Why do other states follow Texas in what school books to buy when they rank 49th in SAT scores?

Great Debates
1

The decisions of the Texas Board Of Education school system re what books to pick loom huge in their influenceon the book buying options and decisions for other states because many publishers tailor their books to fit what the Texas school system wants.

If the scholastic performance in Texas is so poor relative to the rest of the nation why don’t the other states take this into account before following the lead of Texas. I get that they’re big, but why don’t the other states step back and look at the Texas results before committing to the same books?

2

Texas buys a LOT of textbooks, and we usually have a lot of religious/ social conservatives on the board that makes the recommendations. These conservatives dig in their heels and won’t allow Texas to purchase anything that goes against their beliefs. So, the textbook printers tailor their texts to what will sell in Texas. Then the printers don’t make a different edition of the texts for more reasonable states. The other states should get together and demand better texts, but they won’t. Printing two or more editions of a text would make each edition more expensive. It’s easier to just go along.

Speaking as a Texan, yeah, our state education standards DO leave something to be desired. We have a lot of fundamentalists here, and they find our curriculum to be too liberal.

Personally, I’d love to see a NATIONAL standard on curriculum, and what a high school student needs to know before being allowed to graduate. But then, I hate football and pickup trucks, so I’m not your typical Texan.

3

Wow. That must warm the cockles of those asinine Bible thumper’s hearts, to know that they are not just imposing their morality on people in their own state, but on the nation as a whole. This is a disgusting situation. :mad:

4

California is the other state that drives textbook material. Unfortunately the two don’t average out… The other 48 just take what is offered.

5

I make a good chunk of my income by writing textbooks-and-other-educational-materials.

While TX has a great deal of influence in the textbook market, it’s increasingly common for publishers to put out multiple editions of books, each designed for a different state. How many states depends on budgets and so on. Typically, though, you’ll have a “national” edition that is meant for the so-called “open territory” states, where there is no centralized state agency that approves textbooks and textbook choices are made on a district-by-district basis (Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania are examples of open adoption states, which are most common in the Midwest and East). Then there’ll be a “Texas” edition, which reflects Texas educational standards (and Texas values), and often other editions for other “adoption” states as well (the states with centralized boards: TX, CA, FL, and others, mostly in the South and West).

How different the textbooks are depends again on budgets. I recently worked on a text designed for the state of Georgia, which was a 50% revision–that is, we could make meaningful changes to half the pages in the National book. Arkansas was getting a version of its own, which was about a 25% revision IIRC (I didn’t work on it). Florida gets more than 50%, I believe, and TX and CA get pretty much whatever they want.

Part of the thing is that standards can be very different from state to state. As a silly example, 1st graders in Texas are expected to be able to use the numbers 1-99. 1st graders in most states are expected to use 1-100. So you’re putting together a page in which you want kids to practice adding 10 to a number that’s a multiple of 10 (50+10=60…). Texas isn’t going to like it if you ask them to add 10 to 90. OTOH, other states will wonder why you aren’t asking the kids to go beyond 99. Will Texas reject the whole program because of one problem that asks kids to do something beyond the scope of the standards?..Probably not. But publishers are understandably edgy about such things.

Fractions are another example. In first grade, TX wants all fractions to be in word form only (that is, one third instead of 1/3). Some other states expect kids to write and read fractions at this stage using numbers. And I’m pretty sure that a couple of states (Michigan? Don’t quote me) leave all formal work with fractions to second grade. That doesn’t mean a teacher won’t cover fractions if they’re in the textbook, just that it won’t be “on the test” and a textbook committee might not be inclined to buy the book if it’s got a lot of that stuff in it.

One more thing: textbook adoption states like it if you emphasize their geography, history, etc., even when it’s tangential. To use math as an example again, grades 3 through 6 texts often use problems based on real-life scenarios. Here’s a population sign at the edge of a city: write the population in word form/expanded form/whatever. Here’s some driveby information about a (real) wildlife refuge somewhere; let’s suppose that there were 674 brown ducks and 358 green ducks… In a basic national textbook these images and stories will be drawn from all over the country. Texas, though, would very much like to see the population of San Antonio on that highway sign, not the population of Salt Lake City, and they want that wildlife refuge to be somewhere in east Texas, not somewhere in south Jersey. Small things, but they add up. The rule of thumb in the industry these days is that adoption states will prefer a state-specific book of middling quality to a non-state-specific book of better quality.

All of which is a longwinded way of saying that states REALLY like it when the text is written with them in mind, and that Texas is big enough and important enough that textbook publishers want to give them what they ask for, and that in the long run this (somewhat) lessens Texas’s influence on books that are marketed to other states. Which, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a good thing.

6

the California bit is spot on - they are even bigger than Texas, and attention to the liberal fads Californian educators drove the proliferation of various learning-free “progressive” curricula in math, reading, diversity appreciation and other subjects.

The answer is not “national standards”. The answer is more competition on the textbook market, greater local control by the local authorities and parents and greater willingness on the part of the locals to decide which textbook and which curriculum is worth it for their kids.

7

Though I lived in Texas for some time, I didn’t actually grow up or go to school there. What are some examples of “conservative” or “fundamentalist” material that might find its way into the Texas books?

8

TEXAS CONSERVATIVES WANT TO DOWNPLAY CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS…

I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.”

9

Great! Let’s take each Podunk School Board and assign the relatively uneducated but likeable and hence elected officials the job of leafing through fifty to 100 texts on each subject to determine the best based on their subjective opinion. I sense real opportunities for freindly persuasion backed up by incentives of varying legality, and texts not chosen for their content but for their lobbying support; and the price of that lobbying folded into the textbook.

I suggest national standards, and a list of books that meet that standard. Submit book and get approval once. Then, Podunk Elementary or their board can pick from the list. At least then all books meet a basic standard.

10

I grew up in Texas and was educated in the Texas public schools, and my kids are in Texas schools as well.

In spite of the publicity when a Texas school board has some fundamentalist dust-up, the final effect that this has on the actual textbooks or curriculum is pretty much nil.

Further, parts of Texas have some some of the best public schools in the country, and they use the same textbooks, so it’s not that there’s anything really wrong with the texts. The reasons for Texas’ poor average performance on many educational measures is way more complex, having a lot to do with demographics.

So the bottom line is that Texas uses its market size to get the textbooks tailored to its educational programs, and they are adopted by other markets because there’s no real reason not to.

11

Podunk Elementary (as well as Afrocentric Earth-friendly Elementary, for that matter) folks don’t need to leaf through the books themselves. Neither should they be obligated to pick an option from a list compiled by an unelected bureaucracy in Washington DC. They can make an informed decision by reading up on internet forums ran by associations of like-minded people.

For instance, as you may recall, American mathematicians periodically write collective “letters” to public authorities deploring the way the “progressives” teach math. Well, so the mathematicians keep writing, the progressives keep teaching - you cannot convince the true believers even if you know more math than they do. Meanwhile, I am sure that at many Podunks of the world the good professors would find a sympathetic audience.

Another solution for Podunk, and one that is in fact used by many concerned parents nowadays (not sure about school districts) is to buy and use translations of textbooks from Asia. The textbook publishers from Singapore reputedly do a pretty good job at explaining the algebra part of math, while not spending much time on self-esteem, diversity, environment and other such, shall we say, aspects of it.

12

If other states use the same textbooks and outrank us on various scores, perhaps it is not the textbook. Personally, I think the reason for our poor performance is our large population of people who speak English as a second language, combined with many remote, rural areas that have difficulty attracting teachers. A former co-worker from Marfa (a town in the middle of nowhere whose main industry was the Border Patrol) told me that his high school lacked a science teacher for two years. He was the valedictorian of his class, but only scored a 10-something on his SAT. Being highly motivated, he excelled, but I think that was in spite of his schooling.

FWIW,
Rob

13

This is an important point. Texas may be 49th in education based on objective academic performance among its students, but it’s also got more ESOL students than any other state but California.

14

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Since no one ever agrees with a position you take, are you saying that doing the opposite of what you say is an informed position that people should be taking?

15

The difference between California and Texas, though, is that Texas has statewide textbook adoption from K-12, and California only has statewide textbook adoption for K-8. So, if you’re a secondary schoolbook publisher, you’re going to focus on Texas.

16

Competition from who? It costs a LOT of money to produce a textbook from scratch, not to mention a lot of time from conception to final adoption and distribution. This is why there are relatively few publishers who are willing to be in the textbook market in the first place.

And which local authorities do you mean? The unelected curriculum specialists who know more about education and their specific subjects and the district’s characteristics than most people ever will, or the insurance salesman who gets himself elected to the school board because he figures it’s good for business? As for parents, finding some who a) give a shit and b) don’t have an agenda of their own, well, good luck with that.

17

Oh, that’s a nice daydream, but it doesn’t match reality. The reality is that the Podunk board absolutely is not going to pick any textbook that doesn’t match their ideologies, and the board members are CERTAINLY not going to spend their time researching texts, either. The board members firmly believe that they know everything that’s worth knowing, and if they don’t know it, they don’t need to know it, and neither do the students in their district. What’s more, anything that challenges their belief system (such as evolution, or the notion that the Christian Bible is not, in fact, divinely written and infallible) will be rejected out of hand, without any research being done.

Textbooks should meet national minimum standards of accuracy. Schools should have to turn out students who can solve a quadratic equation, know the difference between the scientific and layman’s definition of the word theory, and construct a decent sentence in English. I went to school during a period of time when nobody diagrammed sentences, and sometimes I think of asking an English teacher to tutor me, as I’m sure I could write more clearly. But a school textbook should meet some minimal standards, and a high school diploma should mean that the student actually learned something in high school, not that s/he just occupied a seat in that school.

18

Here’s more, as approved a couple of weeks ago. Among other highlights, students will apparently get to learn that Joe McCarthy was right.

19

Well, in fairness, he was right - he said had a list of people in the State Department who were communists.

Now, the list itself might have been a bit inaccurate… :wink:

20

it’s FREE as in FREEdom, comrades. If Podunk have their ideologies, let them have them. You can have them too, though - no national standards prohibit that either.

As far as where the competition comes from, I have already mentioned one possible source - foreign textbooks. The miniscule city-state of Singapore apparently manages to produce its own math textbooks (so can it be all that expensive, really?), and nothing is stopping Americans from using them. Perhaps developing textbooks in America wouldn’t cost much either if there were no fees to the environmental, bias and general scammer consultants to pay.