Who Is Norma Gabler And Why Should We Care

If you ever used a textbook in a school, especially a public school you were influenced by Norma and her husband Mel.

From The NY Times:

Norma Gabler, Leader of Crusade on Textbooks, Dies at 84
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 1, 2007

Norma Gabler, a Texas homemaker who recoiled at material in her children’s textbooks and became the public face of a crusade with her husband to rid schoolbooks of content they considered antifamily, anti-American and anti-God, died on July 22 in Phoenix. She was 84.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, her son James said.

From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche in the nation’s conservative pantheon. For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country.

The reason was Texas’ power to be a national template; the state board chooses textbooks for the entire state, and of the 20 or so states that choose books statewide, only California is bigger than Texas. It is difficult and costly for publishers to put out multiple editions, so a book rejected by Texas might not be printed at all.

In a 1982 article in The New York Times, Anthony T. Podesta, executive director of People for the American Way, a liberal group, said, “Texas has the buying power to influence the development of teaching materials nationwide, and a textbook edition chosen for Texas often becomes the sole edition available.”

The Gablers were first to seize on the Texas textbook process as a means of pushing their conservative principles, and their success baffled and angered civil liberties advocates and progressive educators. Publishers, with much to lose if Texas rejected their books, were often willing to make changes to please the Gablers.

Richard Morgan, president of Macmillan’s school division, said in a 1983 interview with The Times, “Not making the list in Texas is not a good sign.”

Mrs. Gabler, always with a smile and careful, precise diction, usually testified at textbook hearings rather than her shyer husband, Mel. She argued for more instruction in morality, free-enterprise economics, phonetics and weaknesses in evolutionary theory.

The Gablers had a two-barreled strategy: in addition to pressing issues of ideology, interpretation and philosophy, the Gablers ferreted out errors of fact. In 2001, Time magazine reported that their “scroll of shame” of textbook mistakes since 1961 was 54 feet long. In the early 1990s, Texas fined publishers about $1 million for failing to remove hundreds of factual errors the Gablers had found in 11 history books.

An example: A textbook said that Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had supported the tariff of 1816. He opposed it.

But the Gablers’ most important battles concerned bigger issues, like making publishers define marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman.

The couple’s interest in textbooks began when James, at 14, had to memorize the Gettysburg Address and turned to an encyclopedia, he said in an interview. The words “under God,” part of the address, were shown in a picture of the Lincoln Memorial, but were omitted in the text as published. His parents blanched.

Soon, the couple were poring over textbooks, something they said few parents ever did, and finding lots to offend. They raised objections at the local P.T.A.
Why did a history textbook give more space to the French Revolution than to the American Revolution? Were not Vietnam and Watergate overemphasized? Was Robin Hood a hero, as the text claimed, or a dangerous advocate of income redistribution?

From the kitchen in Hawkins, about 100 miles east of Dallas, their piles and piles of books and notes spread throughout their house. They worked by what they called the three p’s — prayer, preparation and persistence — as they geared up for their once-a-year trips to Austin, the state capital, to ride herd on textbooks.

There, each academic subject — English, say — is reviewed on an eight-year cycle in a system established a century ago to create an organized buying system to negotiate lower prices. It was also intended to improve the quality of books used in rural areas.

Norma Elizabeth Rhodes was born in Garrett, Tex., on June 16, 1923. She did not go to college. Her husband of 62 years, Melvin Nolan Freeman Gabler, went for a year. He worked in the oilfields, served in the Air Force during World War II, was a clerk for 39 years for Esso, now part of Exxon-Mobil, and died in 2004.

In addition to James, who lives in Phoenix, Mrs. Gabler is survived by another son, Paul, of Houston, and six grandchildren.

Neal Frey, who has worked with Educational Research Analysts since 1972 and is now president, said that Mrs. Gabler’s larger public role was deceptive.

“Mr. Gabler wore the pants in that family, and Mrs. Gabler wanted it that way,” he said in an interview.
Together, they were “the most effective textbook censors in the country,” Creation/Evolution, a publication of the National Center for Science Education, said in 1982. It went on to point out that while the Gablers derided textbooks that left out alternatives to evolution, they opposed alternative interpretations of American history they deemed negative. They objected to an Edgar Allan Poe story as gruesome. Texts that raised questions without firm answers were suspect.

Famously, in 1973, they flinched at a fifth-grade American history text that devoted more attention to Marilyn Monroe than to George Washington.

“We’re not quite ready for Marilyn Monroe as the mother of our country,” Mrs. Gabler said.