Dr. Frank Wang

How textbooks and the considerable economic resources of textbook publishers can be used to improve student achievement.

Every president in recent memory has come to office hoping to achieve the mantle of "the education President." During the recent hotly contested presidential election, there was much talk about a variety of proposals: reducing class size, hiring up to 100,000 new teachers, allowing parents to use vouchers to afford them a greater choice of schools, instituting merit pay for teachers based upon student performance, and ensuring accountability through rigorous student testing. Today, all of these proposals remain worthy of serious consideration. However, one proposal was notably absent - improving the effectiveness of textbooks. Why is such a proposal important? Because textbooks form the backbone of every young American's education.

Simply stated, for most students in the United States textbooks are the primary basis of instruction. Studies on the role of textbooks show that up to 90% of classroom time is structured around them, and that the weaker the teacher, the greater the reliance upon the printed pages. Further studies indicate that students spend between 70-90 percent of their homework time using textbooks. All this to say that a debate about the future of American education is, at best, incomplete without a debate about textbooks -- which ones to use and how to choose them.

Textbook selection (in education circles called "textbook adoption") is a state issue and, at present, there are two categories of states, "open" and "closed." An open state is one where individual school districts are free to choose the textbooks they want to use. A closed state chooses its textbooks at the state level and, if a textbook is not deemed "acceptable" to a state textbook committee, then state funds cannot be used to purchase them and schools face formidable barriers should they want to use a non-adopted textbook. Twenty-one states have the "closed" model of textbook selection. In theory, the goal of such a process is noble: to ensure students use only the best and highest quality textbooks; in practice, this process creates a dynamic that results in poor and ineffectual textbooks and hurts the very students it is trying to help.

A big flaw in a closed system is that the state textbook selection process is often subject to the whims and biases of individual committee members. One celebrated case of this is described in Harriet Tyson-Bernstein's stinging indictment of the state textbook selection process, America's Textbook Fiasco: A Conspiracy of Good Intentions. In her book, she describes how, in 1966, a single North Carolina textbook committee member complained that the state's approved history textbook failed to mention the relatively obscure Revolutionary War Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge - which happened to have occurred near his home. Result? History textbook adoption in the Tar Heel State was delayed a full year while the publisher of the state's only approved history textbook revised its content to include a full account of that battle. Once done, students in not just North Carolina but the entire country (as textbooks designed for a few large textbook adoption markets are then used for the whole country) found more written on the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge than either the Boston Tea Party or the first Continental Congress. This remained the case until the late 1980s. In this case, "Moore is less".

Nowhere do "closed" states do more damage than with mathematics textbooks; here, the textbook adoption processes led to the rise of what has been called "fuzzy" and "MTV" mathematics. John Saxon, the founder of Saxon Publishers, wrote textbooks that emphasized basic skills and whose use produced impressive results in the classroom.

However, his textbooks were widely rejected by state textbook adoption committees. Why? Because Saxon did not bow to the idol of new age, new wave education practices that included de-emphasizing basic skills and putting calculators in the hands of students as young as five. Armed with hard evidence of higher test scores directly related to his programs, John Saxon led successful grass-roots movements to change the law in a few "closed" states, (most notably Georgia and Oklahoma) allowing school districts the freedom to choose their own textbook programs.

President Bush says that schools must be accountable for student achievement. It's time to stop arguing about inputs and start focusing on outcomes, because results matter. As Time Magazine wrote, "Students using Saxon's (algebra) book showed an overall gain of 159% as compared with the control group. Tests also revealed that Saxon students in the lowest-ability group outscored their control counterparts by a staggering 246%. Perhaps even more staggering is the fact that the low-ability Saxon students outscored the high-medium controls on every test." President Bush demands, "no child be left behind." I couldn't agree with him more.

President Bush's goals can be accomplished not by spending more money but by deregulating the textbook review and adoption process. The evidence against the state textbook adoption process is damning. For example, a careful examination of the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will show that the "closed" states dominate the ranks of the lowest performing states, whereas states without a state textbook adoption process are the NAEP's top performing states.

Our textbook publishers are simply followers in a flawed educational process. In response to criticism of the quality of textbooks, one major textbook publisher executive, speaking on behalf of the American Association of Publishers, stated that publishers are simply giving the public what is being asked of them by the state textbook adoption processes. Significantly, not a single one of these state adoption processes that I know of includes effectiveness as part of their criteria. In fact, I have personally heard the chairman of the California curriculum commission state in a recent open meeting, following the public testimony of teachers about test score increases after using the Saxon program, that though effectiveness may be part of the criteria we use as consumers, it is not part of the textbook selection process and should not be considered when reviewing the Saxon textbooks.

My simple solution to this idiocy is that we do away with the cumbersome and convoluted state textbook selection process and institute greater accountability through better and more rigorous testing. Local educators should be freed to use whatever curriculum they wish as long as they are able to achieve the desired results. In such an environment, I believe textbook publishers will spend more time developing programs that produce real results and less (or no) time primping and preening to win the textbook adoption "beauty contest". But in order to reach this goal, textbooks must be placed high among the top issues of American education. Right now, textbooks are not even part of our national education dialogue.

The recently passed education bill numbers nearly 1000 pages but makes no mention of textbooks. This is a shame, since textbooks and the considerable economic resources of textbook publishers can be (indeed must be) part of the solution if they are to cease being a large part of the problem. This I believe is the "textbook solution" to our education woes.

Dr. Frank Wang is an M.I.T. educated mathematician and chairman of Saxon Publishers , a textbook publisher for elementary through high school textbooks. He has served on advisory committees for the proposed national voluntary and the NAEP tests. He is presently on the M.I.T. mathematics department visiting committee