Education plays a vital role in shaping our collective memory and understanding of the world. Recognizing this influence, political and religious actors have long sought to shape school curricula to reflect their values and ideologies. In the United States, school choice programs such as charter schools and voucher initiatives have expanded parents’ ability to select educational environments that align with their values or religious beliefs. Despite the growing prevalence of these programs and the public investment they attract, we lack comprehensive evidence on how curricular content differs across schools. Motivated by this gap, in this paper, the authors examine popular textbooks used across a variety of educational settings in the United States.
The authors examine state-adopted public school textbooks in California and Texas, two states that serve the largest student populations in the US, as well as curricular materials often adopted in religious private schools and home school contexts. Using computational social science methods, including artificial intelligence tools, they analyze the content of these textbooks to assess what topics are covered, which individuals and groups are highlighted, and how those groups and values are portrayed. Their analysis focuses on textbooks in the foundational subjects of Reading, Science, and Social Studies, specifically those intended for third and fifth grade students. Keep scrolling to explore their results: