Anyone interested in the future of textbooks should take a look at Jay Mathews’ “Class Struggle” column “Why Don’t We Fix Our Textbooks?” in yesterday’s Washington Post. Why are most K-12 textbooks in America so mediocre? It’s in large part due to the adoption process used in 21 states, including the biggies Texas, Florida and California, in which textbooks are selected by statewide committee rather than by teachers themselves. The ones that make it through are like processed cheese, politically censored by pressure groups, and written in dumbed-down language in “chop shops” at the “el-hi publishing cartel” – Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, and Houghton Mifflin. Even states and schools that are not directly subject to these policies are affected, since the dominant textbooks on the market are the ones produced in the mediocrity mills of the adoption committees.
Mathews points to an excellent report by David Whitman called “The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption”, published by The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which gives a good overview of the situation. It’s fascinating to learn that adoption committees first appeared during Reconstruction when Southern States pressed for the right to publish their own version of the Civil War. Today, it’s political correctness and economy of scale that guide textbook selection, with cranky pressure groups forever chipping away at perceived infelicities, and publishers looking for formulaic bestsellers appealing to the broadest possible audience. Meanwhile, high-quality alternatives from smaller presses struggle to survive.
Peppered throughout the article are bits of a conversation between Mathews and Diane Ravitch, author of the introduction to the “Mad, Mad World” report, and of “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn”:
“I asked Ravitch a couple of days ago if there has been any progress lately. She said California, Florida and Texas have all considered bills that would weaken the adoption process, but so far there has been little change. She said she thinks the best hope is that the Internet and electronic publishing will eventually render obsolete the textbook giants and their adoption panel co-conspirators.”
There is reason to hope that digital technologies might usher in a textbook renaissance, boosting quality and diversity while dramatically reducing cost (see Textbook Ripoff report), and ultimately redefining education in the digital era. And if the open source model is embraced, then textbook adoption might actually evolve into an interesting process of peer review and creative collaboration. But there is equal reason to fear that the el-hi publishing cartel will cut innovators off at the pass and dominate the e-textbook market through DRM and extortionist content-update schemes.
Dave Munger summed it up well in a conversation we had last month about laptops as textbooks:
“In my dream scenario, the big publishers will embrace open source. They will become service companies, doing contract work to customize texts for particular markets.
“I imagine what will really happen is that publishers will fight this tooth and nail, like Microsoft is doing with Linux. It will be an all-or-nothing battle, with one side winning and the other losing.”