By Joseph Erunke, Abuja
The Federal Government has drawn a fresh battle line against substandard textbooks in Nigerian schools, declaring that instructional materials scoring below 70 per cent will no longer qualify for national ranking.
The new standard followed the first-ever national textbook assessment and ranking exercise conducted by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, NERDC, which exposed disturbing quality gaps in books submitted for use in Nigerian classrooms, with some scoring as low as 25 per cent.
Receiving the assessment report and ranked list in Abuja on Friday, Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, said the government could no longer tolerate the use of poorly written, inaccurate or curriculum-incompatible textbooks to educate Nigerian children.
In a blunt assessment of the situation, Alausa declared that some textbooks currently finding their way into primary and secondary schools were simply unacceptable.
