Our school board recently approved a textbook for the newly offered AP Psychology class. I realize the board does not want to micromanage the book selection process. At the same time, alarm bells should have gone off when they saw that Pearson publishes this book.
Pearson cannot seem to do anything right. Do a quick Google search to find a myriad of serious problems attributed to Pearson’s incompetence over the last 20 years.
An online search for the best AP Psych textbooks led me repeatedly to a widely used book by David G. Myers. However, nowhere did I find a positive review by education or psychology experts for the book that was approved. The only place it was mentioned? A list of “example psychology books” by David Coleman’s College Board. Yes, the same Coleman who is the “Architect of the Common Core” and who now runs the College Board (Heaven help us!).
Of course it also included a disclaimer that “the texts listed should not be regarded as endorsed, authorized, recommended, or approved by the College Board.” Then why list them?
I also researched the authors of the approved book. Neither one has a Wikipedia page, but I did learn that one author teaches at a community college in Florida. Shouldn’t our district use books written by more accomplished professors?
Just for fun, I checked out a few universities — including UNC, Rice, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Berkeley, University of Michigan, Rutgers, Penn State, University of Maryland, Harvard, Yale and Duke — to see which Psychology 101 texts they’re using. While several schools use the Myers book, none of them use the textbook our district approved. In fact, the only colleges I could find that use the Pearson book are Midland College in Georgia (unranked by U.S. News and World Report) and College of the Canyons, a community college in California. Even locally, Mercer County College uses the well regarded David Myers textbook. Why didn’t our district choose this book?
It is quite easy to find professional, scholarly reviews for textbooks. It is obvious to me that our board did not do its due diligence and merely rubber-stamped what was presented. When I emailed the board with these concerns, only one member responded. This person claimed to have done due diligence by “looking up the reviews on Amazon.” Surely one cannot expect an Amazon review (“I give it 5 stars because it arrived on time”) to give meaningful insight into a textbook.
There is a huge difference between micromanaging the selection of textbooks and rubber-stamping whatever is put in front of you. Why require board approval in the first place if they aren’t going to put any thought into whether or not something should be approved?
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. The lack of critical thinking by board members is seen again and again. I hope that moving forward our school board will be more careful in its approval of materials — and in all of the decisions it makes — that will be shaping our children’s minds.
Virginia Manzari
West Windsor
