At the corporate level, textbook companies rival liberal arts campuses in their progressive orthodoxies.
S kim through the voting section of McGraw Hill’s civics textbook, and you’ll see images from Hillary Clinton’s and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns (whilst any campaign photos of a certain recent victor who won the popular election are notably absent). Grab the same publisher’s World History textbook, and you’ll read that the First Intifada was a “mostly unarmed uprising against Israeli occupation,” conveniently omitting discussion of the 200 murdered Jews. A small oversight, some might say.
Despite conservative efforts to remove DEI, CRT, and other suspect ideologies from classrooms, progressivism remains entrenched in the institutions of American education, including schools of education, accreditors and authorizers, school boards, curricula, unions (duh), publications and conferences, and professional organizations.
Many of these have faced scrutiny, but the multibillion-dollar textbook industry — dominated by major players like Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill — has gone largely unexamined. And scrutiny they deserve. At the corporate level, they rival liberal arts campuses in their progressive orthodoxies.
In 2022, Pearson Education launched the Pride 365 initiative — intended to incorporate LGBTQ+ themes into all classrooms every day of the year. Their guide on LGBT+ language inclusivity — complete with student worksheets — teaches children about non-binary gender pronouns and LGBTQ+ activism, encouraging a shift from “grammatically gendered” to gender-fluid language, promising that their textbooks will make this change soon.
Scholastic may be best known for their book fairs. But instead of popularizing books about puppies and fairies, its webstore now promotes LGBTQIA+ graphic novels to children as young as four years old.
The commitment to progressive dogma extends beyond gender. In 2021, Houghton Mifflin announced its support of Black Lives Matter, establishing a Black Alliance employee group. Cengage, another leading producer of educational content, has also committed to reinventing education, issuing a slew of press releases on just about every social justice cause imaginable.
These ideological allegiances aren’t limited to public messaging. Pearson’s editorial policy includes a commitment to “underpin all our decision making with a DE&I lens,” noting an online bias reporting portal for students, educators, and customers.
Meanwhile, McGraw Hill has an “Equity Advisory Board,” which includes a children’s pride parade organizer, a scholar of social justice math, and a “belonging and inclusion facilitator.” These luminaries are tasked with advising on everything from corporate policies to product development.
This progressive bent among the corporate office trickles down into student-facing materials. In 2018, Fox News reported on a Pearson AP History textbook (the edition still approved on the College Board’s website) that depicts Trump’s election as a racist, white majority reacting in fear to the ethnic diversity of the country and Trump himself as mentally unstable.
In the closing paragraphs of another AP-approved textbook, the author quotes economist Joseph Stiglitz, who suggests, “The United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country” and proposes that the American dream is a myth. Progressivism is always a force for good, conservatism is largely a reactionary tic, and Reagan was mostly a failure who only managed to increase our deficits.
McGraw Hill’s online math curriculum, Reveal Math, centers on social and emotional learning, opening every grade level with a unit on math mindsets where students discuss how math makes them feel, tell their math biographies, and establish collectively agreed-upon class norms (instead of adult-established rules). When Florida took up the mantle of reviewing its vendor lists more carefully, they uncovered one math textbook that used a racial-prejudice test to teach students how to add and subtract polynomials, the lesson prompting students by asking “What? Me? Racist?”
Selling woke curricula to schools is a lucrative industry. Consider just one district: Houston Independent School District. According to their vendor payment portal, they’ve given over $4 million to McGraw Hill, $15 million to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and $4.3 million to Pearson since 2020. California doles out over $500 million to publishers every year, according to a press release from the Golden State’s Department of Education.
Bias in the media is easy to identify and inoculate against; if the New York Times runs a preposterously biased headline, anyone with an internet connection can contest it. But publishers hide their materials behind paywalls, and many in-class readings never make it home for parental review.
And the implications of curriculum bias are far more consequential. Whereas many adults have in-built skepticism, children don’t readily question the “facts” they learn in textbooks, instead considering them tomes of objectivity. That we have allowed one side of the political spectrum to author the vast majority of instructional guides and textbooks for our children is alarming.
To their credit, these textbooks shy away from the radical conclusions of Howard Zinn or the 1619 Project. Even so, the subtle narrative that one gets as you read their chapters — one of big government ever-championing over conservative recalcitrance — can prove more noxious.
Unfortunately, it will take far more than a few executive orders to reroute American schools back onto a path of traditional academics and political neutrality. It’ll require hundreds of ongoing course corrections: parents reviewing homework and other class materials, school boards carefully vetting textbooks and curricula, and local legislators ridding state standards and approved vendor lists of ideologically charged content.
It should raise eyebrows — and a serious response — when our curriculum developers are tweeting about identity politics and releasing guides on the equity-industrial complex. Their job is to provide fact-based resources, not agitprop for the indoctrination of children. When it comes to activism masquerading as education, the publishing industry provides a textbook example of what not to do.
Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute, where Anna Low is a program manager.