Has the Amount of Information on African Americans Increased in Secondary School American History Books?

With new discussions and debates about the changes needed to the curriculum of the United States Education System, especially in the area of history which scholars say that the curriculum leans toward an euro-centric model of teaching with information about European Countries and the Anglo-Saxon move to the United States. I wanted to look at American History and analyze it to see how much information is in books about African Americans and the details of the African American Culture in the United States.

In previous studies it was found that most major changes in the curriculum to add African Americans in the late 1960’s. Since this period the appearance of more information on African Americans has surfaced in History Books, but some scholars say that it is not enough. In California, the state curriculum commission rejected 16 of 26 new history and social-studies textbooks, on the basis that the books fail to focus enough attention on minorities. (Tifft, 95) Cameron McCarthy states that “Ultimately, there is a desperate need for schools, school districts, and university teacher education programs to develop strategies for interpreting the urban context by closely collaborating with minority parents and communities. These strategies should lead to specific curriculum and instructional initiatives that give priority to the educational needs of disadvantaged youth (297).” This type of multicultural education movement gets much support from liberal than conservatives. Multiculturalist argue that mainstream American education forges a homogeneous American culture, ignoring the important contributions of people of non-Western cultural heritages. Nobles expresses that Afro centric curriculum should be a tool for affirming African and African American culture (5).

This research intends to link the amount of African American Content in history books that the State of Arkansas uses in 8th and 9th grade classrooms. The design will have a dependent variable of African American content in textbooks published at present time and the control variable will be African American content in textbooks published in the 1970’s. The dependent

variable and control variable will both be measured on the nominal scale. I believe that this research will show that the amount of content will be greater than the 1970’s, but only by a small percentage. The criterion for selection will come from the list of selected books that can be used in the Arkansas Public School System through a list compiled by the Arkansas Dept. of Education. Content Analysis will be used for this design since I will be looking at amount of content in books. The books will be analyzed through inches of text content and then the inches will be converted to pages through

taking that average number of inches per page of the textbooks. There will be no sampling plan due to all of the books being searched for content analysis to provide for a true representation of the data. Manifest coding will be used highly reliable because you can train assistants to do it, and it ensures reliability. After the research is done it will be retested to look for face and content validity. Chi-Square will be used for analysis due to it measuring