Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Surely the simple answer is for the individual school or teacher to choose what textbooks they wish to use. Why do politicians have to get involved at all?
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I can come up with three simple, obvious problems with letting individual teachers decide, off the top of my head:
1) Economic: the school can afford more books & other things if it buys textbooks in bulk, rather than 1 classroom's worth at a time. That also gives them a bit of cushion in case of lost/stolen/damaged textbooks--if the the entire district is using the same book, spares are available; if each classroom is using something different, the student who spills a drink/loses his backpack/home is destroyed in a flood has no book.
2) Standardization: if every teacher is creating a different curriculum, how can other teachers develop compatible lesson plans? If 6th year children learn "World History" from an unknown book or set of books, how can the 7th year world history teacher decide what to cover? She doesn't know what they've already learned. How do literature teachers across several years avoid using the same short story or essay?
3) Avoiding the crazy: Some teachers have an *agenda*. Might be their own religion, might be some form of social activism, might be their personal beliefs. How do you prevent teachers from pushing conspiracy theory or religion or weird pet projects, if they get to choose the teaching materials without oversight? (If they do have oversight--it's still too much. The district can't possibly review several thousand individual teachers' individual choices for books in different classes.)