The Ed Biz

Or, more accurately, the Publishing Side of the K-12 Ed Biz, and how it sucks mightily, being a significant component, I have little doubt, in the dumbification of America. It’s all neatly, scandalously summarized by Tamim Ansary.

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education | Edutopia 

Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I’d be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas.

Not so.

I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, “The books are done and we still don’t have an author! I must sign someone today!”

Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. “Who writes these things?” people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, “No one.” It’s symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, for the anecdotes if nothing else, but Ansary’s main points:

1. Most textbooks are regurgitation of existing textbooks (industry-wide), flavored by the pedagogical-theory-of-the-year.
2. Most textbooks are structured in response to insanely tedious volumes of bullet items from each state. The guidelines are often longer than the product. Fortunately, most states are ignored (see #4).
3. Product variety was further stifled by a mass consolidation of the textbook market in the 80s-90s, leaving, essentially, four US/European firms in the business. Fewer companies means less product (why compete against yourself) written/edited by fewer folks.
4. Most states are ignored because three of them — Texas, California, and Florida — are the only ones that select texts on a state-wide basis (as opposed to, say, New York, where any school district can choose its own textbooks if they fit the state criteria), and the three of them have as many students and the next eighteen, and spend a quarter of the national budget on textbooks. And Texas has more clout that California because the latter only adopts texts statewise for K-8, while Texas does so K-12 (and Texas has dedicated textbook money).
5. Conservative public organizations force Texas to adopt only books that adhere to their standards (“phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values”), while liberal public organizations force California to adopt only books that adhere to their standards (political correctness in pictures and text).
6. The stakes are so high (developing a basal K-8 reading program can cost a publisher $60M) that publishers avoid anything that might cause any controversy, concern, or risk that their books won’t be adopted within the Big Three.

Once, I remember, an editorial group was discussing literary selections to include in a reading anthology. We were about to agree on one selection when someone mentioned that the author of this piece had drawn a protest at a Texas adoption because he had allegedly belonged to an organization called One World Council, rumored to be a “Communist front.”

At that moment, someone pointed out another story that fit our criteria. Without further conversation, we chose that one and moved on. Only in retrospect did I realize we had censored the first story based on rumors of allegations. Our unspoken thinking seemed to be, If even the most unlikely taint existed, the Gablers would find it, so why take a chance?

Self-censorship like this goes unreported because we the censors hardly notice ourselves doing it. In that room, none of us said no to any story. We just converged around a different story. The dangerous author, incidentally, was celebrated best-selling science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Ansary has some suggestions on how to solve the problem — more modular publishing solutions (for content), changing how textbook purchases are funded to allow more local control, curricula that are inherently extensible by third parties — but, unfortunately, this misses the fact that nobody has a real incentive to change the system. 

More modular publishing and extensibility is great, for teachers and students, but provides no clear advantage to publishers (“You mean you want us to give third parties a piece of the pie? Why should we?”). More local control reduces the power of state educational politicians and bureaucrats, in turn reducing the influence of the interest groups that control them. California and Texas and Florida like controlling the textbook market; they have no incentive to change.

Which is a shame, because the production models of the indie publishing community (as Doyce has been discussing in recent months) and publishers as “Pedagogical Operating Systems Publishers” that others can build off of (as Ansary describes) have tremendous potential in an ideal world. Unfortunately, the Ed Biz is hardly an ideal world.

Pity that.