning (DIF), which identifies questions on which equally proficient students from different demographic groups perform differently. Items displaying unacceptable DIF levels are discarded regardless of content. Research finds that women score lower on items about science, sports, and historical topics, while Black examinees perform worse on items with maps and charts. These findings generate lists of topics to minimize or avoid, even though testing experts acknowledge that fewer than 10 percent of items display extreme DIF and that screening has not meaningfully changed scores for women or minorities. A top official at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) tells Ravitch that his company deletes test items whenever anyone complains, noting that "it is better to be bland than to be controversial" (50).

Ravitch traces the history of censorship from both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, she recounts her experience as a student in Houston in the 1950s, where the Minute Women of the USA, a right-wing organization, dominated the school board and removed textbooks deemed "socialistic." She surveys attacks ranging from post-World War I patriotic societies through the burning of Harold Rugg's social science textbooks in the 1940s to the religious right's campaigns of the 1980s. The most consequential legal battle was Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1983-1988), in which fundamentalist parents in Tennessee sued over Holt, Rinehart and Winston's elementary readers for promoting secular humanism and witchcraft. Although the parents lost, the Holt series was commercially devastated. A similar fate befell the Impressions reading series, a K-6 literary anthology attacked by right-wing groups for stories involving magic and fantasy. Despite winning in federal court, the series was never republished. Publishers learned that controversy means commercial death, making preemptive self-censorship their preferred strategy.

On the left, the most influential organization was the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), founded in 1966, which initially sought to include more realistic portrayals of minorities in children's books but grew increasingly radical, attacking fairy tales as sexist and condemning classic children's books as racist. CIBC's greatest impact was on textbook publishers: Members of its advisory board wrote the bias guidelines for McGraw-Hill and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley. Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women pressured publishers to adopt strict gender quotas. Ravitch obtains internal Holt correspondence revealing editors frantically revising stories to meet numerical quotas, sometimes adding stories of poor literary quality because they had the right demographic balance.

She explains how the state textbook adoption process in Texas and California gives extraordinary leverage to pressure groups. School textbooks are sold through a government procurement process, and California and Texas dominate the market. In Texas, Mel and Norma Gabler, conservative activists, scrutinized textbooks for decades, reviewing them line by line for content they considered anti-family or anti-Christian. In California, social content standards require that instructional materials portray all groups with "no adverse reflection." Ravitch provides examples of content revised before submission to Texas: A headline mentioning the Devil was changed to reference Angels, an article about the murder of Matthew Shepard was revised to ignore Shepard's homosexuality, and a statement about fossil fuels was rejected because the publisher feared it would prevent adoption.

Ravitch examines the consequences for literature and history instruction. She finds that the national English language arts standards, published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA), do not identify any authors or works students should read, giving equal weight to classic texts, advertisements, and memos. No state requires students to read any specific literary work, and Massachusetts has the most discerning standards. In history, Ravitch reviews a dozen world history textbooks and examines U.S. history textbooks, finding they have adopted an ideology of "cultural equivalence" in which all civilizations are presented as equally advanced. Non-Western societies are never criticized: Slavery in Africa is presented as benign, Aztec human sacrifice is glossed as a religious requirement, and Mao Zedong's dictatorship is treated with notable leniency. U.S. history textbooks downplay the European ideas that gave rise to democratic institutions while overstating the achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations. On the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than half of high school seniors scored below basic in U.S. history.

Ravitch proposes a three-pronged strategy: competition, sunshine, and better-educated teachers. She calls for abolishing the state textbook adoption process to create a real marketplace that would empower teachers and eliminate the leverage of pressure groups. She demands transparency, urging publishers and states to publish their bias guidelines and make review panel recommendations and DIF analysis results public. She argues for teachers who are masters of their subjects rather than dependent on sanitized textbooks. In an afterword, she compiles additional examples of language policing, including Michigan's ban on mentions of "fighting terrorism" and a New York State examination that changed the word "love" to "friend" in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach." She concludes that the pressure groups driving censorship are small and unrepresentative, and that their power depends entirely on the state adoption process, which she calls "the choke point that makes censorship possible" (181).