1. Do you think textbooks are a problem in US schools as far as content?The problem with the United States textbook market is that consolidation has made the process one that has evolved without variety and innovation.
The problems with the lack of a market are two-fold.
1. The book publishers have consolidated into an oligopoly.
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With so much at stake, how did we get into this turgid mess? In the '80s and '90s, a feeding frenzy broke out among publishing houses as they all fought to swallow their competitors. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Houghton Mifflin bought D.C. Heath and Co. McGraw-Hill bought Macmillan. Silver Burdett bought Ginn -- or was it Ginn that bought Silver? It doesn't matter, because soon enough both were devoured by Prentice Hall, which in turn was gobbled up by Simon & Schuster.
Then, in the late '90s, even bigger corporations began circling. Almost all the familiar textbook brands of yore vanished or ended up in the bellies of just four big sharks: Pearson, a British company; Vivendi Universal, a French firm; Reed Elsevier, a British-Dutch concern; and McGraw-Hill, the lone American-owned textbook conglomerate.
The Muddle MachineSo this creates a problem in that not enough companies are competing with each other and they watch each other closely to turn out very similar product.
The Second problem is:
2. Statewide Adoption Procedures
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Adoption states, by contrast, buy new textbooks on a regular cycle, usually every six years, and they allow only certain programs to be sold in their state. They draw up the list at the beginning of each cycle, and woe to publishers that fail to make that list, because for the next 72 months they will have zero sales in that state.
Among the adoption states, Texas, California, and Florida have unrivaled clout. Yes, size does matter. Together, these three have roughly 13 million students in K-12 public schools. The next 18 adoption states put together have about 12.7 million. Though the Big Three have different total numbers of students, they each spend about the same amount of money on textbooks. For the current school year, they budgeted more than $900 million for instructional materials, more than a quarter of all the money that will be spent on textbooks in the nation.
[same link]
There are three large states that use statewide adoption procedures and Texas is the most dominant and most active of these states. (CA only mandates textbooks for K-8) The Texas standards are met and made the de facto national curriculum unless they clash enough with the standards of FLA and or CA. What is referred to in the article of basal material becomes the core of these textbooks for all textbook markets and determines the limited selection available to school districts around the country.
2. Is the process of textbook selection too politically driven?It sure seems to me that the Texas Adoption committee is driven too much by politics and not enough by educators searching for the best available product. The concerns seems to be the lowest common denominator of conflict or potential controversy.
3. Should there be a national curriculum which would standardize textbooks across the country? This appears to be the problem and not the answer. More federal control of education is not the answer for innovation in the educational materials market. In fact less state control over the process would be extremely helpful. Texas, California, and Florida bureaucracies have far too much say in the matter of creating textbooks today.
Hopefully electronic style publishing will make room for more innovation and the entry of aggressive, creative textbook publishers into the market.
This is a problem of a lack of a free market gone bad. Classic economic conservatism is the answer here, not social conservatism or political liberalism.