The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption

September 29, 2004

Statewide textbook adoption, the process by which 21 states dictate the textbooks that schools and districts can use, is fundamentally flawed. Textbook adoption distorts the market, entices extremist groups to hijack the curriculum, enriches the textbook cartel, and papers the land with mediocre instructional materials that cannot fulfill their important education mission. The adoption process cannot be set right by tinkering with it, concludes The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, the latest release from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Rather, legislators and governors in adoption states should eliminate the process and devolve funding for and decisions about textbook purchases to individual schools, individual districts, even individual teachers.

The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption is the first of a new Fordham Institute series, "Compact Guides to Education Solutions," that provides practical solutions to K-12 education problems for policy makers, legislators, school leaders, and activists. These concise guides are meant to help drive reforms at the local, state, and national levels by offering actionable policy recommendations.

Executive Summary

Textbook Adoption: 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.

Textbook Adoption Is Bad for Students and Schools
It consistently produces second-rate textbooks that replicate the same flaws and failings over and over again. Adoption states perform poorly on national tests, and the market incentives caused by the adoption process are so skewed that lively writing and top-flight scholarship are discouraged. Every individual analyst and expert panel that has studied American K-12 textbooks has concluded that they are sorely lacking and that the adoption process cries out for reform.

Textbook adoption has been hijacked by pressure groups. The textbook adoption process has been a feature of American education since Reconstruction, when former Confederate states issued guidelines for school materials that reflected their version of the Civil War. In the present day, special interest pressure groups from the politically correct left and the religious right exert enormous influence on textbook content through bias and sensitivity guidelines and reviews that have dumbed down textbook content in an attempt to render them inoffensive to every possible ethnic, religious, and political constituency.
Textbooks are now judged not by their style, content, or effectiveness, but by the way they live up to absurd sensitivity guidelines. Do literary anthologies have more male than female story characters? Do textbooks portray stereotypes such as female nurses or male mechanics? Do history textbooks suggest that religious strife has been a cause of conflict in human history? Do they mention junk food, magic, or prayer; suggest that the old are wise or the young are vigorous; or leave out any ethnic, racial, or religious group, no matter how small? If they do, that is grounds to have a textbook rejected.
The adoption process encourages slipshod reviews of textbooks written by anonymous development houses, according to paint-by-numbers formulas. Textbooks are not actually carefully reviewedand sometimes are not read at all by those who act as "reviewers." They are scrutinized instead with a superficial "checklist" approach that identifies whether textbooks have presented key words and phrases without viewing the entire textbook for quality, accuracy, and content. States often apply "readability" formulas to ensure that textbooks use simpler words and phrases, resulting in a lowest-common-denominator approach. Reviewers almost never have to sign their reviews, and the entire process is cloaked in secrecy laws. Meanwhile, textbooks are almost never field tested to gauge whether they are effective in raising student achievement.
Finally, textbook adoption created a textbook cartel controlled by just a few companies. Requiring publishers to post performance bonds, stock outmoded book depositories, and produce huge numbers of free samples have all raised the costs of producing textbooks. This has frozen smaller, innovative textbook companies out of the adoption process and put control of the $4.3 billion textbook market in the hands of just four multi-national publishers.

The Bottom Line
There is no evidence that textbook adoption contributes to increased student learning. In fact, the vast majority of adoption states are also in the bottom half of all states when it comes to NAEP reading and math scores.

How To Reform Textbook Adoption
Textbook adoption is a fundamentally flawed process: it distorts the market, entices extremist groups to hijack the curriculum, and papers the land with mediocre instructional materials.

We do not believe the adoption process can be set right by tinkering with it. Rather, legislators and governors in "adoption" states should devolve funding for and decisions about textbook purchases to individual schools, districts, or even teachers.

Instructional materials are key parts of the domain where we should rely on front-line educators to make the best decisions for their pupils. That means that textbook selection and purchasing decisions should be made as close as possible to the teacher, ideally by the teacher herself. If that's not practical, then they should be made by the school or district.

Six Steps Toward Reform
For states that choose to maintain textbook adoption, we recommend six steps toward reforming the process.

Textbook guidelines should create incentives for quality rather than quantity.
State officials should eliminate their bias guidelines in general and California should abolish its "social content" guidelines in particular. Generally, state adoption processes should abandon the checklist approachincluding the use of computerized key-word searches and correlational analyses.
Abandon the use of readability formulas.
Adoption state officials should drop policies and practices that discourage small, high-quality publishers from competing in the textbook market.
State education officials should reform the adoption process to reveal the names of reviewers and encourage personal responsibility.
Districts, or groups of school districts, should be authorized to petition the state education department to add specific textbooks to the state-approved list.

Nationwide Reforms
These additional recommendations represent an effort to bring the textbook sector into better alignment with the No Child Left Behind act and the premium it places on rigorous scientific research and proven instructional programs.

State lawmakers, private foundations, and professional associations should create a book review industry for textbook authors.
Fund new research centers to appraise textbook effectivenessand substantially expand textbook research and evaluation at the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse. Federal, state, and private dollars could be used to fund pilot tests of the effectiveness of different textbooks on student achievement.
Adoption state lawmakers should create a textbook "safety net" that will prescribe instructional materials in failing schools.
Congress should consider modestly expanding federal funding to assist states in purchasing effective instructional materials in math, science, and historyas it has with the "Reading First" program. But funds should only be provided for the purchase of materials shown to be effective in increasing student achievement.

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The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption

Contents

Executive Summary