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September 16, 2003, 10:30 a.m.On PatrolDiane Ravitch goes inside a protection racket.A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez iane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, is author, most recently, of The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Ravitch recently talked to NRO about the Language Police. Kathryn Jean Lopez: Who are "the language police"?Diane Ravitch: Read the book and you will see. It is now a process of "bias and sensitivity review" for weeding out anything controversial or offensive. It is self-censorship, which publishers think is high-minded and necessary. It is the result of...

In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions and functions. In the 1998 book, the index listed families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in...

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the "new, new math"...

In 1970s a publishing house approached author Ray Bradbury asking to reprint his short story, “A Fog Horn,” for a high-school textbook. Bradbury refused upon learning that the editor of the reader deleted two phrases from the story: “in the Presence” and “God-Light.” This particular incident prompted Bradbury to add a coda to his most well-known work, Fahrenheit 451, in which he wrote: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist,...

Sanitized Tests THE JOURNAL NEWS By FREDREKA SCHOUTEN AND MERYL HYMAN HARRIS In the world of standardized tests, Christmas never comes. No one celebrates Halloween or birthdays. Kids rarely encounter a french fry. And no one dies. Ever. The tests taken by millions of schoolchildren are scrubbed clean of topics that might reflect ethnic, cultural or regional biases. Yonkers students shouldn't be expected to have a vast knowledge of corn production, and Florida 10-year-olds shouldn't be expected to compose essays about blizzards. Subjects viewed as inappropriate or potentially upsetting to children, such as death, violence, drugs or sex, are out...

Diane Ravitch is a research professor, New York University; distinguished visiting fellow, Hoover Institution; and member, Hoover's Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the media have noted how easily the terrorists blended into our open society. They joined health clubs, rented cars, got pilot training, patronized neighborhood bars, obtained credit cards, and moved about freely, without anyone noticing that they were planning a heinous crime or that some were on the FBI's terrorism watch list. When they bought their one-way tickets to California, the hijackers identified themselves with ...

Before the words went into the pledge, Jefferson, Washington & Lincoln used them The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a legal challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance in a case that makes - unintentionally - a powerful point about the place of religion in our nation's history. At issue are the two words "under God," which were added to the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954. Michael Newdow - an attorney, physician and atheist - says these words turn the pledge into an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. In 2002, a federal appeals court in California agreed by a...

To judge by the magazines we read, the programs we watch or the music lyrics we hear, it would seem that almost anything goes, these days, when it comes to verbal expression. But that is not quite true. In my book "The Language Police," I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by "bias review committees" employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are "landlord," "cowboy," "brotherhood," "yacht," "cult" and "primitive." Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups —...

<p>The Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations-sponsored school program that aims to become a "universal curriculum" for teaching global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures.</p> <p>The goal is to devise a curriculum to teach "a set of culturally neutral universal values to which all people aspire," based on human rights, equality of the sexes and "open-mindedness to change and obligation to environmental protection and sustainable development."</p>

We are now making the Afghans and the Iraqis pay a terrible price for American political correctness, and the price is being exacted by our diplomats and misnamed "strategists." The fundamental error — enshrined, as the splendid Diane Ravitch has recently explained in her stellar work on American history textbooks — is the belief that American political and civic culture is just one among many, no better and quite likely considerably worse, than most. Hence we have no right to tell anyone, here or elsewhere, how they should behave. This leads inevitably to one of Jerry Bremer's favorite dicta, which...

How the Thought Police Rewrite Textbooks and America's History NewsMax.com Wires Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2003 MIAMI – Diane Ravitch hammers away and hammers away, and even a reader going into her book with a healthy dose of skepticism comes away with the conviction that the "language police" must be fired. It's hard to believe when she says guidelines by the Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley textbook publishers demand that people "over the age of 65 must be fully represented in text and illustrations; there must be a larger number of older women than older men, because 55 percent of older persons are...

Here's the rub: the same children complain incessantly that their textbooks are boring. Whereas they hunger to get a Harry Potter book of nearly 900 pages, they can barely tolerate the equally large books that are assigned in school. What does Harry Potter have that the textbooks don't? Today's textbooks represent a major achievement in visual design. They glitter with charts, photographs, drawings and pedagogical advice to the reader. But they are boring.

Dobbs: Schools Banning Words at 'Alarming Rate' Political correctness has so infected the government schools that classroom textbooks are now vetted for bad words and phrases that may upset people. Lou Dobbs reported Monday night on his CNN program that "the list of words and phrases now banned in American classrooms is rising at an alarming rate." "You may be surprised" to find out the innocent words and phrases now being deemed inadmissible in a classroom, Dobbs said. Dobbs' launch pad was author and education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."...

Political correctness has so infected the public schools that classroom textbooks are now vetted for bad words and phrases that may upset people. Lou Dobbs reported Monday night on his CNN program that "the list of words and phrases now banned in American classrooms is rising at an alarming rate." "You may be surprised" to find out the innocent words and phrases now being deemed inadmissible in a classroom, Dobbs said. Dobbs' launch pad was author and education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn." Here are some examples from Ravitch's...

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<p>Thought police in American schools and rotten history textbooks are as great a threat to American freedoms as al Qaeda terrorists, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer David McCullough said yesterday.</p> <p>"Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual," Mr. McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of the United States' second president, John Adams, told The Washington Times. "I mean, it's really bad."</p>

WorldNetDaily Study: 'Language police' harming childrenActivists helping produce bored, cynical, 'dumbed down' students Posted: May 10, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Activist groups acting as "language police" are exerting increasing control over American schools, resulting in bored, cynical and "dumbed down" children, according to a three-year study of education policy. Diane Ravitch, author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," notes the classic children's story "The Little Engine That Could" has been banned in some U.S. jurisdictions because the train is male, the National Post reported. "The Little Engine that Could" barred because train is male....

Last summer, an enterprising Brooklyn mother of a New York City high school student did a little literary detective work and discovered that the state English exams contained numerous passages from famous authors that had been stripped of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity, and just about anything that would offend anyone anywhere on the planet. So an excerpt from the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer was altered to eliminate any references to Judaism — the essence of his writing. The language in a book by Hispanic writer Ernesto Galarza was cleansed...

California rejected a reading series for gender bias until The Little Engine That Could was given a sex-change operation. Such absurdities fill Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police ", which is about the removal from school books and test questions of anything that might be offensive to anyone on the planet. Historical accuracy often conflicts with political correctness, writes Merle Rubin in the Los Angeles Times (requires registration). A "bias and sensitivity" panel removed a test essay about patchwork quilts made by 19th-century frontier women: "The reviewers objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew,...

Fictional tales involving dinosaurs, disobedient children, coffee, Irish-American policemen and "exemplary upper-class people of bygone days" are being excised from American schoolbooks, according to a newly-published study on classroom policy in the United States. The prohibitions are devised and enforced by educational publishers fearful of losing lucrative state contracts if they break the rules of political correctness, or offend Right-wing fundamentalists. Their self-censorship is backed up by "guidelines" issued by some state governments. The result, according to Diane Ravitch, the author of the study and an assistant secretary of education in the previous Bush administration, is that publishers are flooding...

<p>A textbook review process taking place in states across the country has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers to hot dogs, leaving many to charge educators with distorting history in the name of political correctness.</p> <p>The review process, which is routinely done in many states, is meant to eliminate or replace outdated words or phrases. But what’s happening has a lot of people wondering – quite literally – "Where’s the beef?"</p>

<p>LOS ANGELES — A textbook review process in California has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers (search) to hot dogs, leaving many to charge the state with distorting history in the name of political correctness.</p> <p>The textbook review process, which is routinely done in many states, is meant to eliminate or replace outdated words or phrases. But what’s happening in California has a lot of people wondering – quite literally – "Where’s the beef?"</p>

<p>A textbook review process in California has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers (search) to hot dogs, leaving many to charge the state with distorting history in the name of political correctness. The textbook review process, which is routinely done in many states, is meant to eliminate or replace outdated words or phrases. But what’s happening in California has a lot of people wondering – quite literally – "Where’s the beef?" That’s because many California textbooks will no longer feature pictures of hot dogs, sodas, cakes, butter and other kinds of food that are not considered nutritious. Nor will the books contain any phrases judged to be sexist or politically insensitive.</p>

If you wonder why children in America's failed government school monopolies aren't learning, perhaps it's because P.C.-crazed educrats are too busy acting as left-wing thought police. Out in La-La Land, educrats are rewriting history to appease those who make a career of taking offense at reality. California's textbooks are being changed as follows, according to Fox News Channel: Even though all the signers of Constitution were specimens of those dreaded white males, "Founding Fathers" is a no-no, to be replaced by "The Framers." Pictures of naughty foods such as hot dogs, soft drinks, butter (even though that's better for...

<p>THE LANGUAGE POLICE: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. By Diane Ravitch. Knopf. 243 pages. $24.</p> <p>In her introduction titled "Forbidden Topics, Forbidden Words," Diane Ravitch, the nationally renowned educator and historian, describes how she "stumbled upon an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by test publishers, textbook publishers, states and the federal government." What she next writes should send a shiver down the backs of parents with school children: "What I did not realize was that educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school." The villains in this dumbing down process go by an innocent, virtuous title: "bias and sensitivity review" panel. These panels are tainted by a spreading and threatening disease, PCS, or Politically Correct Syndrome. Panel members — the language police — are routinely hired by publishers and state education agencies to screen every test and textbook for potential "bias." These panels, pressured by lobbies of left and right have, writes Ms. Ravitch, "evolved into an elaborate and widely accepted code of censorship . . . hidden from public sight." The author has collected examples of what some of these bias reviewers have recommended for elimination from school tests. A short biography of Gutzon Borglum, who designed the Mount Rushmore monument consisting of gigantic heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Why shouldn't school children read about this acclaimed national monument? Because the Lakota Indians, said the panel, consider the Black Hills a sacred place to pray and consider the sculpture "an abomination." Out. A passage about owls was eliminated from a proposed test because a panel member said that owls are taboo for the Navajos. Out. California has informed publishers not to include references in their textbooks to "unhealthy" foods such as: french fries, coffee, bacon, butter, ketchup and mayonnaise among others. California, along with Texas, have the largest school populations, so when their book-buying panels command, the four major textbook publishing houses stand at attention. Such prohibitions are promulgated by these powerful "bias and sensitivity review" panels not on the basis of any kind of research findings but "because the topics upset some adults, who assume that they will upset the children in the same way," writes Ms. Ravitch. "The guidelines ensure conformity of language and thought." Four different agencies promulgate the bias guidelines, which have become a preemptive form of censorship: educational publishers, test development companies, scholarly and professional associations and the states themselves. Some of these guidelines are simply mad. One commands textbook authors to acknowledge — this will come as news to American historians — that the United States was "patterned partially after the League of Five Nations, a union formed by five Iroquois nations." Literary classics by William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and others are bowdlerized to a degree I never dreamed possible. The ultimate goal of the academic curriculum, says one publisher's set of guidelines, is "to advance multiculturalism." The most stunning section of the book includes the 1993 guidelines prepared by McGraw Hill, one of the four conglomerate textbook publishers in the country. The basic thrust of the guidelines, says Ms. Ravitch, is not to depict the world "as it is and as it was, but only as the guideline writers would like it to be." She writes: "The bias guidelines are censorship guidelines. Nothing more, nothing less. This language censorship and thought control should be repugnant to those who care about freedom of expression." What the textbook and testing industry have accepted without demur or public discussion is that the object of education is to produce a generation of high school graduates who accept "diversity," which, of course, makes quotas inevitable and racial discrimination admirable. The real world is replaced by a politically correct fairy tale in which it is morally acceptable to "censor" "Romeo and Juliet" or "Macbeth" so as to ensure that the ninth-grade dears don't inhale wicked ideas. What does it matter if the classics are chopped and their authors betrayed? Indignation misplaced? Well then, go to the book's 32-page appendix, "A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes and Topics." There you'll see the meaning of the cultural revolution incited by the "bias and sensitivity panels." Perhaps that appendix ought to be attached to George Orwell's "1984."</p>