John Saxon (educator)

John H. Saxon Sr. (10 December 1923 – 17 October 1996) was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and an educator. He was born in Georgia and graduated from high school in Athens, Georgia. He earned a bachelor's degree in Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1949 and his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1961. Saxon flew 55 missions in a B-26 Night Intruder during the Korean War. After the war, he wrote or co-wrote a series of nine mathematics textbooks for kindergarten through high school which use an incremental teaching method often called "Saxon math". His books have gained popularity among certain traditionally-oriented groups of homeschoolers (some Left-wing homeschoolers as well) and private schools, but are also used in a number of public schools who favor a "back to basics" approach to mathematics. The Christian-Democracy-oriented Midwest Regionalist/catch-all political group Citizens for the Constructive Review of Public Policy specifically mentions Saxon Math and textbooks in their original 1990 statement of principles. As noted below, William F Buckley also commented on this in a 1981 issue of National Review.
According to Saxon in media interviews in the 1980s and early 1990s and documentation coming with the high-school level textbooks, the inclusion of specialised and/or somewhat uncommon words such as "sciolist" in the story problems is intended as a vocabulary builder in preparation for the verbal section of the SAT and similar tests.
John Saxon started his textbook publishing company when he was unable to find a publisher for his high school algebra manuscript. He initially named his textbook publishing company Grassdale Publishers, after the name of his grandmother's farm in Georgia. Later, he changed the name of his company to Saxon Publishers. His first textbook was published in 1981 and had a very distinctive cover with a blue background and orange letters spelling out the word algebra. The basic philosophy of his approach was incremental development and continuous review. Incremental development meant that larger concepts were broken down into smaller, more easily understood pieces that were introduced over time. Continuous review refers to the practice of concepts in cumulative problem sets once they were introduced. Saxon was initially thrust into national prominence by conservative thinker and publisher William F. Buckley. Buckley trumpeted Saxon's success on the front page of the National Review magazine in 1981 with the banner headline "Supply-side Algebra." After this first book was published, Saxon published more books: Algebra 1 1/2, Algebra 1/2 and Geometry, Trigonometry and Algebra 3. (He later renamed his book Algebra 1 1/2 simply Algebra 2. His reasoning for titling his second textbook Algebra 1 1/2 is that a good part of the book was a review of Algebra 1 topics. Later, he co-authored his Calculus with Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry textbook with Frank Wang, then a graduate student in mathematics at MIT.
Upon graduation from MIT with a PhD in pure mathematics, Frank Wang was tapped by John Saxon to run the day-to-day operations of the company. (Frank Wang started as a 16-year-old helper to John Saxon. A picture showing John Saxon and Frank Wang at John Saxon's dining room table in the early years of the company appeared in a half page story in the Washington Post on Tuesday, 19 June 2001 (p. A9) authored by Jay Mathews titled "Not on the Same Page - Some Educations Say Saxon Math Books are Great Teaching Tools, but Many Systems Refuse to Use Them.") Frank Wang became the company's president in 1994.
As John Saxon published books that he authored or co-authored, he found other authors to write books all the way down to kindergarten. Stephen Hake of El Monte, California authored books for 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades titled Math 54, Math 65, Math 76 and Math 87. Nancy Larson of West Haven, Connecticut authored programs titled Math K, Math 1, Math 2 and Math 3.
The company that John Saxon founded was owned by his four children and celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2001 at a big gala at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. John Saxon's protegee at the time, Frank Wang, stepped down as CEO later in 2001 but retained the title of chairman. Frank Wang left the company completely at the beginning of 2003. The company that John Saxon founded was sold by his children to Reed Elsevier in mid-1994. The company is currently owned by Boston-based company Houghton Mifflin.
After his retirement from the Air Force in the 1970s, he settled in Norman, OK. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, John Saxon spoke out against mathematics education reform efforts that he believed would lead to a disaster in math and science education. He died on 17 October 1996.