Photo by Rob Shenk.

Anyone out there looking for a job in factchecking? If so, it sure sounds like Five Ponds Press could use a couple. Five Ponds is the publisher of a series of textbooks purchased by the state of Virginia which contain a multitude of errors — some laughable (like getting the year the U.S. entered World War I wrong), some not so much (such as the claim that “thousands” of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War).

The state ordered a review of the Our Virginia: Past and Present textbook which is used in some, but not all, of the state’s classrooms after The Washington Post reported on the claim regarding black Confederate soldiers. The Post reports today that the review, which involved five professional historical scholars, yielded a list of errors from the text which was “several pages long.” One historian told the Post that “any literate person could have opened that book and immediately found a mistake.” Ouch.

According to the report, Joy Masoff, who wrote the textbook, “said at the time that she found references” to the black Confederate soldier claim while “during research on the Internet.” (Masoff’s other credits include titles like Oh, Yikes! History’s Grossest, Wackiest Moments.) Given this, the state probably could have saved some money and just told the kids to check Wikipedia for their history lessons, right?

The irony here is that the Old Dominion’s Department of Education maintains one of the strictest standards of learning in the entire country, which often leads the state to purchase texts which are specifically contoured to the tight guidelines. But from the Post’s report, it appears as if the panel of reviewers who are slated to check textbooks against those guidelines aren’t really vetting the books for factual accuracy — only making sure that they cover the subject areas which are required by the standard. One wonders, exactly, how the state thought it would be able to effectively police standards if the people tasked with doing so aren’t actually, you know, reading the books to which they apply.