Robert Shepherd posted this explanation of how the
publishing industry has changed and how a small number of corporate
giants control what students learn:
I think it important
to distinguish between entrepreneurs
attempting to bring new products to market that will succeed or
fail in the market based on the merits of those products
and monopolistic corporate giants
attempting to rig the market for educational materials so as to
shut out new competitors. A little
history:
When I started working in educational
publishing back in the early 1980s, a basal literature program
consisted of a student text and a softbound teacher’s guide
containing lesson plans and answers to questions in the text.
That’s it—a student edition and a softbound teacher’s
guide. Then, over the course of many years,
the big educational publishers competed with one another by adding
new components and features, including many “give-aways,” to their
product lines.
So, for example, many years ago, one publisher of a
K-12 basal composition program added to its product a “free”
Teacher’s Resource Binder (a 3-ring binder containing lesson plans,
answer keys, tests, correlation charts, planning guides, and the
like). The other big ed book publishers rushed to follow suit, to
create their own “free” Teacher’s Resource Binders. And then, of
course, all the publishers upped the prices of their student
editions and teacher’s editions to cover the cost of the “free”
binder.
Over time, the big ed book publishers
added many, many more components to their basal programs—annotated
teacher’s editions, test banks, multimedia CDs, materials in
various languages, transparency sets, blackline masters, diagnostic
test booklets, test prep booklets, manipulatives, handheld student
response devices, leveled readers, cross-curricular readers,
various web-based components, etc. —and whenever one publisher
innovated, the others followed suit, and the costs of the student
and teacher editions went up and up and up to cover all these
“free” materials. In parallel, state
departments of education in adoption states like California, Texas,
and Florida started issuing lists of adoption criteria that
REQUIRED programs submitted for adoption to contain these various
“supplemental” materials.
Where, in the past, when a school ordered
a literature text, it would receive student editions and softbound
teacher’s guides, it would, after all this change in the textbook
publishing racket, receive, with each classroom set, several very
large boxes containing supplemental products—boxes that came to be
known as Teacher’s Resource Kits. In addition, the sizes of the
student and teacher texts also increased enormously as the big
publishers competed with one another by adding features and
components to those.
To summarize: thirty
years ago, a Grade 10 basal literature program consisted of a
340-page student text and a 150-page, softbound teacher’s guide.
Now it consists a 1,200-page student text, a 1,400-page annotated
teacher’s edition, and about a hundred crappy ancillary products
shipped out in big, colorful boxes. In the
past few years, every teacher I’ve talked to about this has told me
the same thing—he or she uses ALMOST NONE of the great mountain of
supplemental material that comes with the basal text and skips
ALMOST ALL of the junk in the annotated teacher’s edition.
At the
same time, the school districts pay HANDSOMELY for all these “free”
supplementals because the cost of developing them, plus a pretty
profit, is rolled into the cost of the student and teacher editions
and because, when one publisher starts charging for a key
supplemental component, the others quickly follow suit.
The upshot of all this is that textbook production has
gotten much, much more expensive than it was in the past.
Where a
couple decades ago a publisher might develop a new literature
program at a cost of, say, 6 million dollars, it will now cost 100
million or more to do this. And those state adoption requirements,
along with the customer expectation that programs will have all
these “free” supplemental components, effectively lock would-be
competitors out of the business. Only a few large companies with
deep pockets can play. And so, where in the
past we had lots of small educational publishers with sizable
market share, now we have, basically, four big players in the U.S.
And what that means is that teachers and schools have fewer
products to choose from, and those products have a terrible
sameness to them because publishers with monopolistic positions
have no incentive to innovate. To the extent possible, they now
“repurpose” old material, change the headings and correlations to
accord with the latest educational fads, do some new design work,
and call that a new edition.
But they don’t innovate, really, when
it comes to what matters—in the areas of pedagogical approach and
curricular design. The last thirty years have
seen an enormous amount of consolidation of the educational
publishing industry—a few large publishers buying up all the
smaller ones, and that consolidation also works against real
pedagogical and curricular innovation.
Ed book publishing is now a
monopolistic business, and state departments of education, with
their adoption requirements, have inadvertently helped to make that
happen—their well-intentioned pages and pages of adoption
guidelines have served to decrease real innovation in educational
products while dramatically increasing their cost.
So, basically, that’s how ed book publishing became a
monopoly business. However, the Internet
presented a great threat to the emergent monopolies.
Almost all of
the cost of producing a textbook program was, traditionally, in
paper, printing, binding, and sampling of products to potential
customers. The high cost of producing physical basal textbook
programs with large numbers of supplementary/ancillary materials
effectively shut out any new competitors. However, pixels are
cheap, and some college professors even started SELF PUBLISHING
respectable introductory textbooks, in subjects like statistics,
philosophy, logic, history, business, economics, etc.—online for
FREE. Really for free. This presented an
enormous threat to the ed book monopolies. They had to do something
to ensure that they could maintain their monopolistic market share
and continue to lock out new entrants, new competitors.
Well, one
way of making it difficult for new competitors to emerge is to
create national standards that every program must follow slavishly.
That keeps a new competitor from doing a better job than the large
publishers do of following the unique standards for a particular
state AND keeps new entrants from creating alternative curricular
designs that accord, better, with new, alternative, or competing
standards.
Another way to shut out new competitors is to create a
single national database of student scores and responses that
serves as a gateway for delivery of content. Those who can afford
to be connected to that system for content delivery can play, and
those who can’t will be shut out. Teachers,
students, parents, and other stakeholders would be much better
served, of course, if small publishers with innovative ideas could
compete on an even playing field—if there were room, again, in
educational publishing for real entrepreneurship. The Internet can
help to make that possible—for small entrants, again, to have a
chance to compete against the big textbook companies.
Mountains of
federal and state requirements serve not the cause of the small
entrepreneur but of the existing monopolies, making it easier for
them to shut the small entrepreneurs out. And the big companies pay
lots of money to lobbyists at the state and federal levels to
ensure that there are plenty of requirements on educational
products that will make it difficult for new, entrepreneurial
competitors to emerge. Here’s how to fix all
this: Return to site-based management. Allow individual groups of
teachers at individual schools to make their own decisions about
what products they will purchase and what characteristics those
products will have.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Chez Jane Smith and commented:
It’s frustrating to see depth and breadth of corporate monopolies…
This was enlightening. Thank you, Diane. I have often wondered why we now have to juggle five different textbooks from the same “set” in our English courses. I had suspected that the reason for the existence of the paperback “workbooks” was a hope on the part of the publishing company that schools would keep purchasing new ones as the old ones were used up by students; of course, in my school the students are not allowed to write in the workbooks, so we photocopy what we need and eight years down the road still have stacks and stacks of pristine student workbooks gathering dust in the book closet.
I miss the simpler days of one book with one teacher guide. Trying to cross-reference five different books every time I want to teach a lesson is infuriatingly frustrating, as is the pedantic admonishment from admin that “only poor teachers taught the text from beginning to end anyway”. Who fed them THAT chestnut?
“I miss the simpler days of one book with one teacher guide.”
I was fortunate enough to be able to choose the text series that I wanted for my Spanish classes and did not choose one of the big fours texts. I went with Vista Higher Learning as they specialize in foreign language texts. Their books have more vocabulary, grammar and an excellent overall progression. And we only need the text for the students so we don’t have to buy workbooks each year. That’s a plus for a district that only spends $8,000/student.
I began public schools teaching in the 1995-96 academic year. I have seen the problem about which Shepherd writes continue to get worse. My reaction is that most of the “supplemental” materials (whose existence escalates the cost of the text) are simply not worth it. And that is before we look at the quality of the texts themselves, which is very problematic, often with errors, far too often in my field of social studies shaped by biased points of view.
Perhaps I can note how far it is how changed by the new textbook we have for AP US Government & Politics. It is the “AP edition” and for the first time I have a government textbook that has neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence (nor any other relevant documents) in an appendix. Yes, all of my AP students have internet access at home, and can readily reference such documents on their own, but not in class, and the existence of a class set of the texts does not solve the problem. I am producing my own class sets of relevant documents to be used when relevant in class discussions / group work.
I also note the following – in the district in which I teach, my text book is from Pearson, and much of the mechanisms for how teachers are going to be evaluated is on platforms from Pearson. So a for-profit British company (which oh by the way is in partnership with Bill Gates) is driving an ever larger portion of what is supposed to be AMERICAN public education.
Ed book publishing is now a
monopolistic business, and state departments of education… have inadvertently helped to make that happen—
Maybe not so “inadvertently” –
“[in February, New York] attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas to the Manhattan offices of the Pearson Foundation and Pearson Education. Mr. Schneiderman is looking into whether the nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation, which is prohibited by state law from undisclosed lobbying, was used to benefit Pearson Education, a profit-making company that publishes standardized tests, curriculums and textbooks, according to people familiar with the inquiry.”
http://www.areweawareyet.com/29349/soviet-style-gosplan-common-core-state-standards-now-involved-in-collusion-investigation-of-pearson-publishing/
There are now only 4 major publishers in the education business; there used to be dozens. The big ones bought up the little ones. The cost of creating a “series” acceptable to both California and Texas drove the little guys out of business or made them willing to sell to McGraw Hill, Harcourt, Pearson, or another big guy.
Diane, you whet our curiosity. Who is the other “big guy”?
Is it Prentice-Hall?
Fascinating but scary reading this. What strikes me most is that a teacher receiving simple basal readers and a small teacher’s edition was free to actually make the professional decisions on how to educate the students. When profit came into play, a bunch of corporate folk sitting at board room tables obviously discussing profitability to increase their market share were suddenly in charge of setting education policy. Did they have lengthy classroom experience? Why does “their opinion” matter more than those of education professionals in the classroom? Why do all roads seem to lead toward corporate profit these days? Reading this makes me want to know more about how educational materials are published and disseminated in countries like Finland and Cuba .. two vastly different countries with strong education systems… Anyone out there done research on this??? Robert Shephard? Diane????
I recently did a comparison of U.S. math basals to the best-selling math basal in Japan. The U.S. pupil edition text would be hard bound and 600 pages long and accompanied by many big boxes of ancillary materials. The Japanese pupil edition text would be 65 pages long, soft bound, and have very little accompanying, ancillary material. And yet the Japanese students actually perform better than our students do on international tests (if one doesn’t correct those tests for the socioeconomic status of the children taking them–that’s an issue, but clearly, the Japanese students aren’t suffering because of their textbooks). And when one looks at the Japanese texts, there are MAJOR differences. Ours have forty different special features on each page. Each bit of learning is buried in tons of exercises covering this standard and that standard and extending the lesson here and there. The Japanese texts are a clear, straightforward, coherent presentation of concepts, facts, skills. Our bloated texts look as though they had been prepared by gerbils on methamphetamine. They skip from one thing to the next. Everything is presented in sound bites. There is no coherence. But there is a GREAT MOUNTAIN of stuff.
And that situation has been created not by evil publishing houses but by state regulatory agencies that insisted on this being added and that being added, and such design by committee led to the bloat. In each case, the particular addition sounded like a good idea. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a cross-curriculum history connection in these? Shouldn’t every lesson have materials for diversifying the instruction for LEP students. And the list grew to 40 or 50 items per new concept introduced, items that then, in the finished text, hung off that item like leaches or lampreys on a fish.
It’s no wonder that we have some sort of sudden epidemic of attention deficit syndrome in the US.
Really, put one of the Japanese texts next to a US one. The difference will ASTONISH you. The Japanese text is clear, has focus, unfolds coherently, spirals instruction, and, BTW, is a lot of fun. They have figured out how to
KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID
Instructions from publishers on how to put together a lesson now run, typically, to 140 pages because those lessons have to be so complex in order to instantiate all the regulatory demands and the edufads.
“Our bloated texts look as though they had been prepared by gerbils on methamphetamine.”
Ha, this is funny and sad, but true. Flip open any new textbook and it is full of sidebars, pictures, prompts to go online, color-coded text, optional activities, and all sorts of digressions.
I totally agree that a straightforward, simple approach would better serve students and be much cheaper to produce. The profit motive behind the Common Core is important for parents and voters to understand. The loss of local control is also something that people should take more seriously.
Yeh, we had to include the Topic, the State Standard, the Curriculum Objective (the student will…), the materials (page and supplemental and worksheets), the activities (measurable), the groups into which the students were placed, the evaluation, and connections forward and backward to other lessons and towards interdisciplinary links. This was for every lesson, every day, 5 days a week, in ADVANCE by a week (and we all know that nothing ever comes up to change the course of events and that serendipitous learning is never advantageous). There were lessons for reading (5 levels), writing, spelling (3-5 levels not corresponding to the reading levels), English (which was also part of the writing rubric), math, science, social studies, and technology. We had to schedule all this around the special classes and other events of the day with pinpoint accuracy, well-stated goals on the board for any given moment of an observation, and keep all kids on task at all times, even while someone is having a crisis of some sort … medical, accidental, personal, or nutritional. The demands to “spell out” every step of the day were excruciatingly time consuming and in the end were never really ACCURATE, but we had to have “proof” that we were “doing our jobs” … All for the sake of “data accountability”.
Craziness. But, I loved my kids … so I kept on until I could no longer do it.
This is beyond craziness. This is abuse. And the worst part is that it’s counter-productive for real learning. I retired before I had planned because I knew this was coming and I knew I couldn’t withstand it.
I sorry to repeat myself but I think this is fits into this article:
REFORMER’S LEMONADE STAND
During the hot summer days, did your children ever sell lemonade to the neighbors or passer-bys? The children learn a little about Sales but not really about Profit, since they are using your Goods to produce their Profits. For your children it is pure Profit, since there is no cost to them for the Goods. We don’t mind too much since at least we don’t have to buy the Lemonade. Now, if you actually bought the Lemonade from them, you would be Teaching them about “Reformer Profit”!
“Reformers” , such as Pearson, Wireless Generation, Amplify, the three having received $249,704,097 in ARRA funds for producing the Goods(“Educational” materials) and then turn around and sell it back to US the tax payers! It is GREAT for them now with CCSS, since once the “Educational” materials are produced from ARRA funds given to them by individual State Education Departments; they can sell these materials to any CC State since they are all doing the same thing. More CC States = more “Reformers” pure profits!
The only profits, comparable to these, were when a young man in the 1980’s (Gates) became a multibillionaire by selling instructions to us (our computers). At least, to my knowledge, we did not pay him for producing the instructions! Once the “instructions” were produced then except for a small expense for transferal(disk, tape, etc.) , all sales were pure profit! With our current “Educational Reformers”, we are paying them not only for the instructions but also to produce the instructions!!!
A delightful little parable, Tim! Thank you.
So, state regulation that required particular components went a long way toward creating the present monopoly situation. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Here’s another extremely important example of that. Well-meaning folks in the reform crowd back the creation of standards and argue that these (at least in ELA) do not mandate content. But because these standards are what matters, ultimately, are what will be tested, the publishing houses take them as the sine qua non when they are planning their books. The outline, at the outset, becomes the standards. The standards become what the books “have to cover.” What’s the problem with that?
Well, think of it this way. You have to write a curriculum on, say, the short story. You could start by thinking about how best to approach the short story with kids, or you could start with a list of standards related to the short story that you have to cover and then attempt to fit anything you create into that Procrustean bed. The situation is even worse when one turns to, say, language instruction (vocabulary, grammar, usage, mechanics, etc) and writing instruction. The standards end up driving the curriculum. They become a defacto text outline. And any new ideas, based on new, scientific understandings of how kids learn (and there are many of these in the areas of reading, writing, and language instruction) are unimportant from the point of view of the publisher and, in fact, will get in the way of the marketing message. No one wants to hear about an innovative, scientific approach to helping kids to gain, say, syntactic fluency. What they want is to make sure that this text “covers” the standards.
And so the standards end up dramatically distorting the educational materials produced and the curriculum development and pedagogy. Anyone who actually works in the ed book business knows what I am talking about here. In planning that new product, now, the first thing that one does is to put together a spreadsheet with the standards in one column and the units or lessons where those are “covered” in another. And that approach has a TERRIBLE COST in curricular coherence.
“No one wants to hear about an innovative, scientific approach to helping kids to gain, say, syntactic fluency. What they want is to make sure that this text “covers” the standards.”
Yes, one text fits all. Thank you so much, Robert, for explaining this. Now I have a better understanding of why it has been so hard to argue on behalf of deaf students for attention to the syntactic, usage, and semantic difficulties they have with English in print when dealing with Common Core curricular materials. Putting it in the framework of fairness and high expectations for all, of demanding the same high standards for all, as the “reformers” do–this rides roughshod over the actual learning needs of many of these students. Many will not master the standards at the pace of students who have had the benefit of full mastery of their native language prior to entering school. Providing them with an inflexible standardized curriculum with all the bells and whistles does not serve their best interests.
I also greatly appreciated this from a previous comment of yours:
“The Japanese texts are a clear, straightforward, coherent presentation of concepts, facts, skills. Our bloated texts look as though they had been prepared by gerbils on methamphetamine. They skip from one thing to the next. Everything is presented in sound bites. There is no coherence. But there is a GREAT MOUNTAIN of stuff.” Students, especially students with gaps in background knowledge, need deeply contextualized, coherent teaching. Otherwise the result is pretty much flotsam and jetsam. From my understanding of the Common Core, students are expected to deeply analyze decontextualized passages. Who in the real world has ever chosen a complex passage at random to deeply analyze? Why spend students’ entire academic experience starting in pre-k to become proficient on this type of distorted task?
Well said, Sheila, and deeply moving. How wonderful for the country that there are so many teachers like you. If only people like you were empowered to make, with their colleagues, their own informed decisions.
In the days before the current “accountability” craze, my colleagues and I were empowered to make our own informed decisions about addressing our students’ needs. Regrettably, with all of this lunacy going on, I realized that I did not have the mental or emotional stamina to withstand the coming onslaught of obsessive measuring of students to other people’s ideas of achievement, so I decided to retire two years ago. Since then I have devoted much of my time and mental energy to learning about the ed reform juggernaut and writing and speaking out against it. What a huge waste of resources. There are so many real needs that are not being addressed. It reminds me of the saying from the Vietnam War days–we have to destroy this village to save it. In the end, what is left but suffering.
I don’t think good intentions are germaine. What is being described is an unregulated monopoly– the state ed dept, not the materials vendors. The same thing will happen in any public utility if there is not a separate procurement arm with the responsibility to keep rates down through competitive bids, development of new sources, commercial review of specifications, etc., all operating within the sort of regulatory framework you have to have when there is only one provider of services.
Sounds like nobody’s minding the cookie jar. Another very important reason to run school districts at the local level where those paying for the service can keep a close eye on how expenditures are managed.
There are many educational reasons to avoid state and fed intervention in mandating standards and curriculum. But we must also remember, as taxpayers and businesspeople, that if we cede that kind of power for any reason, we are handing over control of the pursestrings.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. What a mess. And caused by a lot of bureaucratic good intentions.
When do we stop the “one-size-fits-all because it works for me, it will work for you” approach to education? I read a Charlotte Danielson interview and was troubled by her discussion for several reasons. One hill does not make a mountain!
She states: “Administrators face an enormous paperwork burden. How can they cope”?
DANIELSON: “I’ve partnered with a software company to design online tools that help administrators. They’ve developed an iPad app that helps with assessment of observers. Many vendors sense there is money to be made and are getting into the act. I’ve partnered with just one company so that I could ensure a high quality product. In response to demand, the Danielson Group also developed a commercial version of the online training and certification test for administrators and observers that we used in the MET study”.
And so here goes the vicious cycle. Who are we kidding if we think one person should control ONE approach which is forced upon ALL public school students in THE US??? RTTT has ensured this. Sounds an awful lot like reasons that democracies so deplore communism.
Here is the link to the interview from Feb 2013 in which Danielson comments on why her program is the ONE…
http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=26268
I want to read a variety of view points on what works for a variety of teachers in different settings AND WANT TO BE A REFLECTIVE TEACHER WHO MAKES UP HER OWN MIND ABOUT WHAT WILL HELP ME WHILE SEEKING ADVICE FROM MY PRINCIPAL. Danielson has become nothing more than a highly expensive, top-down, all- encompassing and time-consuming potentially punitive directive that a nation of public schools are held hostage to by RTTT!
Another perfect example of where the rubber meets the road. You start with a well-intentioned attempt to address a social need. Danielson’s evaluation models were already widely used (at least among northeast schools I know of) & very helpful as guidelines. Schools were free to adapt what worked for them. She herself has said they were never intended for use as a gov-imposed mandate tied to teacher pay.
As soon as you mandate the details of how to administer staff TO those responsible for staff administration, the baby goes out with the bathwater. The principal cannot tweak the evaluation tool to fit his own requirements, has no control over the costs to administer it or whether it even works as an evaluation tool. There may be a feedback/correction channel, but the more distance you place between the principal & the mandating authority the less likely corrections will be made. When the state tries to make corrections suitable ‘for everybody’, all you can expect is the sort of thing you cite Ms Danielson is working on here– a software program to reduce the volume of paperwork.
The practical result will be exactly what we’ve seen for decades when the state attempts to remove curriculum design from the teacher’s province: storage cabinets full of untouched binders full of predigested lesson plans and workbooks.
Literature textbooks these days are horrendous, and most of the accompanying supplementary material is useless. All I want from a literature textbook is the literature itself printed in a clear and aesthetically pleasing font, some thoughtful questions at the end of the selection to help with active reading, good introductions to literary movements and time periods, and a glossary of literary terms at the end. That’s it.
In recent textbooks there’s so much visual eye candy all over the page, and so many pointless activities aligned to every bad educational trend over the last thirty years that it’s impossible for me to get my bearings when I open the book, never mind the students. I always try to use the oldest extant textbooks in my school, and they sit in kids’ lockers most of the time anyway because we spend most of the year working out of paperbacks and photocopied packets.
The lit texts these days are a complete abomination. Just awful. Fully of idiocies. Bloated and stupid. They appear to have been put together by complete amateurs. But they weren’t. They were put together by people cobbling something together that had to meet a billion regulatory demands and instantiate all the latest edufads cooked up by the reform crowd.
Look at a lit text today and you will have a hard time actually finding the selection in a lesson. A four-paragraph selection will be BURIED, completely BURIED, in 40 pages of ancillary exercises and extensions.
“All I want from a literature textbook is the literature itself printed in a clear and aesthetically pleasing font, some thoughtful questions at the end of the selection to help with ative reading, good introductions to literary movements and time periods, and a glossary of literary terms at the end.”
These are words spoken by someone who has a clue what he is doing. And a lot of teachers do. But all, now, have to wade through the mountains of junk in these programs, and their students suffer from the opportunity cost of their districts having spent so terribly much money on all that useless ancillary crap.
My students use actual novels and plays as well as an American Literature text from the 1990s. Many of our lessons are collaborations of genius and love passed on for decades. We are now applying the Orwellian CC language to our lessons. We used to admire College Board materials because individual teachers designed them. Not anymore.
Robert, you are absolutely correct on all points! This needs to be said, loud and clear, to all districts everywhere. It has been a corrupting influence.
I might add, too, that when schools are locked into only certain accepted avenues of purchasing supplies, the cost is unnecessarily high. Why can’t teachers be given $x to go buy what they truly need for the classroom at a lower rate than ordering from specified approved catalogs? They don’t seem to TRUST us to spend wisely. I have had 2 small bottles of White Out shipped in a box the size of a Puffs tissue box or larger , with postage for more than the product cost. Ridiculous.
We need site-based management in this country. We need local principals, superintendents, curriculum coordinators, and teachers to take back their profession, to make their own decisions about materials. Sadly, we are heading furiously in the opposite direction. The current reforms are top-down, authoritarian mandates created by amateurs. And those amateurs, many of them professional educrats, are ruining our teaching and stifling the creation of truly coherent and innovative educational materials.
Robert, I worry that the sites won’t be able to choose well. In fact, CA has recently passed a law that enables districts to choose their own Common Core texts –bypassing the state approval process — and use some of the CC monies allocated to each district to do this. But when I explained this to our administrators and teachers, there was no rush to start hunting for good materials. I sense that everyone wants to be told what to buy. Who has time to find new materials? And what KIND of materials do we need? The answer hinges on one’s interpretation of the Common Core –which most seem to view as a bundle of skills to be explicitly taught and mastered, not a call for a coherent, knowledge-building curriculum (even though the CC does call for this in a sidebar on p. 2). So the texts sites choose (if they choose to choose at all) are likely to be ill-chosen. And I must confess that I don’t quite know how to go about using this opportunity. I’d like a day off to roam the Internet looking for materials and order sample copies. Then another day to examine the materials when they came in and discuss with colleagues. I actually asked for this; no reply. Meanwhile I’m swamped with the demands of teaching seven classes a day. Schools have been given the “freedom” to make new curricula (in accord with the CC) and buy whatever materials they deem fit, but what good is this freedom if we’re too overburdened and overstretched with daily demands to use it well. Like overbusy families, who’d like to cook delicious healthy meals from scratch each night, but end up having to resort to Taco Bell, our school finds itself having to reach for the curricular equivalent of fast food.
You raise a very important point, Ponderosa! Above, I discuss some of the differences between the bloated U.S. math texts and the coherent Japanese ones. Here’s another BIG difference in Japanese and American education. A big part of the Japanese system is something called “Lesson Study.” Teachers are given a great deal of time, each week, to meet and think very seriously about what they did, what worked and what didn’t, what they are planning to do, what materials they are going to use and approaches they are going to take. This emphasis on Lesson Study AND GIVING PEOPLE THE TIME FOR IT promotes continuous improvement. Such improvement comes from the bottom up, not from the top down.
I doubt you could find a teacher in Japan who is teaching seven classes a day. That is insane!
Still, I think CA is onto something there. At least they’ve opened the door. Individual teachers won’t be able to make much use of the opportunity at first (maybe one slim book at a time?). If the school has enough budget for a curriculum adviser, perhaps she/he could begin making inroads. Seems like, if a way to save $ & improve quality is legally open to the local schoolthings could start happening!
These textbooks are symptomatic of everything that is wrong with American education — and they send a dreadful and misleading message to naive teachers, parents, and administrators (and students probably) about what education is all about.
Jim Morgan’s comment sounds like the comment of true teaching… teachers want to work very hard.. very hard at creating the best education environment they can based on their dedication to students and the craft of education. The only comment missing from his was this.. “Can we just let teachers TEACH”… Following a cookie cutter step-by-step published manual is not why we who love teaching get into teaching. I know I love teaching when I am able to look at each of my students and to help each one of them get excited in the learning process. Inflicting the “Bill Gates.. education my way or the highway…” is an “engagement” killer in the learning process that no one passionate about teaching wants to master.
Robert Shepherd: How Corporate Monopolies Control What Students Learn
Mr. Shepherd you bring out a very disconcerting aspect of the CC.
What do the states do who haven’t bought into the CC? Where are they going to go to purchase their unadulterated textbooks?
Big publishers like Scott Foresman, Harcourt Brace, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Allyn & Bacon have all been bought out by Pearson Co. which is based in England and operates in over 70 countries. Pearson has over 100 “education brands.” has publishing companies in China and Indonesia to state a few.
★ The Testing Industry’s Big four/Frontline”
“When Congress increased this year’s budget for the Department of Education by $11 billion, it set aside $400 million to help states develop and administer the tests that the No Child Left Behind Act mandated for children in grades 3 through 8. Among the likely benefactors of the extra funds were the four companies that dominate the testing market — three test publishers and one scoring firm.
Those four companies are Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. According to an October 2001 report in the industry newsletter Educational Marketer, Harcourt, CTB McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests. NCSPearson”
“Pearson Conglomerate Gets $32 million for Standardised Test Scandal and Idiocy” …”RESIST THIS ORWELLIAN ATTACK ON THE MIND AND THE DEMOCRATIC VALUES OF INDEPENDENT THINKING WE PROFESS TO SUPPORT!…”
Also,
I don’t like what I am discovering in our libraries. I have been checking out the publishers of the picture books my grandchildren have from the public library. All look so new and eye catching, however, they are all published in either Indonesia or China. (I do not like the art work in many of the new picture books. The story line can’t compare to our tried and true authors of the past. ) I have searched one of the largest libraries on Long Island and I can only find two titles of Eric Carle; nor could I find many other phenomenal children’s authors and classics. Initially I thought that there must be a lot of parents with good understand of great children’s books but after returning numerous times the shelves never had more than a book or two of Eric Carle. Many other classics I couldn’t find. I know at our own neighborhood library many classics are sold to make room for new books. I don’t want our libraries purchasing any book from the Pearson Company. We need to put our own publishers to work- regardless of the cost. Plus, we have some of the most phenomenal authors and illustrators here in the US. We don’t have to settle for less.
RE: the library. You should ask the head librarian what’s going on. My local NJ library (town pop 35k) has over 40 Eric Carle titles on hand, many in multiple copies.
About 7 years ago – back when my district still had textbook funds – teachers were encouraged to go to a book fair to look at potential math programs for adoption by our county. Every publisher had give-aways, freebies and salespeople hawking their wares. One program stood out as being very different from the others. It wasn’t fancy. It didn’t come with boxes and boxes of supplementary crap. It was solid and simple and published by a university.
When we went back to our schools and discussed the materials and all of our options, only a couple of us voted to adopt that program. Most teachers were absolutely convinced that the programs that came equipped with the most extra stuff would be the best choice. Shiny stuff is very tempting and the publishers all know this. And I was shocked at the number of teachers who wanted a “fool-proof,” scripted program. The publishers were also well aware of this, too.
My county chose a program from one of the major publishers. It was ridiculously expensive. Once we started teaching using the materials, I found major disconnects between the program and our state objectives, even though the publisher had touted the program as being aligned. I also realized that the materials were simply boxes and boxes of junk. Much of the junk needed to be re-purchased each year, no matter our dwindling budgets.
Now that the Common Core NATIONAL Standards have been adopted by my state, that same publisher has rewritten the program to match the CCNS. I suspect they are just slapping a CCNS sticker on the cover of each book and adding a section in each teacher manual which lists the CCNS standards.
Of course, my county cannot afford to buy this new program. So we are stuck with the unaligned program, which was terrible from the get-go. CCNS alignment is just a ploy to sell more books. Little did the publishers know, we ran out of money attempting to meet RttT mandates. They are going to have to find other ways to make money off of us.
Oh, tests! Testing is the new frontier for edu-publishers.
Same story everywhere. Districts adopt the bloat. Then the buyer’s remorse hits home, big time.
I so agree with the description of literature anthologies. The new world lit book my district adopted a few years before the common core was so bad, my department chair and I called companies to get more of our out-of-print text from warehouses, and luckily, they had enough for us to cling to our old books a little longer. The new books were so huge, we could have used them all four years of high school and not finished them. No way would students be able to carry them around, and the texts were buried under so many pictures and distracting sidebars, the main point of the text was lost. With CCSS, our district has really pushed thematic units and “excerpts” until the new magical commmon core textbooks come out, but my English Dept. has mostly taken the introduction of the ELA standards to heart where it mentions that students should be able to focus on an extended text. We are using novels and book-length nonfiction more than ever. We also use a ton of nonfiction, whether digital, visual or printed, from current national conversations. So given that novels are still pretty cheap, especially classics, and nonfiction selections in anthologies are either quicky outdated or have stood the test of time and are free online, I would argue that for ELA in high school, we really don’t need textbooks at all, at least not the kinds the major publishers focus on. A small reader of classic essays and a few novels would suffice. And a lot of copy paper for our kids without internet access, which is still cheaper than giving every kid an Ipad.
These books make excellent door stops. Expensive ones, but they certainly do the job!
About 40% of the textbooks produced by the big corporations consists of filler—black space and irrelevant visuals.
Why should trees die for that?
The late Senator Byrd, not long before he died, stood on the Senate floor and showed his colleagues one of these. He said, it’s no wonder kids are attention deficit. Look at this crap. Every few lines it’s “And Now for Something Completely Different.” Worked for Monty Python, not for textbooks.
And yes, those trees. 92 percent of old-growth forest is gone. But hey, we have monoculture tree farms, as we now have monoculture, scripted, standards-and-test-driven reformy ed.
“The new books were so huge, we could have used them all four years of high school and not finished them. No way would students be able to carry them around…”
The massive textbooks are also health hazards. This NYT article on overloaded backpacks didn’t address this problem, though. The favored solution is to go digital:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/heavy-backpacks-can-spell-chronic-back-pain-for-children/?_r=0
And don’t you think it came to this because corporate entities (the giant ones) got their foot in the door because some leaders were starry-eyed over rubbing elbows with big money?
It reminds me of Sasha Baron Cohen’s movie where he pretends he is looking for children for a movie and parents say yes to unbelievably risky things just so their kid can get in the movie.
Risk-taking and foolishness, lately, have a blurry line. Particularly when things like “creative disruption/destruction” are boasted about. Nobody wants to be a square and say “no thank you.”
Every day I hope to be a giant square. Because at least I can play the drums and so I know I’m not really a square, but I’m square enough to know that big money is not everything.
Let’s here it for squares! (Squares who have rhythm. . .even better).
Leaders will always rub elbows w/stars (or at least take their $) if given the opportunity. Taxpayers & voters have got to insist on proper purchasing procedures/ cost accountability at every level of gov they allow to make purchases with our tax $.
I would love to see the testing companies make money–creating good personalized diagnostic instruments, good content-specific formative testing. There’s a lot that could be done in both areas that would extraordinarily valuable. But this general high-stakes summative testing on great swathes of learning (reading, writing, mathematics) based on egregious standards (in ELA this is particularly so) has terrible consequences for pedagogy and curricula. The standards become recipes that the publishers follow in order to create their bloated products that lack any coherence or real curricular innovation. Why this happens is complex, but it is, in fact, what happens. The road to hell in American PreK-12 education is paved by the good intentions of the makers of the standards and of the summative, high-stakes tests.
Robert D. Shepherd: love your posts.
Consider this. Gerald Bracey, EDUCATION HELL: RHETORIC VS. REALITY: Transforming the Fire Consuming America’s Schools (2009), p. 3 of his introduction, where he notes in commenting on someone else ideas that—
“When was the last time you read something about the cosmic related to education? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while. As a psychologist, I might want to add that, psychologically, education is the development of intellectual skills, aesthetic awareness, and creativity.
Perusing an article by Sharon Nichols and David Berliner in the May, 2008, Phi Delta Kappan, I was stunned on encountering the phrase “love of learning” (Nichols and Berliner, 2008). Wait! I’ve head that before! Just not lately. Lately it’s all dreariness and fearmongering about “achievement,” achievement narrowly defined by test scores.Get it through your head now: In the long run, test scores don’t count.”
So keep thinking big and writing big. You are on the right track. Or so a pretty darned accomplished numbers/stats guy thought:
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” [Albert Einstein]
🙂
I really dread these tests, and not because I am afraid of their being tied to my evaluation, although they are, but because I know the kids will be so demoralized. We use a lot of copy paper in my English Dept., as I mentioned above, and one advantage is that we can instruct the kids in annotation. This kind of engagement with text has helped our low readers with our state proficiency exam, which is taken on paper. The new tests are online, so kids can’t do this anymore, even though research has shown we all read better with printed rather than online text, especially when we can annotate. I know SBAC says kids can open a box to take notes in and highlight with the cursor. But that is way more cumbersome, and guess what? A lot of our low readers also do not have computers at home. And their skills in keyboarding etc. are not as strong. I mostly teach AP, so I am not as worried about those kids, because the writing portions of the test are an awful lot like AP exams, but I also tutor lower level kids after school, and they are likely to give up on themselves when faced with these long, difficult online tests. I teach in Las Vegas, and we have a big problem with no funding for a large population of ELL students and with poverty, as one of the hardest hit communities during the recession.
Reblogged this on As the Adjunctiverse Turns and commented:
Not so different from what is happening #highered, just with a head start – a fearful example that academia ignored. Now it comes for them….
This was posted in Edweek by the mom of a murdered Sandy Hook child:
Nelba Marquez-Greene’s 6-year-old daughter Ana Grace, who was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2012.
As another school year begins and old routines settle back into place, I wanted to share my story in honor of the teachers everywhere who care for our children.
I lost my 6-year-old daughter Ana Grace on Dec. 14, 2012, in the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. My son, who was in the building and heard the shooting, survived.
While waiting in the firehouse that day to hear the official news that our daughter was dead, my husband and I made promises to ourselves, to each other, and to our son. We promised to face the future with courage, faith, and love.
As teachers and school employees begin this new year, my wish for you is that same courage, faith, and love.
It takes guts to be a teacher. Six brave women gave their lives trying to protect their students at Sandy Hook. Other teachers were forced to run from the building, stepping over the bodies of their friends and colleagues, and they came right back to work.
When I asked my son’s teacher why she returned, she responded, “Because they are my kids. And my students need me now more than ever.” She sent daily updates on my son’s progress, from his behavior to what he’d eaten for lunch. And four months later, when my son finally smiled one day after school, I asked him about it. His response? “Mom. My teacher is so funny. I had an epic day.”
While I pray you will never find yourself in the position of the teachers at Sandy Hook, your courage will support students like my son, who have lived through traumas no child should have to.
Your courage will support students who are left out and overlooked, like the isolated young man who killed my daughter. At some point he was a young, impressionable student, often sitting all alone at school. You will have kids facing long odds for whom your smile, your encouraging word, and your willingness to go the extra mile will provide the comfort and security they need to try again tomorrow.
When you Google “hero,” there should be a picture of a principal, a school lunch worker, a custodian, a reading specialist, a teacher, or a bus monitor. Real heroes don’t wear capes. They work in America’s schools.
Being courageous requires faith. It took faith to go back to work at Sandy Hook after the shooting. Nobody had the answers or knew what would come tomorrow, but they just kept going. Every opportunity you have to create welcoming environments in our schools where parents and students feel connected counts.
Have faith that your hard work is having a profound impact on your students. Of the 15,000 personal letters I received after the shooting, only one stays at my bedside. It’s from my high school English teacher, Robert Buckley.
But you can’t be courageous or step out on faith without a deep love for what you do.
Parents are sending their precious children to you this fall. Some will come fully prepared, and others not. They will come fed and with empty bellies. They will come from intact homes and fractured ones. Love them all.
When my son returned to school in January, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Imagine the difficulty in sending your surviving child into a classroom when you lost your baby in a school shooting. We sent him because we didn’t want him to be afraid.
We sent him because we wanted him to understand that while our lives would never be the same, our lives still needed to move forward.
According to the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health, nearly half of America’s children will have suffered at least one childhood trauma before the age of 18. They need your love.
A few weeks before the shooting, Ana Grace and I shared a special morning. Lunches were packed and clothes were picked out the night before, so we had extra time to snuggle. And while I lay in bed with my beautiful caramel princess, she sensed that I was distracted and asked, “What’s the matter, Mom?” I remember saying to her, “Nothing, baby. It’s just work.” She looked at me for a very long time with a thoughtful stare, then she told me, “Don’t let them suck your fun circuits dry, Mom.”
As you begin this school year, remember Ana Grace. Walk with courage, with faith, and with love. And don’t let them suck your fun circuits dry.
Still wondering….Why do all “publication” roads seem to lead toward massive corporate profit these days? Reading this article makes me want to know more about how educational materials are published and disseminated in countries like Finland and Cuba .. two vastly different countries with strong education systems… Anyone out there done research on this???
I am sick to death of Pearson!!! The 1st edition of Reading Street before Common Core wasn’t great but I made it work for my students. Their 2013 CC edition of Reading Street is horrible, they keep telling us in our trainings that we’d better follow their scripted or our students won’t pass the test and the sales person for my area seems to have become best friends with my school system’s Superintendent for Curriculum.
The letter posted by Linda about Nelba Marquez-Greene is both heart breaking and dramatically inspirational at the same time. That they adopted that attitude, that the teacher said “They are my kids” and weeks later her son for the first time comes home with a smile and she asks what happened “My teacher is so funny.” Does it get any better than that and why you need dedicated people like that with our children not an “In and Out” like TFA. With burgers real good, with teachers and children, real bad.
Where there is real big money there will be total corruption when it is allowed as it is now. Textbooks are major money. At a state board of education meeting I had one of their lobbyists tell me, after I gave him something he needed and did not know about until he saw it, that they have a special section for the crazy people in Texas as there is enough money to dedicate just for them and their fantastical makeup world they want in their books. Whatever, right?