[Bridging_the_digital_divide] incredible article!

[bridging_the_divide at touchsmart.net]

[I have bolded one passage in particular, near the end, that is 
critical and exactly what TouchSmart Publishing has been advocating 
with Open Source Publishing.]

The Muddle Machine
Confessions of a Texbook Editor

by Tamim Ansary

SOME YEARS AGO, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of 
elementary 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.

Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher 
as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are 
conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions 
to advancing knowledge. In fact, most of these books fall far short of 
their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are 
processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising 
like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and 
tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly 
objectionable before it is fed into a government-run "adoption" system 
that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.

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.

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." But wait. If every publisher was 
going through this same process (and they were), how was ours to stand 
out? Time to stir in a philosophy.

By philosophy, I mean a pedagogical idea. These conceptual enthusiasms 
surge through the education universe in waves. Textbook editors try to 
see the next one coming and shape their program to embody it.

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-based learning?

At those same conferences, senior editors look for up-andcoming 
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:

The student shall be provided content necessary to formulate, discuss, 
critique, and review hypotheses, theories, laws, and principles and 
their strengths and weaknesses.

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 sixthcentury 
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.

What comes back isn't even close to being the book. The first project I 
worked on was at this stage when I arrived. My assignment was to reduce 
a stack of pages 17 inches high, supplied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch 
stack that would sound as if it had all come from one source. The 
original text was just ore. A few of the original words survived, I 
suppose, but no whole sentences.

To avoid the unwelcome appearance of originality at this stage, editors 
send their writers voluminous guidelines. I am one of these writers, 
and this summer I wrote a 10-page story for a reading program. The 
guideline for the assignment, delivered to me in a three-ring binder, 
was 300 pages long.

Bon Appétit

with so much at stake, how did we get into this mess?

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.

This concentration of money and power caused dramatic changes. In 1974, 
there were 22 major basal reading programs; now there are 5 or 6. As 
the number of basals (in all subject areas) shrank, so did editorial 
staffs. Many downsized editors floated off and started "development 
houses," private firms that contract with educational publishers to 
deliver chunks of programs. They hire freelance managers to manage 
freelance editors to manage teams of freelance writers to produce text 
that skeleton crews of development-house executives sent on to 
publishing-house executives, who then pass it on to various committees 
for massaging.

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.

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.

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

The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In that elite 
trio, Texas rules. California has more students (more than 6 million 
versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much 
money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More 
important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for 
textbooks. That money can't be used for anything else, and all of it 
must be spent in the adoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular 
power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts 
statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though 8th grade, while 
the Lone Star State's adoption process applies to textbooks from 
kindergarten through 12th grade.

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 
5 Democrats and 10 Republicans, about half of whom have a background in 
education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation 
will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however, a tail 
that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows private 
citizens to review textbooks and raise objections. Publishers must 
respond to these objections at open hearings.

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 Longview, Texas-based 
nonprofit corporation they founded 43 years ago, Educational Research 
Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobby against liberal 
content in textbooks.

The Gablers no longer appear in person at adoption hearings, but 
through workshops, books, and how-to manuals, they trained a whole 
generation of conservative Christian activists to carry on their work.

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.

A social studies textbook was attacked because a full-page photograph 
showed a large family gathered around a dinner table. The objection? 
They looked like Arabs. Did we rise up indignantly at this un-American 
display of bias? We did not. Instead, we said that the family was 
Armenian. 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 
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 bestselling science fiction writer 
Isaac Asimov.

Turn the Page

There's no quick, simple fix for the blanding of American textbooks, 
but several steps are key to reform.

# 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.

with so much at stake, how did we get into this mess?

# Reduce basals to reference books -- slim core texts that set forth as 
clearly as a dictionary the essential skills and information to be 
learned at each grade level in each subject. In content areas like 
history and science, the core texts would be like mini-encyclopedias, 
fact-checked by experts in the field and then reviewed by master 
teachers for scope and sequence.

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. Local districts and classroom teachers 
would receive funds enabling them to assemble their own constellations 
of lessons and supporting materials around the core texts, purchased 
not from a few behemoths but from hundreds of smaller publishing houses 
such as those that currently supply the supplementarytextbook industry.

# Just as software developers create applications for particular 
operating systems, textbook developers should develop materials that 
plug into the core texts. Small companies and even individuals who see 
a niche could produce a module to fill it. None would need $60 million 
to break even. Imagine, for example, a world-history core. One 
publisher might produce a series of historical novellas by a writer and 
a historian working together to go with various places and periods in 
history. Another might create a map of the world, software that 
animates at the click of a mouse to show political boundaries swelling, 
shrinking, and shifting over hundreds of years. Another might produce a 
board game that dramatizes the connections between trade and cultural 
diffusion. Hundreds of publishers could compete to produce lessons that 
fulfill some aspect of the core text, the point of reference.

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.

Bundling selections from this forest of material to create curriculum 
packages might itself emerge as a job description in educational 
publishing.

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

Tamim Ansary, a columnist for Encarta.com and author of West of Kabul 
and East of New York, has written 38 nonfiction books for children. He 
was an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for nine years and has 
written for Houghton Mifflin, McDougall Littell, Prentice Hall, and 
many other textbook publishers. Write to edit at edutopia.com.

http://www.edutopia.org/magazine/ed1article.php?id=art_1195&issue=nov_04

---

Jason Barkeloo
President
TouchSmart Publishing
6522 Waldorf Place
Cincinnati, OH  45230
http://www.touchsmart.net
t: 513.225.8765
f: 206.666.4856

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