How Effective Are Publishers at Delivering Inclusive Materials?

In November, the Virginia Board of Education tossed out its plan to revise the state’s standards of learning for history and social studies. Buoyed by appointments from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin—who made wading into education fights a staple of his campaign—the board scalpelled out many of the proposed revisions that had been intended to create more diverse representation in lessons in Virginia schools. In their place was a more conservative—and much smaller—set of standards, one that didn’t include curriculum frameworks for teachers. This all fueled the impression that it was a political, rather than an educational, decision...

...There’s been a general increase in effort to make published materials more inclusive of more groups of people. Data about publishing titles from the Cooperative Children`s Book Center—a research library, housed at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—shows that there’s been an increase in children’s titles published by and about racial minorities over time...