A subset of that movement has been focused on getting openly licensed textbooks into classrooms. Flat World Knowledge is often cited as being a leader in the commercial distribution of open content, relying on supplemental materials for sustainability. But until just recently, the concept of open (not just “free” or “digital”) textbooks hadn’t begun to creep into education policy discussions. But now it has, and as usual those organizations in a position to embrace and benefit from change make it their business to oppose it. Just as the music and movie trade associations went after innovative technology, textbook publishers are fighting innovation and change in their industry.

The Association of American Publishers (and its School Division in particular) are quickly becoming one of the main barriers to the adoption of open educational content in K12 and higher education. When the U.S. Dept. of Education wanted to require that any educational materials developed with Race to the Top funding (a $4.35 billion dollar state education grant competition) be made “freely available”, the School Division submitted comments opposing the requirements saying it would “compromise the intellectual property rights of third-party providers.” Basically, the AAP didn’t like that public money would fund public, rather than proprietary, content. And at least according to the AAP, the rule has been changed to allow for Race to the Top funding to go towards proprietary content.

But the AAP doesn’t limit itself to influencing policy at a high-level. They’re movings towards co-opting a desire for textbook reform at the grassroots level.

Take a look at this flier for an upcoming AAP briefing at Southern Illinois University on “New Textbook Technologies”. From the flier:

The goal for the Cost Effective Solutions for Student Success program is to begin a broader and more informed discussion between members of the academy, policy makers and publishers about course materials and the benefits they offer for:

• Improving students’ grades, pass rates and retention;
• Lowering students’ costs for course materials;
• Providing flexibility and efficiencies for instructors; and
• Lowering the postsecondary institutions’ cost per pupil for instruction.

The AAP frames their briefing at Southern Illinois University as an attempt to begin a “broader and more informed discussion” about textbooks. Apparently members of the academy, policy makers, and publishers (students notably absent) had been having a less than optimally informed discussion about course materials. But what we don’t know based on this flier is what kinds of information they will be providing.

Luckily for us, on the AAP-operated site TextBookFacts.org, they have a handy FAQ which hopefully will start this more informed dialogue. From the FAQ:

The cost of developing a new textbook and the accompanying materials can exceed $1 million. Most of this cost is attributable to paying for the work and original ideas of authors, experts, editors, researchers, reviewers and designers. Many other factors also contribute to the final retail price of textbooks, such as:

• Inflation, which accounts for the lion’s share of most years’ annual increases in textbook prices.
• Freight and transportation, which are driven by rising fuel costs
• Bookstore mark-ups, which are determined by bookstores and affected by a number of factors – such as staff and operational costs – that vary from store to store
• Paper, which is driven by the cost of raw materials
• Layout, typesetting and printing, which are driven by time-intensive labor costs
• Taxes by federal, state and local governments

The AAP falsely claims that inflation is a main factor in the rise of textbook costs. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office, the costs of textbooks have increased by twice the rate of inflation.

They also misrepresent the costs associated with textbook development. According to a 2007 University of Wisconsin budget review (citing a 2006 College Store Industry Financial Report by the National Association of College Stores), 77.8% of the cost of a textbook goes to the publisher. Of that 77.8%, the break down is roughly:

Only 33.5% of the cost is due to the physical production and shipment of the book. The rest is marketing, profit, overhead, and unnecessary expenses avoidable through different models of knowledge production and dissemination (but more on that in a bit).

They continue:

Student Monitor, an independent student research service, found that the average four-year undergraduate spends approximately $650 a year on textbooks. That’s less than five percent of an average student’s total direct higher education expenses.

Not true. Even back in 2007 the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance found that “Annual per student expenditures on textbooks can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today.” (Source: Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable, A Report of the Advisory Committee On Student Financial Assistance, 2007) Today the cost is likely to be higher.

And even $700-1000 a year seems inexpensive to you, “affordability cannot be assessed by examining the absolute level of total expenses alone. It depends on how much expenses have risen over time, what share of family income they represent, and whether they are typically covered by grant aid for students from low- and moderate income families.” (Same source as above) That is, it isn’t the number that’s important in evaluating costs, it’s the percentage of overall budget and income, taking financial and sociological contexts into account. And the AAP doesn’t really take into account the financial contexts of students… or at least not in the way you might expect. Continue reading their FAQ:

What do college students buy? LOTS! But only a small percentage of these expenditures go towards important learning tools such as textbooks. [...]

This semester (Spring 2009) the average student bought 5.3 textbooks (2.2 new and 3.1 used) spending an average of $333 for both new and used textbooks. (Source: Student Monitor 2009)

Retail spending on new college textbooks last year was about $4.7 billion — significantly less than what college students spend on clothes and accessories and less than half of what they spend on electronic products such as iPods, laptops, video games, stereos and televisions. (Source: Association of American Publishers and the National Retail Federation)

Yes, you read the AAP right! Students are too busy buying iPods, shoes, and concert tickets to notice the high cost of textbooks. Just another drop in the bucket, right?

The AAP implies that college students spend so much on electronics, clothes, and accessories that their textbooks should be considered cheap. So what exactly are students and faculty getting for that low low price of $1,000 a year (roughly the equivalent of buying a high-end laptop a year)?

What is the role publishers play with students and faculty? Publishers serve the needs of students and faculty

Publishers’ primary focus is on meeting the needs of students. Today, a wider range of instructional supplements enable faculty to teach more students and empower students to achieve better results.

Colleges are being asked to serve students with diverse learning styles and a wider range of preparedness and skills. At least 50 percent of students who enter 2- and 4-year colleges drop out in their first year and never return

Only 54 percent of students who remain in college graduate in 4 – 6 years, increasing costs and debts for students and straining campus assets.

So publishers serve needs, help schools to pack diverse groups of students into classrooms, annnnd… not sure what those last two mean. Publishers cause students to drop out and increase cost and debt and strain campus assets?

Maybe the AAP is struggling with this question because they have no good answer. Of course publishers should be responding to the needs of students and teachers. But when it comes to spelling out the details of what those needs are, big publishers in the AAP fail on all counts:

What are the demands that students and faculty place on textbooks?

Today’s students and faculty demand choices

Students and faculty have become smarter, more demanding consumers, who value options.

In today’s challenging environment publishers are offering a broader range of textbooks and instructional materials at a wide range of prices.

Options available today include low-cost editions, one- or two-color editions, loose-leaf editions, split editions, black-and-white editions, custom books, books by the chapter, abbreviated editions, and electronic books.

College instructors adopt the textbooks and supplemental instructional materials that they believe best meet their students’ needs. They want their students to succeed by having the latest information and the most up-to-date learning tools.

Students and faculty want choice, customizibility, low cost, up-to-date, and optionally digital textbooks. Sounds exactly like what OER provide! Not only do you have the legal right to modify and redistribute OER, they are usually digitally provided free of charge. And given the completely public availability of Creative Commons licenses, there is little barrier to any individual, academic, or organization developing and distributing their own textbook at a small fraction of the cost that the AAP claims is required to develop a textbook.

The high-level message the AAP tries to convey is “we spend a lot of money on producing textbooks, but they’re actually cheap and students buy so much crap anyways they can afford it”. And to top it all off, they argue for innovative digital solutions that their own IP-centric business models discourage.

In the end, the AAP gets its numbers wrong, implies students are materialistic spend-heavies who care more about iPods and concert tickets than education, and makes a compelling argument against their own product.

Do textbooks enhance the quality of education?

Evidence strongly suggests that the average textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource. Several studies, beginning in the 1980’s, have elaborated on this evidence, concluding that the textbook is a hopelessly low quality educational resource. Low quality because of the way textbooks are written and processed; hopelessly low quality because the existing process of textbook creation is enforced by state policies. This process is known as the state textbook adoption process.

K-12 textbooks are not generally written by experts or even teachers; rather, they are written by teams of anonymous writers from development houses. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, textbooks are “hurriedly put together by teams of hack writers from ‘development houses,’ known as ‘chop shops’.”  The identities of the writers remain largely undisclosed, and they are not the university professors often cited as contributors. In fact, several professors who have been cited as contributors to popular textbooks deny ever having read or seen the textbooks.   Experts are also not involved in reviewing the quality of textbooks, such as checking for accuracy of facts. This is because there is no review process for quality.

Instead, the review process is grounded in the textbook adoption process that is mandated in twenty-one plus states. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute defines it as, “The process, in place in twenty-one states, of reviewing textbooks according to state guidelines and then mandating specific books that schools must use, or lists of approved textbooks that schools must choose from.” Due to conflicting political and ideological views, state guidelines are fashioned to please a wide spectrum of demands regarding inclusion and exclusion of content. These demands result in a second set of guidelines from textbook publishing companies, who preempt the adoption process with their own checklists to speed things along. These checklists are not checking for quality; they are checking for politically correct representation of content and groups of people, in addition to checking for “morally questionable” facts, regardless of whether such inclusions or exclusions are accurate portrayals of the subject matter. Furthermore, California and Texas, as the most populous states, are the two major players in textbook adoption, which means their guidelines affect the majority of textbooks in America, as the market depends on their approval. Four publishing companies constitute 70% of this market, having built long-standing partnerships with the states. This makes it incredibly difficult for alternative textbook companies with a focus on quality to break in to the market.

The U.S. History textbook is a prime example and outcome of the textbook adoption process. The U.S. History textbook is subject to two major problems. In a testimony to the Senate in 2003, the American Textbook Council  summed up these problems as “dumbing down” and “increasing content bias and distortion.” According to the council, current history textbooks are more concerned with capturing and sustaining short attention spans than with relaying accurate and compelling history. They have become “picture and activity books instead”, with the actual text as the supplemental component. The language of the text itself is grossly simplistic, catering to all reading levels, rather than relaying events in compelling narrative. Instead, “states often apply “readability” formulas to ensure that textbooks use simpler words and phrases, resulting in a lowest-common-denominator approach.” The second problem is that history textbooks are censored with “increasing content bias and distortion.” Content bias and distortion refers to the differing political ideologies competing for inclusion and exclusion of facts. Since different people and groups have different ideas about what should or shouldn’t be included as relevant to U.S. or world history, the contents of history textbooks are screened and then screened again to appease all parties. This process not only produces mediocre results, but a politically crafted history of the United States, which often glosses over or even entirely omits relevant facts while elaborating on inoffensive details. However, since “one person’s distortion is another’s correction,” the details actually included in history textbooks are either highly insignificant or so generalized that they fail to deliver the meanings of those details in context.

None of this is evidence that textbooks enhance the quality of education. On the contrary, all evidence affirms that the majority of textbooks are low to mediocre quality resources. Such resources run the risk of decreasing, rather than increasing, the quality of education. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math and reading were found to be generally lower in textbook adoption states.

Do teachers and students know how to use the textbook?

If we believe that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, we are also assuming that teachers and students know to use textbooks. In other words, we are assuming that teachers know how to effectively leverage textbooks as teaching resources and students know how to learn from them as learning resources. For teachers, effectively leveraging textbooks requires more than simply assigning reading and lecturing on that reading during class–it means using the textbooks as a starting point for other perspectives and educational resources. For students, learning from textbooks requires more than just reading the textbooks–it means understanding and retaining what they have read. The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning reports that,

“For centuries educators asumed that student learning consisted of rote memorization of new knowledge–students listened to lectures and read books, their progress measured by their ability to recite what they had heard and read. But research in the past 20 years demonstrates that another form of learning is also important–the learning that occurs when instruction is inquiry-oriented, encouraging learners to actively think about and try out new ideas in light of their prior knowledge, to personally transform the knowledge for their own use, and to apply it in other situations.”

Teachers effectively leverage textbooks when they use them as starting points, subsequently utilizing other educational resources (which include materials, tools, media, and techniques) that instigate inquiry, activity, and creativity. “Mere regurgitation of facts and figures… is not sufficient for in-depth understanding” (How Teachers Learn to Engage Students in Active Learning). On the other hand, actively engaging students while exposing them to other perspectives helps them to fully grasp and retain what they have read.

Unfortunately, most teachers and students do not know how to use textbooks in this manner. Most teachers do little more than assign reading, only to lecture later on the same reading, and as a result, most students do not retain what they have read, if they have read at all. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, “Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered. History and social studies teachers, for example, often rely almost exclusively on textbooks, instead of requiring students to review primary sources and read trade books by top historians.”

Further evidence suggests that this misuse of textbooks is affecting students’ performance. In a study on the impact of curriculum on achievement in twenty-five countries, Professor William Schmidt found that “textbook content in different nations correlated closely to what their children learned–and how they fared on tests.” Even though U.S. textbooks were hundreds of pages longer than other countries, U.S. students were still learning less. In History, especially, one of the most “textbook-heavy” subjects, “half of high school seniors scored “below basic”–the lowest outcome possible–on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History.” (Too Little Too Late: American High Schools in an International Context)

But isn’t the California Digital Textbooks Initiative improving textbooks?

Among the plethora of new initiatives surrounding textbooks, the Free Digital Textbook Initiative in California is the most notable because of its ties to both state policy and alternative textbook publishing models. It is a plan heralded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in response to the state’s economic crisis. The initiative provides for free digital textbooks for high school math and science, and lays out a set of state standards for those subjects. Content developers submit digital textbooks that are reviewed by teachers and experts in math and science to align to those standards.

The initiative’s appeal is that it purports to use a process different from traditional textbook adoption. Its initial phase boasts of alternative content developers, consisting of non-profits, such as the CK-12 Foundation, Connexions, Curriki, and individual authors. Content review to meet state standards is facilitated by the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN). In California’s press release on August 11, 2009, ten of the sixteen textbooks submitted were found to be acceptable, meeting 90% of the state’s standards.

The intent behind the initiative is a positive one, and the process thus described seems headed in the right direction. However, as it stands the initiative puts no real dent in California’s textbook adoption policy, as it becomes clear that none of these textbooks are required for districts to purchase and use. In order for materials to become a required text, they must meet every standard, including California’s social content standards, which none have been reviewed for.  For this review to occur, creators of the textbooks must go through the social content standard review process, which is not only costly and time consuming, but runs the risk of dumbing down their textbooks to the same level as currently required textbooks.

Even if we assume that somehow these textbooks will survive the reviews unscathed and maintain their existing levels of quality, nothing ensures their proper use in the classroom. With cut funding in the state, districts may be expected to access the texts only online, even when they don’t have computers for every student or the teacher/student training necessary to help them work with texts in digital formats. The initiative does not call for additional funding for hardware, training, or supplemental resources. Additionally, only textbooks go through the review process, which means that only textbooks can be required for use in districts. Other educational resources, such as digital materials and software, are never required statewide. Requiring only the digital textbooks and not the means to leverage them leaves teachers and students in pretty much the same boat as before, only this time without funding for the hard copies. Though the quality of textbooks may improve via this initiative, there is no guarantee that they will be used, or used properly. After all, the quality of instruction depends on more than just the textbook.

“Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors. Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students.” –Eric Frank, Flatworld Knowledge

Conclusion

In conclusion, efforts are better spent building upon what we have learned about textbooks in the past few decades, instead of trying to save a dying resource. Textbooks may not need saving. Textbooks, as they currently stand, do not enhance the quality of education. They are outdated resources that have been enforced by outdated policies. Most teachers and students use the textbook as a crutch rather than a tool, and as studies show, this linear way of teaching has resulted in less learning and lower student performance. Though some current textbook initiatives may alleviate symptoms temporarily, they are essentially flogging the same tired mule. The future of education does not hold textbooks, at least in the traditional sense of textbooks; it holds the plethora of other resources that better serve it. We should focus on prioritizing the creation and adoption of these resources so that they are accessible, adaptable, and don’t fall into the same mediocre traps of the textbook.