Texas Textbooks Massacre: Not So Scary After All

(May 25) -- Late last week, the Texas Board of Education, in a party line vote, passed a series of controversial changes to the state's social studies standards. Among them: Joseph McCarthy was right, Thomas Jefferson was wrong, etc.

Board members had also attempted to rechristen the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade," perhaps in the hopes of casting that tragedy in geometric, rather than human, terms to ease those unpleasant pangs of culpability. That one didn't make the cut.

Texas' move outraged educators and historians all over the country, as well as some politicians. California Democratic state Sen. Leland Yee, for instance, proposed legislation that would force the state to reject any social studies text that contains any of the changes Texas has called for. The bill has its roots in the pervasive fear that the Texas curriculum will now somehow spread over the land like an oil spill, befouling other states.

It turns out, though, that such concerns may be overblown.

Historically, Texas has been one of the three biggest buyers of textbooks in the country, along with Florida and California (publishers refer to the three as "Calflexas"). These three states have wielded great clout not just because they are large but also because they are what are known as "adoption states."

In adoption states, of which there are 21, all in the South and West, boards of education create guidelines for textbooks and reject or approve books on the basis of how fully they satisfy those guidelines. Each operates differently. Some boards require teachers to use only the books they approve, others assemble a list of approved titles for teachers to choose from. Still others merely make recommendations.

In all cases, there are huge revenues at stake for publishers. So when Texas, a giant, populous adoption state, wants a change, publishers will be eager to make it. Especially in a bad economy in which, as one textbook maker says, "states can hardly manage to pay teachers, much less buy textbooks."

Except it's no longer that straightforward. Yes, in the analogue past it was expensive and time-consuming for publishers to make customized versions of textbooks, so publishers would make changes to their editions to appease Texas, then sell those editions around the country. If Texas wanted more material on the Alamo, kids in Ohio would get more Alamo.

There were millions of books published to meet California's stringent standards as well, but they fell to the left of the mainstream. Many moderate or conservative states, given the choice, would buy the Texas addition over the California one. That made Texas especially influential.

Nowadays, despite what you may have read, the notion that the Texas Board of Education is a driver of state curricula around the country is becoming obsolete, due to digital technologies that make it easier for publishers to cater to a specific state.

Kathy Mickey, a publishing industry analyst at Maryland-based Simba Information, says, "The abilities of publishers to make those changes relatively quickly, easily and cheaply makes Texas much less of a national model."

As a result, publishers, availing themselves of this technology, are willing to tweak texts not just for larger markets but for small ones too. One publishing executive, who asked to remain anonymous, says a second consequence of the lousy economy is that publishers are glad to use the digital technology to be much more responsive to requests from smaller states, "to the point of, if you don't like that cover, we'll put a separate cover on just for you."

Another industry executive, who also asked to remain nameless for fear of alienating customers, told a story about a school district in North Carolina he worked with that asked that an award-winning Latin vocabulary book be stripped of the terms "homo" and "bi," out of fear that parents might be offended by them. Language lovers may shudder, but the changes were made, cheaply and easily. The district was happy; the revenues kept coming into the publisher.

If anything, by adopting its hot-button curriculum, Texas, rather than showing off its clout, may wind up only accelerating the evolution away from the old Calflexas-dominated system, as other states decide they'd rather not discover in themselves a sudden distaste for Jeffersonian ideas. The doomsday predictions the revisions generated could also play a role.

"There's been enough of a dumbfoundedness across the country that I suspect that's not going to happen," Mickey says. "Anybody who's going to be looking at social studies books in the next few years is going to very carefully ask if this is the Texas edition."

Adds Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers' School Division, "School districts [in non-adoption states] are free to buy other things. There are other social studies curricula out there."