Error-prone science textbooks: Who's to blame?

The 2005 article, "A Textbook Case of Junk Science," by journalist and lawyer Pamela Winnick - whose A Jealous God I am reading - excoriates the all-too-frequent errors in textbooks:

--------
Members of the scientific elite are occasionally heard blaming religion for the sorry state of science education. But it isn't priests, rabbis, or mullahs who write the textbooks that misrepresent evolution, condescend to disadvantaged groups, misstate key concepts of physics, show the equator running through the United States, and come close to excising white males from the history of science. Young Americans need to learn science, and they need to distinguish it clearly from Algonquin myth.
______

Ah, bittersweet memories! I used to work in textbook publishing, when not doing anything else. I understand all too well how those errors get into the books and why they stay there.
For the most part, we editors were only really appreciated when we could work some political correctness fad into the text. We tried to produce good material, but speaking for myself, I was often just marking time.

I ended up running away and joining the surplus (of writers, that is).

Winnick's A Jealous God is a pretty sharp takedown of the science elite over the past 40 years. Not to all tastes, but I greatly enjoyed it, as I lived through many of the events, and know that she has her facts straight. I will shortly review it and link to the review. I will also be interviewing her, as she appears briefly in the Expelled movie.