Open education vs. Texas Board of Education

Ali Frick worries that California isn’t doing enough to provide the yin to Texas’s crazy yang when it comes to textbook adoption by the rest of the country. Apparently, California isn’t too worried about the Texas reforms since California uses its own textbooks. Since textbooks are mass marketed to the entire country, textbook publishers often adopt the standards of big states like Texas or California to help with the bottom line, leading Frick to write:

Thus the only state with enough clout to actually counter the Texas changes already has cocooned itself with its own separate textbook standards. That other states could coordinate sufficiently to outweigh the Texas megamarket seems an unrealistic hope. Which means that one state can effectively mandate changes that will reach the entire non-California nation.

So where is the conservative outrage on this?

Cato tells us that the federal government has no place in education because the “Founders wanted most aspects of life managed by those who were closest to them, either by state or local government or by families, businesses, and other elements of civil society.” The 2008 GOP platform lamented the diminishing local control over education; its nominee had once publicly called for the elimination of the Department of Education. The current darling of the right rejects federal education assistance because “competition breeds excellence.”

But so far, silence form the Right on this usurpation of local control. And it’s hard for me to think of really anything so antithetical to the Founding principles than for one state to mandate radical changes that all the other states are forced to swallow.

First of all, let me just say that I find the ‘reforms’ in Texas’s public school curriculum to be about as absurd as Arizona’s immigration reforms (not to mention that state’s education innovations). These are exactly the sort of reforms that push me toward the school-choice camp. After all, if the government is going to mandate stupidity and anti-historicism, then I think we should have a means of opting out of that and actually getting our kids a decent education. But I’ll leave school choice arguments aside for now.

The problem with Ali’s argument is that he’s missing the real target. Texas is not mandating that other states adopt anything. Other states will suffer from the Texas reforms by default, not by decree, and that’s because they let the textbook publishers get away with one-size-fits-all textbooks.

And remember, these are the same publishers who release endless new editions of their books in order to keep making money and prevent schools from reusing books or students from buying used books (if we take into account college as well as K-12 education).  This is an example of bad practice on the part of the states who allow themselves to be duped time and again by for-profit publishing houses – not a problem with California not standing up to Texas, or even with the crazies in the Texas Board of Education.

The best way to get around this would either be some coordination between states in order to increase their leverage against the publishers, or for more states to begin opting out of the for-profit textbook industry altogether and moving toward an open-source curriculum / open-source textbook model.

Indeed, even in Texas the open-source textbook movement may prove to be a bit of a thorn in the Board of Education’s side. Of course, open-source has its share of problems also, and if implemented badly these could be just as worrisome as anything the Texas reformists are doing. But done properly, open-source can connect education communities nationally without a national mandate; they can save states lots of money to spend on things like teachers and school supplies; and they can get around bad education reforms like those passed in Texas. Furthermore, open-source can combine the best parts of local autonomy and the best parts of national connectivity, and the material will constantly evolving to meet the needs of modern students and educators.

Don’t look to California to solve the rest of the country’s problems, and don’t look to Texas when you go looking for a scapegoat. These are problems that need to be solved by communities and individuals working together with all the new technology and communication options we now have to circumvent bad policies and greedy corporations. It won’t be perfect, but then again nothing ever is. At least it won’t be subject to the laws of ideologues and partisan reformists.

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(Above: Board member Mary Helen Berlanga shows her frustration at the numerous amendments during a meeting of the State Board of Education to discuss social studies standards on Friday May 21, 2010 in Austin, Texas. Conservatives say the Texas history curriculum has been unfairly skewed to the left after years of Democrats controlling the board. Democrats and a moderate Republican accused conservatives on the board of trying to stir up a needless controversy Thursday by using the president’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, saying his middle name was loaded with negative connotation.)