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A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education

A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.
By Tamim Ansary
Related Tags: Assessment, All Grades
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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.



Welcome to the Machine

The first product I helped create was a basal language arts program. The word basal refers to a comprehensive package that includes students' textbooks for a sequence of grades, plus associated teachers' manuals and endless workbooks, tests, answer keys, transparencies, and other "ancillaries." My company had dominated this market for years, but the brass felt that our flagship program was dated. They wanted something new, built from scratch.

Credit: Monte Wolverton

Sounds like a mandate for innovation, right? It wasn't. We got all the language arts textbooks in use and went through them carefully, jotting down every topic, subtopic, skill, and subskill we could find at each grade level. We compiled these into a master list, eliminated the redundancies, and came up with the core content of our new textbook. Or, as I like to call it, the "chum."



The new ideas are born at universities and wash down to publishers through research papers and conferences. Textbook editors swarm to events like the five-day International Reading Association conference to pick up the buzz. They all run around wondering, What's the coming thing? Is it critical thinking? Metacognition? Constructivism? Project learning?

At those same conferences, senior editors look for up-and-coming academics and influential educational consultants to sign as "authors" of the textbooks that the worker bees are already putting together back at the shop.

Content Lite

Once a philosophy has been fixed on and added, we shape the pulp to fit key curriculum guidelines. Every state has a prescribed compendium of what kids should learn -- tedious lists of bulleted objectives consisting mostly of sentences like this:


If you should meet a textbook editor and he or she seems eccentric (odd hair, facial tics, et cetera), it's because this is a person who has spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing countless pages filled with such action items, trying to determine if the textbook can arguably be said to support each objective.

Of course, no one looks at all the state frameworks. Arizona's guidelines? Frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn. Rhode Island's? Pardon me while I die laughing. Some states are definitely more important than others. More on this later.

Eventually, at each grade level, the editors distill their notes into detailed outlines, a task roughly comparable to what sixth-century jurists in Byzantium must have faced when they carved Justinian's Code out of the jungle of Roman law. Finally, they divide the outline into theoretically manageable parts and assign these to writers to flesh into sentences.



Bon Appétit

With so much at stake, how did we get into this turgid mess? In the 1980s 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.


This concentration of money and power caused dramatic changes. In 1974, there were 22 major basal reading programs; now there are five or six. As the number of basals (in all subject areas) shrank, so did editorial staffs.


A few years ago, I got an assignment from a development house to write a lesson on a particular reading skill. The freelance editor sent me the corresponding lessons from our client's three major competitors. "Here's what the other companies are doing," she told me. "Cover everything they do, only better." I had to laugh: I had written (for other development houses) all three of the lessons I was competing with.

The Cruelest Month

In textbook publishing, April is the cruelest month. That's when certain states announce which textbooks they're adopting. When it comes to setting the agenda for textbook publishing, only the 22 states that have a formal adoption process count. The other 28 are irrelevant -- even though they include populous giants like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio -- because they allow all publishers to come in and market programs directly to local school districts.


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


Obviously, publishers create products specifically for the adoptions in those three key states. They then sell the same product to everybody else, because basals are very expensive to produce -- a K-8 reading program can cost as much as $60 million. Publishers hope to recoup the costs of a big program from the sudden gush of money in a big adoption state, then turn a profit on the subsequent trickle from the "open territories."

Those that fail to make the list in Texas, California, or Florida are stuck recouping costs for the next six years. Strapped for money to spend on projects for the next adoption period, they're likely to fail again. As the cycle grows vicious, they turn into lunch meat.

Don't Mess with Texas


Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, because California adopts statewide only for textbooks for grades K-8, while the Lone Star State's adoption process applies to textbooks through to 12th grade.

Credit: Monte Wolverton

If you're creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing "Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills" (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 members of the Texas Board of Education, currently five Democrats and ten Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.


In the late '60s, a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state's adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught -- phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values -- and considered themselves in a battle against a "politically correct degradation of academics."

Expert organizers, the Gablers possessed a flair for constructing arguments out of the language of official curriculum guidelines. The nonprofit corporation they founded 43 years ago, Educational Research Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobby against liberal content in them.


Citizens also pressure textbook companies at California adoption hearings. These objections come mostly from such liberal organizations as Norman Lear's People for the American Way, or from individual citizens who look at proposed textbooks when they are on display before adoption in 30 centers around the state.

Concern in California is normally of the politically correct sort -- objections, for example, to such perceived gaffes as using the word Indian instead of "Native American." To make the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereotype free: No textbook can show African Americans playing sports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of children. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enough develops radar for what will and won't get past the blanding process of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.

Responding to citizens' objections in adoption hearings is a delicate art. Publishers learn never to confront the assumptions behind an objection. That just causes deeper criticism. For example, a health textbook I worked on had a picture of a girl on a windy beach. One concerned citizen believed he could detect the outlines of the girl's underwear through her dress. Our response: She's at the beach, so that's her bathing suit. It worked.


Of course, publishers prefer to face no objections at all. That's why going through a major adoption, especially a Texas adoption, is like earning a professional certificate in textbook editing. Survivors just know things.

What do they know?

Mainly, they know how to censor themselves. 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 the One World Council, rumored to be a "Communist front."



Turn the Page


Credit: Monte Wolverton

Mix and Match

Revamp our funding mechanisms to let teachers assemble their own curricula from numerous individual sources instead of forcing them to rely on single comprehensive packages from national textbook factories. We can't have a different curriculum in every classroom, of course, but surely there's a way to achieve coherence without stultification.

Basals as Backup


Dull? No, because these cores would not be the actual instructional material students would use. They would be analogous to operating systems in the world of software. If there are only a few of these and they're pretty similar, it's OK.


High Tech Textbooks



Innovate the Industry

The intellect, dedication, and inventiveness of textbook editors, abundant throughout the industry but often stifled and underappreciated, would be unleashed with -- I predict -- extraordinary results for teachers and students.


The possibilities are endless. And shouldn't endless possibility be the point?


Go to "Foreign Textbooks Teach a Lesson in American History."


Mark Pickard's picture
Mark Pickard
Teacher and Pastor

This is interesting. Im glad the author took the time to pass on the inside information which many us would not have know.

Meeze's picture

The prospect of entering the education field (as I will hopefully be doing in less than a year) becomes more daunting by the day. This is not because of the kids or the parents or the administrators, but it is because of all the red tape and flat out bullshit that is placed upon us. With the new Texas Social Studies standards, the whole textbook debate is finally going national. Hopefully with passionate and insight articles, such as this one, coupled with good journalism, Americans will come to see the injustices the entire educational apparatus is doing to their children.

Norman Tabios's picture
Norman Tabios
High School English Teacher

i hope that there's something that you can say to those teachers that are still using the normal textbook. those teachers and students that don't have an access to internet inside the class.

Alan Pita's picture

Thank you for taking the time to write down these very relevant issues. I appreciate your attention to pragmatics and detail. I am working with a school that in the course of being "advanced" has also developed a bit of "textbook allergy", which creates problems that most schools have not even encountered. It is very, very hard to replace the educational value of even an average textbook for STEM and related disciplines.

Martin Diaz Alvarez's picture
Martin Diaz Alvarez
Martin Diaz Alvarez EDU Profile Page


Marta Castaño Hernandez's picture

Hello, I am a student of the University of Murcia. I would say that you are right in many things that you say, so I agree with you in the most cases. Teachers may neglect the use of textbooks in the majority of time that they are in the class. They have to show to their students their knowledge because they have been prepared for that and not for be with a textbook on their hands and follow what it says. In the most cases, the textbooks are influenced by a person who shows his ideology or his intention, so we, as teachers, have to trust on ourselves.
Congratulate for the article,

theDoctor's picture
Transitioning the world to a collaborative, sustatinable society.

Hardly. Some of these high school textbooks are complete shill. I just reviewed McGraw-Hill "Mathematics with Business Applications" and it has some of the most boneheaded examples. There are questions the students are expected to answer which could be interpreted in 3 different ways with 3 different answers. This is not a matter of the teacher in any way whatsoever. College professors should be writing these things, because not only are the questions unanswerable except by accident, there is so much material, they don't educate on what is actually important. Buyers: look for textbooks made by PhDs.

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