Late in the year I heard of a job opening at another company that was based in Westerville, and I leaped at it. The company was McGraw-Hill's Glencoe division, a major publisher of schoolbooks for grades 6 through 12. The job -- as a "project worker" in one of Glencoe's editorial departments -- was a menial one, but the prospect of working for a publishing company excited me and even seemed glamorous. Though my daily work would include a lot of mundane tasks, I would acquire some experience in the publishing industry, and I would be able to see how expert writers and editors created the schoolbooks that delivered big ideas to young minds. With a little luck, I might even have opportunities to do editorial research or to perform other editorial tasks that an English major would enjoy.
I got the job, and in December 1994 I joined Glencoe's social-studies department, which produced books in history, geography, economics and some other fields. I worked in the social-studies department for about ten months, and I kept a personal journal of what I saw and did there. Much of my work during those ten months was related to the production of certain versions of five books: Glencoe World Geography [see note 1, below], History of a Free Nation [note 2], Human Heritage: A World History [note 3], United States Government: Democracy in Action and Geography: The World and Its People [note 4].
From my first day on the job, my work consisted largely of making and distributing photocopies. I photocopied the raw typescripts that came in from Glencoe writers, I photocopied typescripts that had been revised by editors, I photocopied typescripts with revised revisions, I photocopied page layouts and revised layouts, and I photocopied page proofs. I became so skillful that I was able to run two copying machines simultaneously. I soon declared myself to be the Copier Queen -- and as I watched the machines consuming ream after ream of paper, I came to regard myself as a major contributor to global deforestation.
Besides photocopying the typescripts and other Glencoe documents, I photocopied schoolbooks produced by Glencoe's competitors. The first time I had to do this, I questioned my supervisor: Why did we need photocopies of other publishers' books? The supervisor replied that the photocopies would be sent to Glencoe's writers. Apparently, the people who wrote about history, geography, economics and civics for Glencoe had to see how other people wrote about history, geography, economics and civics for Prentice Hall or for McDougal Littell or for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. I thought about that as I photocopied a competitor's history textbook from beginning to end: If Glencoe's writers did their "writing" by appropriating or imitating material found in other companies' books, how could Glencoe's books be the best in the world?
I devoted many hours to copying other companies' books, and this always made me feel as if I were committing an act of questionable propriety, if not an actual crime.
Sometimes, if I wasn't making and distributing photocopies, I did indeed get to do some editorial tasks. My first editorial work consisted of checking page numbers in the index of a book that was nearing completion. Later I got to rewrite some glossary definitions, with the goal of making them shorter and sharper, and to check some of the instructions that appeared in the teacher's editions of certain books. I even got to attend editorial meetings so that I could report on my rewriting and my checking.
The editors were busy people. They sat in their cubicles with piles of papers and lots of colored pens, and they seemed always to have important projects in progress. I regarded these people with awe when I first started working for Glencoe, because I associated the title "editor" with an image of a knowledgeable, exacting person who checked the content of written material, did research and rewriting to make the material accurate and precise, and ensured that the material was coherent, literate and readable before it got into print. My sense of awe faded, though, as I came to understand that Glencoe editors didn't quite match my vision. As far as I was aware, they didn't undertake any research into history or geography or anything else -- and as far as I was aware, they didn't check the accuracy of material that the free-lance writers sent in. Maybe they assumed that everything delivered by the free-lance writers was correct and up-to-date, or maybe they just didn't care.
Glencoe editors evidently functioned as auxiliary members of the sales department, for they were concerned chiefly with making sure that Glencoe books would look appealing to teachers and would foster the selling of ancillary products. The ancillary products included printed materials like teacher's guides, activity booklets, assessment packages and maps, along with "media tie-ins" -- audiocassettes, transparencies, videotapes, CD-ROMs and videodisks. As the editors worked to make Glencoe's textbooks attractive, they wrote snappy sidebars, wrote quiz questions, chose or planned appropriate illustrations, planned for media tie-ins, and fussed over layouts. They tweaked words, they counted words, and they tweaked the word-counts. They arranged and rearranged paragraphs, sidebars and illustrations on pages, and they tweaked the color schemes, like so many interior decorators. ("Should the credenza go over here or over there? Should the color of the curtains match the color of the carpet, or should the curtains match the lilies in the Monet? Which would be more dramatic?")
As the development of each book progressed, the editors who were working on that book met with senior editorial honchos and with sales-and-marketing people. I attended several such meetings that focused on media tie-ins. I also was present during several meetings in which editors and honchos squabbled over the illustrations for a history book. This was an uninspiring spectacle, and it left me wondering whether any of the editors or honchos actually knew anything about history. In my journal entry for 18 July 1995, I asked: Do those people care about what they are doing, or are they just pursuing the almighty buck? When I finally realized that Glencoe's editors were little more than paper-pushers, I felt dumb for not having seen it earlier.
Well before I resigned from my job at Glencoe, I knew that the Glencoe variety of educational publishing was not for me, and that I would have to seek a career elsewhere. I might have felt differently if I thought that Glencoe viewed its schoolbooks as important educational tools, not merely as products for creating revenue. But everything I observed gave me the impression that the company viewed its books entirely in terms of dollar signs. Obscure writers recycled old content, from old Glencoe books or from books sold by other publishers, while the editorial paper-pushers concentrated on creating flashy layouts, dizzying displays of illustrations, and lots of media tie-ins. When they needed new editions, they took old editions and jazzed them up with new color schemes and new graphics.
In its own way, the work done by the editors was demanding -- and the editors, in their own way, were diligent and conscientious. But they didn't seem to recognize that schoolbooks should be accurate and reliable as well as attractive, or that the editing of schoolbooks might require some attention to whether the material presented to students was well written and comprehensible.
Although I observed the development of various Glencoe books, I didn't really comprehend, at the time, how poorly written they were or how badly they mauled and obfuscated the subject matter. I didn't have time to read the books' narratives in any normal way, or to assess the "information" that the books conveyed to students, because I usually was preoccupied with some narrow task that required me to focus on such things as punctuation, definitions, pagination or pedagogic notes. Since then, however, I have done some real reading of Glencoe material, and I also have seen some journalistic reports about the state of schoolbooks and the schoolbook industry.
Schoolbooks are expensive items. Shouldn't decisions about schoolbook purchases be made carefully, by people who can tell a good book from a bad one? Apparently not, judging from the commercial success of Glencoe's products and of similar products sold by other big publishers. This isn't to say that all teachers are so dumb and so gullible that they don't see what is going on. I have heard of many teachers who have compiled their own, corrected versions of grossly erroneous books -- after the books had been bought and paid-for by naive school-district officials, and after the publishers of the defective books had taken the districts' money.
I left Glencoe in October 1995. I now work as a librarian's assistant at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, in a library that keeps a big collection of schoolbooks for use by students who are majoring in education. The books are supposed to help the students learn the craft of teaching, and the students check them out by the armload. I wonder: Do the students recognize how bad the books are? And if they recognize it, does it make them angry?
Editor's notes
Kristina S. Cooper is a librarian's assistant at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and a graduate student in the Department of English at Gannon University (Erie, Pennsylvania).
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