Scientists have found no evidence that natural forces have contributed to our planet’s current global warming problem, but a middle school student reading a crisp new book from the nation’s top science textbook publisher might think otherwise. “Due to both human and natural activities,” the child would read, “the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has increased.”
Because Texas is among the largest textbook markets in the U.S., the state has had long-standing influence over textbooks published nationwide. That means content written with Texan politics—and the state’s fossil-fuel industry—in mind winds up in classrooms across the country. Textbooks often have a long shelf life, so the approved materials will likely be read by children into the 2030s.
To examine how political tensions have affected the upcoming textbooks, I reviewed the climate content in the new middle school science textbook sets put forth by the three largest K–12 publishers: McGraw Hill, Savvas Learning Company and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , which together accounted for four of every five textbooks in U.S. public middle school science classrooms as of 2018.
Outside of the eighth-grade chapters specific to recent climate change, the subject appears in a smattering of other places but not always robustly. In two places, McGraw Hill’s seventh-grade book asserts that both human and natural activities have recently increased carbon levels in the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, when McGraw Hill presented the changes it planned to make to these drafts, it included tweaks to the eighth-grade climate change material. In one case, the original language said:
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