Skim 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 Historytextbook, 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.