The Education Bazaar

Is There Room for Web 2.0 Content in the Typical Classroom?

Most schools are still using traditional textbooks in traditional ways. I am wondering where those classrooms are going to find the flexibility or desire to use Web 2.0 tools, such as collaborative content creation and textbook tools that are starting to appear.

As I outlined in “Is K-12 Ready for Open Content?“, the technological tools to support collaborative content development do now exist. There are systems that do serve that purpose on a limited scale now.

The most promising or important ones that are “Open” in the sense we use here would be in my mind Wikibooks, and Connexions. Although quite different, they offer tremendous promise. Sophie looks to be another project to watch, but is not currently something we can examine. The point of conflict is the degree to which schools can or want to participate in curriculum construction instead of buy it from vendors.

Now we look at some of the ways that Open Content would be superior to existing methods of content production through the publishing industry, as well as the limits to innovation that are being imposing on both grant-issuing organizations and schools.

The textbook industry has continued to assimilate smaller publishers into larger ones, and has greatly expanded it’s holdings in data systems, testing products, and the data analysis packages to explain the results to districts. In short, they make the textbooks, the tests, and the remedial materials to improve the test scores.In fact, the handful of companies that control textbook publishing are purchasing digital products and services in the hopes of creating new markets for proprietary knowledge distribution. Most now have online textbook enhancements, multimedia supplements, downloadable enrichment guides for teachers and so on.

Some, like Holt, Reinhart and Winston’s secondary division, have “online textbooks” which “provide expanded access to interactive activities and assignments, offering students a place to store work and teachers a place to manage assessment and progress of student work.”Pearson and others are now talking about Podcast and iPod friendly delivery formats….although the products proposed so far are simply digital audio and video using the latest buzz terminology, and not yet capitalizing on RSS and other Web 2.0 ideas.

Pearson recently bought PowerSchool, Apple’s web-based student information system, and indicated at time of the sale that part of the agreement involved a partnership to produce iPod-based content. Since Pearson now owns virutally all of the top three SIS systems, it is unclear if the iPod tie in will be related to that market, or to instruction.

In general, the industry continues to see takeovers and purchases of smaller, regionally relevant firms by larger, international media corporations. Depending on the source you site, the idustry is now controlled by either four large firms. This centralization of control has had a significant impact on the industry, and resulted in the extensive use of contracted “development houses” for publication lines rather that in-house writers and editors.

Profits are down, and textbook prices have soared. Textbooks are still a very profitable business for publishers, but less so than a few years ago. The industry seems to be struggling to find its way right now. Nearly all the major firms reacted to the calls for increased accountability under NCLB by further extending into testing and test preparation, made a ton of money doing so. Textbook publishers now control the textbooks schools use, the acheivement tests themselves, and the remedial programs sold to schools to increase their test performance.

It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to the essential struggle between perceived control of knowledge by experts – the current system – and Web 2.0’s revolutionary ideas about who owns and vetts knowledge. The interactivity, exploding connectivism, shorter “shelf life” of knowledge will be hard for them to incorporate without giving up some essential controls. . Ideas about knowledge, the role of digital resources, and about technology’s role education are all changing. Teachers and students are people with regular lives outside of school, and they are seeing access to both create and consume information explode.

Are textbooks which are written every six years, even with online supplements, multimedia enhancements, and industry created iPod audio clips going to be enough to engage tomorrow’s students? Tomorrow’s teachers? Are they going to be relevant in a rapidly changing environment where the shelf life of information gets shorter and shorter?

Web 2.0 Content in the Typical Classroom?

Most schools are still using traditional textbooks in traditional ways. I am wondering where those classrooms are going to find the flexibility or desire to use Web 2.0 tools, such as collaborative content creation and textbook tools that are starting to appear.
As I outlined in “Is K-12 Ready for Open Content?“, the technological tools to support collaborative content development do now exist. There are systems that do serve that purpose on a limited scale now.

The most promising or important ones that are “Open” in the sense we use here would be in my mind Wikibooks, and Connexions. Although quite different, they offer tremendous promise. Sophie looks to be another project to watch, but is not currently something we can examine. The point of conflict is the degree to which schools can or want to participate in curriculum construction instead of buy it from vendors.
Now we look at some of the ways that Open Content would be superior to existing methods of content production through the publishing industry, as well as the limits to innovation that are being imposing on both grant-issuing organizations and schools.

The textbook industry has continued to assimilate smaller publishers into larger ones, and has greatly expanded it’s holdings in data systems, testing products, and the data analysis packages to explain the results to districts. In short, they make the textbooks, the tests, and the remedial materials to improve the test scores.In fact, the handful of companies that control textbook publishing are purchasing digital products and services in the hopes of creating new markets for proprietary knowledge distribution. Most now have online textbook enhancements, multimedia supplements, downloadable enrichment guides for teachers and so on.

Some, like Holt, Reinhart and Winston’s secondary division, have “online textbooks” which “provide expanded access to interactive activities and assignments, offering students a place to store work and teachers a place to manage assessment and progress of student work.”Pearson and others are now talking about Podcast and iPod friendly delivery formats….although the products proposed so far are simply digital audio and video using the latest buzz terminology, and not yet capitalizing on RSS and other Web 2.0 ideas. Pearson recently bought PowerSchool, Apple’s web-based student information system, and indicated at time of the sale that part of the agreement involved a partnership to produce iPod-based content. Since Pearson now owns virutally all of the top three SIS systems, it is unclear if the iPod tie in will be related to that market, or to instruction.

In general, the industry continues to see takeovers and purchases of smaller, regionally relevant firms by larger, international media corporations. Depending on the source you site, the idustry is now controlled by either four large firms. This centralization of control has had a significant impact on the industry, and resulted in the extensive use of contracted “development houses” for publication lines rather that in-house writers and editors.

Profits are down, and textbook prices have soared. Textbooks are still a very profitable business for publishers, but less so than a few years ago. The industry seems to be struggling to find its way right now. Nearly all the major firms reacted to the calls for increased accountability under NCLB by further extending into testing and test preparation, made a ton of money doing so. Textbook publishers now control the textbooks schools use, the acheivement tests themselves, and the remedial programs sold to schools to increase their test performance.

It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to the essential struggle between perceived control of knowledge by experts – the current system – and Web 2.0’s revolutionary ideas about who owns and vetts knowledge. The interactivity, exploding connectivism, shorter “shelf life” of knowledge will be hard for them to incorporate without giving up some essential controls. . Ideas about knowledge, the role of digital resources, and about technology’s role education are all changing. Teachers and students are people with regular lives outside of school, and they are seeing access to both create and consume information explode.

Are textbooks which are written every six years, even with online supplements, multimedia enhancements, and industry created iPod audio clips going to be enough to engage tomorrow’s students? Tomorrow’s teachers? Are they going to be relevant in a rapidly changing environment where the shelf life of information gets shorter and shorter?

Textbooks in the Trenches

Embedded within the tale of the United States textbook publishing industry is a disconnect between two competing visions for the role of the textbook in schools.

• Is the textbook the curriculum, or should it serve the curriculum?

Studies and observations of teachers in classrooms have shown that between 80% and 90% of all classroom and homework activities are textbook based (American School Board Journal, 2000). This varies somewhat by school and subject ,of course. The teachers higher grades seem generally more text-bound than elementary teachers.

In some middle school and high school subject areas, however, such as social studies and history, teachers depend almost entirely on textbooks (Whitman, 2004). Science and math instruction at the middle school level and above is also primarily dependent on textbook-driven instruction rather than standards from the state or school district.

William Schmidt, in his well known 2001 research study based on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) in the United States and other countries, says:

Textbooks affect which topics teachers teach and how much time they spend on them…They also affect gains in
student achievement. In other countries, standards play a much bigger role but not in the United States. In recent years there has been considerable emphasis on state standards as a way to guide reform in U.S. math and science education…This is especially true now that there is talk of using high stakes tests linked to standards to make schools accountable for improvement and to tie funding to that improvement. That strategy may fail given that textbooks currently play a much more important role than standards according to our findings…In some countries, standards determine what is taught and what is learned. In the United States, state standards have little direct effect on what is in math and science textbooks and even less effect on determining what teachers teach and students learn.

In reality, the instructional role of the teacher in many districts is limited to teaching the prepared lessons in the textbook. That mean, essentially, that the curriculum in these schools becomes the textbook, or is more driven in reality by the selection of that text than by the work of the educational leaders or committe memebers in the district who write curriculum.

Others see the textbook as a set of resources that supplement the instructional design of the teacher. It can be used, or not, as needed by the instructor. Connectivism, and the exponentially growing set of online resources being built, or which are already in place are ideal as dispersed resources that a reflective professional can tap into for designing instruction.

PLE’s, VLE’s, DART , Moodle, Elgg….Huh?

The current buzz in my own little world is now revolving around the idea of “Personalized Learning Environments”, or PLE’s, which small technologies can now support. For examlpe, the online learning system Moodle is now working with a budding PLE called Elgg, and also with an ePortolio block. My school district is developing DART to help track individual and group progress toward standards, and to play nicely with these other systems. See my recent rant for more detail.

These, and many other new tools offer teachers the ability to track student strengths and weaknesses on learning goals, and design engaging instruction to meet group and individual needs. This granular level of control linking assessment to instruction was unimaginable even a few years ago.

Should standards, or learning outcome targets drive teachers to craft lessons which meet the specific needs of the learners in their classrooms? Should they use data about student needs to plan and guide instruction toward the identified list of essential things students need to know? Or should all teachers in a school or district follow the detailed instructional steps outlined in a nationally produced textbook?

These are essential questions, and they are rooted in the educational philosophy of the school or school district. Are teachers reflective, practicing professionals, or do they deliver training that is the same for all?

The curriculum in the Bering Strait School District (BSSD) is tied to state standards, but is locally written and regionally relevant. There is a statewide high school exit examination that all students must pass to graduate. But, students who pass it can’t get that BSSD diploma without also passing our BSSD Standards in each content area.

There are no textbooks written to meet such a small market, and so we must use texts as resources, as well references in many other media types. In BSSD, teaching from the textbook is not really an option for most subject areas.

Teachers in our district have to be active facilitators of knowledge from a variety of sources, and must use an eclectic mix of instructional materials, media types and assignment designs to meet the needs of their students. This requires far more work than teaching to the textbook, but is also more professionally and intellectually rewarding. Each teacher also has the ability to directly engaged in curriculum development. This high level of involvement is not something all teachers want to do. New staff members typically vote with their feet if they don’t fit in well with our model.

There are other schools and organizations undertaking Open Source projects to meet more “constructivist” ideas about using data for teaching and learning. Here are one partially funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, and one by the Seacoast Professional Development Center, and a collection of eleven New Hampshire school districts.

• CanDo – Developed by Arlington Public Schools & Virginia Beach Public SchoolsCanDo is a web-based, freely-distributed skills tracking program developed by teachers and students in Arlington, Virginia. It was written to help teachers track which skills their students are acquiring in their classes and at what level of competency. CanDo automatically reports skill-levels for students and the class, and issues an official Student Competency Record (SCR), required by the State of Virginia, for each student.But CanDo has two other powerful features: it allows linking to online curriculum so that students can easily work on the curriculum for skills they have not yet mastered; and, it allows students and teachers to communicate with each other directly on the server. Because CanDo is a web-based application, teachers and students may access the program from anywhere they have internet access. Works with the Open Source SIS SchoolTool .SchoolTool -
• Moodle ePortfolio Module – this is an ePortfolio module that works in a Moodle environment. Looks very cool, and I have it installed, but not used yet on a test server The project was developed by Steve Kossakoski’s office at SAU 16 in Exeter, NH.
• DART Demo Site – See the Bering Strait School District’s DART Project page for access info and passwords. The live system we are using now has about 1700 students in it, and tracks progress toward standards in our nine content areas (subjects). There are pretty good tools for grouping, exporting and analysis of data built into this….based on non-traditional, constructivist reform model, but could work with ANY standards set that progressed toward a goal, whether academic or industry oriented. It will talk to Moodle, Elgg and other systems soon….that’s what we are working on now.

Is there Room for Web 2.0 in the Typcial Classroom?

There has been a growing emphasis on curriculum “coverage” in the last ten years, and especially since the focus of accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) shifted solidly to mandated testing in 2001. The call for higher standards, and a increased reliance nationwide on testing outcomes to meaure the percieved success (or failure) of schools has created a rush of products designed to be sold to schools as curriculum packages “meeting higher standards”. Hey, who can be against “higher standards”?

NCLB says that the core areas of language arts (reading & writing), math and science are so important that states need to define what students need to know and be able to do in those areas at each age (standards), and how to measure adequate annual performance (AYP) on these standards at the student, school, district and state level for “accountability” purposes.

The goal is that “all students will be proficient” in reading, writing, math and science by 2014. Those not making Adequate Yearly Progress will be held accountable, and lose funding and varying degrees of control over their own school programs.

Over 93% of school districts nationally, with about 75,000 schools, receive Title I funds. Funding to Title I schools is dependent upon approved state and school plans to make all students proficient in these “core” subjects. Larger Title I programs are found in schools which serve low socio-economic status students. Plans that are approved are must use “scientifically based” [Definitions 1 & 2} and "evidence based" solutions.

Makes sense, right? You wouldn't want to use things that don't work, would you?

What some critics say, however, is that the bar to be labled "scientifically based" is so high, and so vested in quantifiable, meaurable approaches that it eliminates whole categories of alternatives, and makes large scale vendor-driven packaged soluitions prevalent. Vendors spend a great deal of time, money and energy documenting that their products are "scientifically based".

Also, the "scientifically based" curriclum products are typically intended to replace, not supplement a teacher's instructional efforts since "what you are doing is not working". This means that monies under NCLB frequently flow to purchase specific types of curriculum materials - many of which minimize the role of the teacher as professional.

For example, the U.S. Department of Education the What Works Clearinghouse to evaluate Middle School Math and Character Education programs, and a similar database for Reading First. Although Reading First does not have an "approved list", for example, the list of products which are actually funded is fairly short.

Grant funding, which is the primary source of money used for educational innovation in schools, is heavily linked to rubrics encouraging the selection of "scientifically based" solutions that have been "vetted" - the Usual Suspects - whether it is in Middle School math, or any of the other subject areas. Either a vendor or an approved consultant sells the curirculum materials to the district, trains the teachers, and provides support and guidance. A few of these vendors are small and medium sized companies, but most are divisions of major corporations.

There is considerable pressure for schools to select programs that are on the unwritten "approved list" for federal grants such as Reading First, NCLB, E2T2 and many others:

Although federal reading grants are targeted to schools that can least afford to lose them—those with the lowest performance and/or the largest proportion of neediest students—some districts have shunned the money and adopted more progressive literacy programs or kept the programs they currently use.

But where districts have complied and adopted scripted programs that have a Reading First "good housekeeping seal of approval," the viability of those programs, says Cathy Roller, director of Research and Policy for the International Reading Association, has depended largely on a potpourri of local decisions: which specific program gets chosen, the attitude of reading coaches, the availability of extra support and, most important, the extent to which teachers have a voice in the process.

There is a tremendous amount of formal and informal lobbying that vendors and consultants engage in to win the attention of the opinion and policy leaders at the federal and state level. An entire shadow world of meetings and conferences exists where the players from the Department(s) of Education and vendors present to one another. The Department program managers and their staff clarify, explain and revise regulations, and the vendors try to convince the program managers that their packages are valid, replicable and scientifically based.

The solutions that have nice booths and convincing presentations get to join the Usual Suspects List, and I can promise you that these almost certinly will be the hot new programs that your superintendent or your principal hears about at the conference next month. The folks from the Department were talking about them, you know, when they did the training. In fact, the vendor that makes it had a booth at the conference, and your educational leader picked up a brochure. Now the school will be writing that package into their grant.

An example of the battles being fought by vendors for acceptance can be seen in how Robert Slavin's Success for All program struggled to make the Usual Suspects list for Reading First [Article One , Two and Three] despite what appeared to many to be convincing evidence of the program’s effectiveness compared to other programs. Slavin is a long-time educational researcher himself, and works for Johns Hopkins University.

One of Bush’s signature education initiatives, Reading First provides more than $1 billion annually to public schools to help teach reading to disadvantaged children through third grade. Unprecedented in size, it is one of the few federal programs that isn’t shrinking in this time of budget cuts. Congress is expected to distribute about $6 billion to schools by 2007.

Advocates say Reading First has helped students in thousands of schools by training teachers and paying for new materials. But opponents say it has all but forced schools to buy textbooks and related materials from a handful of large publishers, several of which have retained top federal advisers as authors, editors or consultants.

Robert Slavin of the Success for All Foundation, a non-profit research group that has developed its own reading materials, requested the investigation in May, saying Reading First officials have discouraged schools from using his materials despite evidence they are effective. He says Reading First relies on the work of “consultants with major conflicts of interest.”

Susan Neuman, who until 2003 oversaw Reading First as Bush’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, says she has seen no mismanagement but noted a “preponderance” of the same textbooks in many states.

Though a few experts say reading textbooks have improved over time, Engelmann says, money would be better spent on programs targeted to individual needs.

From media reports, and a report from the Congressional Research Service, it would appear that getting validated as “scientifically based” may not be an easy, or easily understood process.

Two programs largely excluded by the federal Reading First program received the highest rating for research on reading outcomes given in a recent review. The review, issued by the Comprehensive School Reform Quality Center (CSRQ) at the respected American Institutes for Research, identified Success for All and the Direct Instruction Full Immersion program as having the strongest evidence of effectiveness for reading among 22 comprehensive school reform programs.

Despite the strong emphasis on evidence of effectiveness in the Reading First legislation, intended to help low-achieving children in grades 1-3 learn to read, the $1 billion a year Reading First program has instead emphasized traditional basal textbooks lacking evidence of effectiveness. Only 3% of Reading First grants have gone to schools using either of these programs.

Robert Slavin, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and Chairman of the non-profit Success for All Foundation said, “The CSRQ report used rigorous standards. It found 31 studies of Success for All and 10 of Direct Instruction that met its standards. If the same standards had been applied to the basal textbooks favored by Reading First, not one would have had more than a single qualifying study. Most have no research base at all.”

Other examples of small instructional material vendors struggling with the Usual Suspects list are numerous if you do a simple Google News search. This one is about a reading a program out of Georgia, but an investigation is currently under way to look at complaints filed by several other small publishers of reading materials claiming their programs were discriminated against.:

Georgia is in line for as much as $200 million of the “Reading First” money. As a retired educator and small-time publisher, Cindy Cupp knew some Georgia schools would want to buy her materials with their federal grants. But, it turned into a bitter fight when she suspected her program was being pushed aside in favor of others.

An educator for 30 years – including 3 as Georgia’s top reading official – Dr. Cindy Cupp now distributes her Cupp Readers out of a small office in Savannah. They’re used by kindergarten and first grade students in 66 Georgia schools, but she’s convinced her material is good enough to be in far more.

At Dougherty Elementary in Butts County – 45 miles south of Atlanta – teachers have been using Cupp Readers for 4 years with excellent results.

But Dougherty Elementary is limited in how much it can rely on Cindy Cupp’s materials. When the school tried to win a $237,000 federal reading grant 2 years ago, it told the State Department of Education that it would rely exclusively on Cupp Readers. And twice – the D.O.E. said “No”.

“It was pretty clear, to tell you the truth. It was like, “You want the funding? Then this, these are the series that you must use,” Dr. White says. We asked if Dr. Cupp was on the list and Dr. White responded, “Dr. Cupp was not on the list.”

The school official who directed that grant application says the rejection were based, in part, on findings by experts who hadn’t even seen Dr. Cupp’s materials.

“It was from evaluators who had not seen her program from other states,” Assistant Butts County Superintendent, Dr. Sheree Bryant says.

“It was just said, “That’s not on our list, so it can’t be on yours,” Dr. White says.

Reading First officials claim that there is “no list of approved programs“, but Georgia officials seem to believe that there is.

Official list or not, one of the impacts of these major grant programs selecting only certain programs is that many districts are now buying “solution packages” from the Usual Suspects to ensure that their formula or competitive grants are approved, and are no longer spending money on training materials which support a given pedagogical approach, or focus teaching teachers how to instruct more effectively through applying certain concepts.

Instead, selection of solutions is at least partially based on the availability of grant funding. The programs offered by the Usual Suspects are more likely to gain a higher score on grant application rubrics, and are very often written into grant applications for that specific reason.

The truth is that in this climate there is very little “home grown”, or “in-house” reform these days. Discussions at state and national conferences are all about “scalable”, “replicable”, “evidence-based” solutions packages, not about pedagogy and instructional techniques.

Depending on the program, the process of using the packaged solution can completely replace teacher lesson planning and resource selection. In some true “direct instruction” packages, for instance, almost all teacher decision making and input is eliminated. Teachers in direct instruction settings work from a “call and response” style script, and all readings, activities and even room decorations are sometimes determined by the package used. Supplementary materials may even be banned or strictly controlled in some schools.

This has polarized some teachers and school administrators who may or may not debate the effectiveness of the programs in question:

“NCLB is shaping the way reading is being taught,” says John Cromshow, a Los Angeles kindergarten teacher whose district uses a scripted program despised widely by many of its educators. “Districts are feeling the pressure to use scripted programs that have been sanctioned by the current administration,” Cromshow continues, noting, “There’s lots of money to be made. The district spends millions of dollars on reading coaches, conferences, and program training.”

The most fervent detractors say scripted programs cast publishers as producers, reading coaches as directors, and teachers and students as mere actors in someone else’s play. Many complain they take away teachers’ ability to make informed, creative choices for their students. “They take the professionalism out of the profession,” says Dawn Christiana, a reading teacher in Bellingham, Washington. “You don’t have to think; you don’t have to modify; you just script.” Others say the programs are nothing more than quick fixes for school districts on a desperate search for the Holy Grail of reading instruction—programs that raise reading scores in time to avoid penalties under the so-called No Child Left Behind law.

Notably, critics say, scripted programs are the ones that get the heartiest sanction under the rules of NCLB’s Reading First legislation, which only grants federal monies to districts that use “scientific researched-based” reading programs.

There is little doubt that scripted “direct instruction” programs can improve test scores. But some teachers see these programs as more training than education.

An example of this can be seen in the controversy over Oakland, California’s experience with McGraw-Hill’s Open Court series. This is part of an open letter written by Elizabeth Jaeger, a resigning “reading coach” with many years of experience.

In the spring of 2001, the school district adopted the Open Court reading series, a scripted reading program that tells teachers what to say and do at every moment. The following fall, the district began a rigid implementation of this program, insisting that teachers cover every detail of the curriculum. This occurred amidst the chaos caused by large numbers of teachers being removed from their classrooms to attend five-day trainings, often with no substitutes available.

Required by the district to spend two to three hours a day on Open Court instruction, teachers felt unable to include the literacy curriculum we had previously developed — curriculum that more fully addressed the range of levels and the varied strengths and weaknesses of our students. These students — full of energy and, by and large, eager to learn — became victims of a system that refused to teach them in the way they learn best: actively, holistically, and cooperatively.

In kindergarten and 1st grade, teachers now taught the least meaningful aspects of literacy — letters and sounds — and postponed emphasis on meaning for nearly two years. These children faced a steady diet of so-called decodable texts (”The cat sat on the mat. The cat is fat. Where is the cat?”). Teachers presented the lessons to all students at the same time, limiting the opportunity to differentiate instruction. Open Court also required a tremendous amount of “teacher talk,” limiting communication among children — especially problematic for English learners. Teachers got laryngitis while children remained silent.

In order to cover all the required lessons, teachers had to present the material at a very fast pace. This resulted in moving on through the curriculum even when students needed more time to understand the lessons. Frequent text-based assessments took up to 20 percent of instructional time. This over-emphasis on testing promoted teaching to the test rather than learning of greater substance. All of these factors reduced the interaction between teacher and student to a mechanical and impersonal back-and-forth.

The following year, McGraw-Hill trainers and other outside consultants began entering classrooms at will — interrupting lessons, chastising teachers in front of their students, going through personal files without permission. If teachers veered from the Open Court script, altering less effective lessons or expanding upon those lessons, the principal threatened them with disciplinary action.

In districts with the neediest students, administrators are under increasing pressure to produce improvements that are statistically measurable. Direct instruction techniques will produce results. Many of these same districts have the least experienced teachers. Some may even have less skilled, or less motivated teachers. Perhaps removing the variable of the teacher’s skill and effectiveness from the mix in this setting makes for a more reliable, measurable impact on testing.

Although education is up to states, the federal government, by attaching curriculum strings to the significant amount of Title I funding for low incomes schools – the academically neediest in the land – the government has essentially mandated pedagogy.

In this context, is there as much room for teacher-selected, or collaboratively built curriculum resources? Web 2.0 and the “read / write web”?

It depends on the program, and on how flexible the district is in its implementation. It also depends on the degree of curriculum narrowing has impacted a school. Teachers are more likely to be required to use officially approved instructional materials in core “basic skills” areas (reading, writing, math, science) than in others, and so their ability to utilize new strategies and technologies is probably greater in non-core subjects.

Most of the popular packages by the Usual Suspects are so far in the “core areas” of reading, writing and math because these are the areas stressed by accountability measures. However, if you are spending two to three hours on basic skills, for instance, your instuctional options as a teacher are limited the rest of the day.

The schools most likely to use Open Content textbooks, Web 2.0 technologies successfully are going to be innovative organizations that focus on pedagogy, not packaged curriclum solutions. The core area subject teachers in needy schools are less likely to be able to try new things, or allow teachers to experiment.

K-12 Textbooks: Scholar created? Expert vetted? Not So Much…

If vendor-driven solutions are scientifically based, then textbooks must be written to high standards by teams of experts, carefully monitored for effectiveness, and have their effectiveness documented with data, right? The programs discussed above are, after all, textbooks – like McGraw-Hill’s Open Court series.

Whether in a highly scripted setting, or in a traditional classroom, textbooks play a critical – some may even say central – role in our educational system, but are written, produced and sold through a rarely examined process. The story really is stranger than fiction.

As even a cursory study reveals, textbook content is primarily determined by political factors present in the textbook selection processes used by two key states: Texas and California. The image most school officials and educators have in their minds of recognized subject experts – probably university professors – working with master teachers to craft, and field test textbooks for publishing firms appears to be quite incorrect. Academic rigor, or pedagogical approaches do not appear to impact the creation process much at all.

Few people in decision making positions in education truly understand how textbooks are created, selected, and marketed. As a school principal, and later as a district administsrator, I did not understand how it all worked until I set out on my own a few years ago to learn more about the process. I quickly learned that even though I had been on curriculum committees, and selected textbooks for several schools and districts over the years, I did not have anything close to the whole picture.

The United States now has four key players serving one primary market , and two secondary markets who use six-year adoption cycles: Texas dominates, and California and Florida are the second tier markets. Although twenty-two states have official textbook adoption lists which tell school districts which they can use in their schools, most publishers create their textbook lines with the requirements of the Texas and California selection committees very much in mind.

Without some background in the realities of textbook publishing and marketing, it is difficult to think about how Open Content and Open Textbooks may or may not offer an alternative to districts willing to break the pattern.

Tamim Ansary’s excellent 2004 article called The Muddle Machine is a good place to start. The author worked in the textbook publishing and “development houses” for 14 years, and offers a valuable look at how changes have reduced quality in the industry in the United States.

Ansary explains in very authentic sounding terms how content gets produced and marketed to be “innovative”, but is in reality rehashed, watered down, politically correct mush. The illustration to the right is of Ansary’s view of the textbook industry, and reminds me of Al Chaffee’s entertaining Mad Magazine diagrams.

Although some believe that schools will never move away from traditional “expert written” textbooks because teachers need that validation, Tamim Ansary and others show how little actual contact or influence subject or content specialist “authors” have to do with textbook creation in the current system:

I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, “The books are done and we still don’t have an author! I must sign someone today!”

Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. “Who writes these things?” people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, “No one.” It’s symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.

Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge. In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run “adoption” system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.

With the call for school more academic rigor in the late 1990’s, all states implemented standards that were written, and intended to guide “what teachers need to teach, and students need to learn”, right? Well. Again, not so much.

Every state has a prescribed compendium of what kids should learn — tedious lists of bulleted objectives…If you should meet a textbook editor and he or she seems eccentric (odd hair, facial tics, et cetera), it’s because this is a person who has spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing countless pages filled with such action items, trying to determine if the textbook can arguably be said to support each objective.

Of course, no one looks at all the state frameworks. Arizona’s guidelines? Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn. Rhode Island’s? Pardon me while I die laughing. Some states are definitely more important than others. More on this later.

Eventually, at each grade level, the editors distill their notes into detailed outlines, a task roughly comparable to what sixthcentury jurists in Byzantium must have faced when they carved Justinian’s Code out of the jungle of Roman law. Finally, they divide the outline into theoretically manageable parts and assign these to writers to flesh into sentences.

What comes back isn’t even close to being the book. The first project I worked on was at this stage when I arrived. My assignment was to reduce a stack of pages 17 inches high, supplied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch stack that would sound as if it had all come from one source. The original text was just ore. A few of the original words survived, I suppose, but no whole sentences.

To avoid the unwelcome appearance of originality at this stage, editors send their writers voluminous guidelines. I am one of these writers, and this summer I wrote a 10-page story for a reading program. The guideline for the assignment, delivered to me in a three-ring binder, was 300 pages long.

A more complete explanation of some of the drawbacks of the current textbook publication and adoption system can be found in the Fordham Foundation’s Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption. Author David Whitman makes very good points, and cites numerous specific examples to support a case for how textbook adoption cycles permit extensive censorship, and a “dumbing down” of texts to appease special interest groups. The full text PDF is available for free download.

The content and marketing of today’s textbooks are controlled by a highly dysfunctional government-run textbook adoption process. Twenty-one states now have a statewide textbook adoption process, in which a central textbook committee or the state department of education reviews, amends, and selects the textbooks that schools may purchase with public monies for students across the state.,,The rest of the states are “open territories,” where districts can purchase textbooks of their own choosing. But since publishers naturally want to make their textbooks available in as many schools as possible, the adoption states that regulate textbooks effectively determine their content nationwide, particularly the huge adoption states of California and Texas.

In The Muddle Machine, Tamim Ansary clarifies this even further:

For the current school year, {the big three states}budgeted more than $900 million for instructional materials, more than a quarter of all the money that will be spent on textbooks in the nation.

Obviously, publishers create products specifically for the adoptions in those three key states. They then sell the same product to everybody else, because basals are very expensive to produce — a K-8 reading program can cost as much as $60 million. Publishers hope to recoup the costs of a big program from the sudden gush of money in a big adoption state, then turn a profit on the subsequent trickle from the “open territories.” Those that fail to make the list in Texas, California, or Florida are stuck recouping costs for the next six years. Strapped for money to spend on projects for the next adoption period, they’re likely to fail again. As the cycle grows vicious, they turn into lunch meat.

The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In that elite trio, Texas rules. California has more students (more than 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money can’t be used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in the adoption year.

Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though 8th grade, while the Lone Star State’s adoption process applies to textbooks from kindergarten through 12th grade.

If you’re creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 members of the Texas Board of Education, currently 5 Democrats and 10 Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog.

Whitman says in his introduction:

The truth is that textbooks are hurriedly put together by teams of hack writers from “development houses,” known
in the el-hi world as “chop shops.” Publishers are preoccupied with scrubbing textbooks of any references that adoption panels in California and Texas might object to, while at the same time scrambling to add state-endorsed keywords, figures from history, and visual aids to ensure their spots on the adoption lists of those states.

Quantity trumps, quality gets bumped. In adoption states, Johnny’s teacher doesn’t pick the textbook at all—or if she does, it’s from a short list of survivors of the adoption gantlet. Nationwide, only about one in four teachers say they pick the textbooks used in their own classrooms.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch’s detailed look at the industry in her 2004 book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Ravitch examines lawsuits, school board hearings and correspondence between textbook editors to illustrate how publishers are squeezed by pressure from groups on both the political right and left.

According the author, committee members from the right object to family conflict, disobedience, sexuality, evolution and the supernatural, while memberfs from the left force controls on language to combat racism, sexism, ageism, culture slights and so on. In response, she says, publishers have quietly adopted both sets of suggestions and ended up with bland, boring texts that can get past the selection filters.

Ravitch and many others say that adoption committees use computerized word searches to make sure certain buzzwords are included, and others not used. Committee members rarely actually read the texts they are evaluating.

Whitman explains how California led the way toward current sensitivity issues with it’s Standards for Evaluating Instructional

Materials for Social Content (PDF) :

To redress the use of stereotypes, California enacted its well-intentioned “social content standards”..These required the state textbook review committee to approve only instructional materials that “accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including the contributions of both men and women in all types of roles . . . [and the] contributions of American Indians, American Negroes, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups.” No textbook could contain “any matter reflecting adversely upon any person because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, [or] sex.” In addition to multicultural tolerance, textbooks had to accurately portray the roles of labor and entrepreneurs, and the necessity to protect the environment. The books also had to encourage thrift, fire prevention, and humane treatment of animals. At the behest of health food groups, California enacted “the junk food rule,” which discouraged the depiction and mention in schoolbooks of foods with little nutritional value.

At first glance, California’s social content standards—at least as applied to minorities and women—appeared to be a common sense and overdue effort to redress the use of stereotypes and prejudicial language….But the implementation of the social content standards by the California department of education in its “legal compliance reviews” soon outstripped common sense…The state education department also interpreted the law to mean that ethnicity, gender, and orientation had to be portrayed in an “equitable way” (not just accurately), which led both the state and ethnic and feminist groups to count and categorize every reference to men, women, people with disabilities, members of ethnic groups, and the like. A selection in a reader, or chapter in a social studies textbook, might lack literary quality or skew history. But if it had
the right numerical balance of genders and minorities, the textbook could be approved.

I managed to locate a very useful PDF of the most recent California Social Content Standards that were written in 2000. I imagine there is a newer version, but I was unable to locate it on the Web. You really should take a look at this document to fully appreciate the process and its limitations discussed here. Keep reminding yourself while you read that the specific percentages of the population of California ethnic and other subgroups must be kept proportial while meeting the other items. This is truly an amazing document.

In short, Ravitch feels that the textbook adoption cycles used by 22 states are the root cause of the significant problems in textbook quality, and have resulted in numbing mediocrity. She agrees with most other sources that the key states driving textbook construction are Texas, California and Florida. Her Wall Street Journal opinion piece on the same theme provides some briefer examples of industry self-censoring to make textbooks palpable to the two or three key textbook adoption committees.

Ravitch further asserts that:

• Textbook adoption has been hijacked by pressure groups.
• Textbooks are now judged bnot by their style, content or effectiveness, but by absurd sensitivity guidelines.
• The adoption process encourages slipshod reviews of textbooks written by anonymous development houses, according to paint-by-the-numbers formulas.
• Textbook adoption has created a textbook cartel controlled by just a few companies

In addition, she finds that there is no evidence to support textbook adoption having any positive impact on student learning, and shows how adoption states are actually all in the bottom half nationally in terms of performance on the NAEP reading and math sections.

Ravitch suggests that adoption cycles be done away with, and argues for a “free market in the world of textbook publishing, where decisions…are made by individual teachers or schools.” Although I agree with her statement, I don’t think she and would solve that problem the same way

Are these issues with textbooks new? Hardly. There has been a generally widespread agreement by industry watchers that the quality of textbooks is not very good for the last 20 years or more. Criticisms made by Fitzgerald’s America Revised (1979), Harriet Typson-Bernstein’s Conspiracy of Good Intentions (1988), Burress’ Battle of the Books (1989), and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) are all still as valid, or even more true than when they were written.

At a time when education is focused intently on quality and accountability, the quality of the textbooks – essentially the de facto curriculum used in most schools – is not being challenged in the public eye.

The focus on accountability should include more than statistics on outcomes. Meaningful discussions about pedagogy, teaching strategies and approaches, and improving the curriculum to take advantage of changing ideas about knowledge, technology and learning should be happening.

The Textbook Industry Giants

Although trade names of textbook product lines are fairly numerous, and schools think they are getting resources from many different vendors, the parent companies of the vast majority of publishers usually are belong to one of the following large corporations.

This list has links to the four dominant educational publishing empires, and a very partial listing of their key divisions and education properties:

McGraw-Hill (United States)

• CTB/McGraw-Hill
  • TerraNova
  • California Achievement Test (CAT/5)
  • TestMate Clarity
• SRA
  • SRA Phonics, SRA Reading Labs, SRA Science, SRA Real Math
  • Open Court Series
  • Windows on Math / Windows on Science
  • Distar Language / Distar Math
  • Dolch Reading
  • Barnell Loft
• Glencoe
• The Grow Network
• Macmillan / McGraw-Hill
• McGraw-Hill Contemporary
• McGraw-Hill Digital Learning
• Wright Group/McGraw-Hill
  • Everyday Math
  • Reading Recovery
  • Mathematics Their Way
  • Wright Group Literacy
• Standard & Poor’s : Although a financial services company, S & P runs the US Department of Education’s school accountability database. SchoolMatters.com is a $50 million project.

Houghton Mifflin (United States)

Houghton Mifflin Math, Houghton Mifflin Readings, etc.

Great Source

McDougal, Littell and Company

Earobics Literacy

Riverside Publishing Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), and many assessment related products.

Pearson (British)

• Pearson Education
• Prentice Hall
• Electronic Education
• Waterford Reading & Math
• MCP Mathematics
• Dale Seymour Publications
• Scott Foresman
• Prentice Hall
• Addison Wesley
• Dorling Kindersly
• PowerSchool
• SASI
• Centerpoint
• Chancery Software
• CIMS /NCS

Reed Elsevier (British-Dutch)

Harcourt Education

Steck/Vaughan

Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Is Collaborative Content Development Feasible?

Tamim Ansary suggest the following steps to reform the troubled textbook adoption and publishing cycle:

• Revamp our funding mechanisms to let teachers assemble their own curricula from numerous individual sources instead of forcing them to rely on single comprehensive packages from national textbook factories . We can’t have a different curriculum in every classroom, of course, but surely there’s a way to achieve coherence without stultification.
• Reduce basals to reference books — slim core texts that set forth as clearly as a dictionary the essential skills and information to be learned at each grade level in each subject. In content areas like history and science, the core texts would be like mini-encyclopedias, fact-checked by experts in the field and then reviewed by master teachers for scope and sequence.Dull? No, because these cores would not be the actual instructional material students would use. They would be analogous to operating systems in the world of software. If there are only a few of these and they’re pretty similar, it’s OK. Local districts and classroom teachers would receive funds enabling them to assemble their own constellations of lessons and supporting materials around the core texts, purchased not from a few behemoths but from hundreds of smaller publishing houses such as those that currently supply the supplementarytextbook industry.
• Just as software developers create applications for particular operating systems, textbook developers should develop materials that plug into the core texts. Small companies and even individuals who see a niche could produce a module to fill it. None would need $60 million to break even. Imagine, for example, a world-history core. One publisher might produce a series of historical novellas by a writer and a historian working together to go with various places and periods in history. Another might create a map of the world, software that animates at the click of a mouse to show political boundaries swelling, shrinking, and shifting over hundreds of years. Another might produce a board game that dramatizes the connections between trade and cultural diffusion. Hundreds of publishers could compete to produce lessons that fulfill some aspect of the core text, the point of reference.

The technologies now exist to make Ravitch’s suggested “free market” a reality – pun intended – and for the teachers and schools to customize curriculum to meet state and local content standards through collaborative content creation. School districts could, as BSSD has done with its Mediawiki-powered site, open up their curriculum as a Creative Commons Licensed set of documents, and make the publishing industry essentially irrelevant outside of supplementary materials.

Of course, nobody believes that the industry will just go away. Ansary’s suggestion of core materials might easily be done as Open Content textbooks by individual school districts or groups of school districts. Publishers and the media corporations could, as he further suggests, create “plug in” materials to enrich the core.

These could also be done by small companies, and groups of teachers, for that matter. Teachers, administrators, parents, and yes, even students in like-minded schools in the region, or around the country, might work together over the web to improve and refine curriculum, suggest and link to resources, upload support materials and create locally relevant, rigorous curriculum materials that meet state objectives.

Although The Muddle Machine was not about Open Content, or even about technology, I think the solutions Ansary suggest are completely practical given current or emerging technologies.

Jury is Out…Way Out

As I outlined in “Is K-12 Ready for Open Content?“, the technological tools to support collaborative content development do now exist. There are systems that do serve that purpose on a limited scale now. The most promising or important ones that are “Open” in the sense we use here would be Wikibooks, and Connexions. Although quite different, they offer tremendous promise. Sophie looks to be another project to watch, but is not currently something we can examine. The point of conflict is the degree to which schools can or want to participate in curriculum construction instead of buy it from vendors.

In this rant we have looked at some of the ways that Open Content would be superior to existing methods of content production through the publishing industry, as well as the limits to innovation that NCLB is imposing on both grant-issuing organizations and schools.

So, the jury is, as they say, “out” on whether or not Web 2.0 content creation tools can be adopted by public schools. I am fortunate enough to work for a district that sees this potential, and has a model of education flexible enough to permit curriculum innovation. Your mileage may vary.

Note: Looking for Part 1 of this rant? – “Is K-12 Ready for Open Content“

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Collaborative Tools, Future VLE / PLE / LMS, Open Content, Open Textbooks, Web 2.0 Challenges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.