Textbooks have an enormous influence on the curriculum of schools across the nation. Many issues are taken into consideration when selecting textbooks. Textbooks that present students with a multicultural curriculum are often at the center of debate among school administrators. This journal presents a series of articles based on interviews with experts. After an introduction, the first article is "Whose Knowledge Do We Teach?" (Anne Turnbough Lockwood). In it Michael W. Apple, the distinguished scholar of textbooks, describes the typical adoption practices in adoption states and explains how those states' processes influence not only the selection practices in other states, but the content of textbooks as well. Apple asks whose knowledge should be taught and calls for fundamental systemic change before textbooks will improve. He also unravels the complicated politics that often exist within adoption states and explains how they affect the content of textbooks, pointing out that the least satisfied educational consumer will probably be the educator in an innercity who is working with a multicultural population. The second article, "The DeFacto Curriculum" (Anne Turnbaugh Lockwood) discusses P. Kenneth Komoski, the Executive Director and founder of the Educational Products Information Exchange Institute, who believes that the key to improving textbooks can be found in taking action to improve their instructional effectiveness--a point that he argues is seldom considered by publishers. The third article, "Political Debates, Classroom Realities" (Anne Turnbaugh Lockwood), discusses Jules Levine, a principal from New York City's Seward Park High School, who explains the realities of textbook selection in a nonadoption state and describes how those practices affect the strongly multicultural and bilingual population of his school. The issue concludes with, "Commentary" (Richard A. Rossmiller). (KDP)