In a rare cease-fire in education's long-running war of ideas, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation announced this week that it has reached a negotiated settlement with the major publishers of history textbooks and state textbook adoption agencies. "For the states, the cost of purchasing new and accurate history textbooks would be astronomical," said Foundation research director Justin Torres. "And it would take years to revise the books. So we thought, these kids don't know anything about history anyway; why not just change it? They'll never know the difference." The settlement is a surprising turn for Fordham, which recently released a report faulting history textbooks for inaccuracies (see A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks, http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=329). Explaining the move, Torres said, "We realized that this wasn't as important a debate as we first thought. In all honesty, nobody really remembers what happened during the American Revolution. If someone comes to me and says, 'Hey, I was there and this isn't what was going on at all,' maybe we'll revisit the issue." Larry Raindrop of the Association of American Publishers noted, "Changing history is a lot easier than changing our books. After all, they've already been printed."
"Foundation to support revisionist history," Fordham Foundation press release, March 31, 2004, http://www.oceanbluepools.com/hamster/