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Educational Research Analysts
1999 high school World History textbook reviews

Texas approved these high school World History books for 1999 local adoption, which we ranked as follows:

BETTER WORLD HISTORY: Continuity and Change   • Holt ©1999
FAIR WORLD HISTORY: Patterns of Interaction   • McDougal ©1999
FAIR WORLD HISTORY: The Human Odyssey   • West ©1999
FAIR WORLD HISTORY: The Human Experience   • Glencoe ©1999
POOR WORLD HISTORY: Connections to Today   • Prentice ©1999

Real gaps exist in this book's coverage of important developments over time of western political/constitutional principles. Coupled with a pro-Marxist slant on Communism's rise in China is its total neglect of principles and benefits of free enterprise in western technological progress, and an underemphasis on this in the Commercial Revolution. It sometimes apportions coverage by politically-correct race and (especially) gender quotas, not by how much influence a person had over how long a time, and it contains a women's-lib animus against men in modern western culture. An anti-Christian editorial bias is evident as well. For example, on religious beliefs, practices, and holy writings, Hinduism gets 340 student text lines. Christianity gets only 82. Even Incan religion gets 117 student text lines, and Sumerian religion 111.
• Contact us for a full review.

We evaluated these books on the basis of their subject-matter content. Our reviews (a) supplement the State Textbook Review Panel, which checked these books' coverage of state curriculum standards; and (b) balance publishers' sales pitches, which stress teaching aids. You may be interested in the lists of factual errors we found in these texts (sample errors: I, II).

Our reviewer of these books served on the Texas State Board of Education-appointed Social Studies Review Committee during the Social Studies TEKS writing process in 1996. We are the Texas group noted by the Wall Street Journal and ABC's Good Morning America for finding the hundreds of high school U.S. History textbook factual errors in 1991-92.

No public school textbook company funded these reviews in any way. We do not have, nor have we ever had, any financial stake in any publisher. Our income derives from concerned individuals and a few small foundations. Unlike publisher sales reps, we have no monetary interest in any textbook adoption outcome. For more info, write, phone, fax or e-mail us at ↓