McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin and Orlando-based Harcourt increasingly dominate the $2.3-billion textbook business nationally. Thus, the six reading programs adopted this year in Florida come from just four companies. The high cost of developing books -- and their video, software and foreign-language ancillaries -- is a significant barrier to entry. Scholastic, publisher of a reading program well-received by some teachers, decided against spending millions to update its broad reading program in favor of focusing on its niche in remedial reading. With no update, its basic reading program this year didn't make Florida's adopted list.
Florida has plenty of clout in the marketplace -- it can usually get what it wants in a textbook and gets its books cheaper than other states.
Florida, like California and Texas, is one of 21 "adoption" states in which the state selects which "instructional materials" local schools may use. In Massachusetts, by contrast, all 371 school districts shop for their own materials individually.
The merits of statewide adoption are debated. According to the Center for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, nine of the 10 worst-performing states, including Florida, on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests are "adoption" states while only one adoption state made the top 10. Florida Education Department spokesman Adam Shores says, "our system is designed to allow us to meet the needs of our students."
Florida, after California and Texas, is the third-largest textbook market in the country, with $209 million set aside this year to buy materials.
By law, local districts can't shift money the state has earmarked for books to pay for salaries, football uniforms or other preferences -- making publishers happy. "Florida has good funding for education in general and instructional materials in particular. It's light-years ahead of other states," says George Logue, executive vice president of Houghton Mifflin's school division.
The publishers fall over themselves to match the state's specifications, which state employees create based on Florida's Sunshine State standards. The specs result in texts that, says McGraw-Hill senior vice president for government and public affairs Roger Rogalin, have been "Florida-ized, FCAT-ed and Sunshined." Texts are liberally seasoned with references to Florida locales, and the settlement of St. Augustine gets prominence.
Some materials are so sprinkled with FCAT and Sunshine State standard markers that the books are virtually unmarketable outside of Florida, says Herb Stanley of the Florida School Book Depository, a privately owned Jacksonville warehouse that stockpiles publishers' offerings from which schools make their purchases.
A comparison of catalog prices for Florida and for other states indicates Florida gets a good deal when it buys books. Prices tend to cluster: The lowest-priced sixth-grade English text, from Houghton Mifflin, costs the state $38.97; On the highest end, Prentice Hall's English text costs $41.97.
Big states like Florida "get listened to" because they're big purchasers, says William Mealey, an administrator with the 4,000-student Timberlane school district in New Hampshire, a non-adoption state. "It's common sense."
Sometimes Florida limits its choices with its standards. The state's social studies curriculum is so idiosyncratic that several publishers took a pass on the expense of developing a text for it. "We only have so many resources," says Houghton Mifflin's Logue. The result: A sales boon for Harcourt, the only publisher on the K-5 social studies adoption list. It lays claim to 533,976 (99%) of the 538,191 social studies books that Florida elementary schools planned to buy for those grades in the past two years.
The state's textbook selection process is fair, if heavily
bureaucratic.
In Florida, adoptions run in cycles by subject. The state adopted an approved group of reading texts this year, for example, and won't review the list for reading again until 2008.
The process: Publishers create texts that match the state's specifications in a subject area and deliver them to members of review committees who are appointed by the state education commissioner. The committees are made up of teachers (who must comprise half the committee), school supervisors, a school district board member and two lay people.
By law, members must represent the state's geographic, racial, socioeconomic and cultural diversity. Committee members individually evaluate books through the summer, using state criteria such as multicultural representation, whether the teacher will need to prepare additional materials for lessons and whether the books meet the state's goal of teaching a few "big ideas."
The specs are sometimes mind-numbing: The criteria for literature -- up for adoption this year -- run 102 pages, for example. Committee members evaluate not only literature, but music, math and all texts on whether their "portrayal of the appropriate care and treatment of people and animals includes compassion, sympathy, and consideration of their needs and values and excludes hard-core pornography and inhumane treatment."
The committees meet in the fall to recommend which texts should go on the state's approved list.
Publishers aren't allowed to talk to committee members; committee members aren't even allowed to talk to each other through the summer. Public comment is allowed but limited by a lack of access to the books under consideration. In Texas in the months before the state chooses texts, all books under consideration are available for inspection at 20 centers statewide, and the state board holds public hearings to air praise and grievances. In Florida, if you want to see the books being considered before that final adoption meeting, you better have a lot of friends at a lot of publishers.
Ultimately, the committee typically recommends more than one offering per subject area, and the state then puts them on its "adopted" list. Local educators then settle on the specific books their districts will use. Approaches vary. Broward County holds system-wide teacher votes, then requires all schools to teach from the winning product. Miami-Dade County, meanwhile, lets schools pick from a short list. Santa Rosa County follows a third option: Each school decides for itself.
Local districts don't use much of the flexibility they have in selecting textbooks.
State law lets districts spend up to half of their textbook budgets on books that aren't on the state-approved list. Few schools, however, use the leeway they have. In selecting reading textbooks for this fall, local districts made only 2% of their purchases from materials not on the adopted list, for example. Stanley, of the Florida School Book Depository, says that in general 75% to 85% of the material that leaves the warehouse is from the adopted list.
Some educators who would like to see individual schools exercise more choice feel hamstrung by their local districts' desire for every school to use the same texts. "Should you get kids in your classroom with needs that differ from that, you're stuck," complains education consultant Brenda Clark, a former Pinellas County principal whose school won acclaim for boosting student learning. While a principal, she successfully pushed for waivers to use different texts. But the process isn't easy in many districts. District-wide use, administrators say, makes it easier on kids who switch schools and easier to diagnose problems at a school.
Also, teachers and administrators fear criticism if a program doesn't work. "Educators as a rule are not big risk-takers," says Bob Resnick of Education Market Research in New York.
The threshold question from teachers when evaluating textbooks, say publishers and textbook bureaucrats, is about giveaways. Big publishers entice teachers with anthologies, overhead projector transparencies, FCAT prep books and the like. A truly innovative program that would require lots of teacher training time won't be as popular with teachers or districts as a familiar approach. Harcourt's Trophies reading program won the voting in Broward this spring thanks in part to its tie-ins to Harcourt's science and social studies books. Non-fiction is important in the state writing test. "Sometimes it's those special nuances that put you over the top," says Broward textbook administrator Maria Radinson.
The process of creating and selecting textbooks tends to produce books that are:
A. Information-rich, but bland and politically correct. With a new book series taking three years and upward of $50 million to develop from scratch, publishers design texts that will win wide acceptance from state to state and not get killed as controversial. Educators also don't want a fight. All publishers self-censor and strive to please liberals opposed to portrayals of women in traditional gender roles and to please conservatives sensitive to sexual references. On their author pages, many texts feature the names of multicultural consultants who, for a fee, have reviewed books to make sure they pass tests of political correctness. Florida screens for "multicultural fairness and advocacy," "inclusion of compassion" and "exclusion of inhumanity." There's hot debate nationally -- though not much in Florida -- over whether the pendulum has swung too far in redressing historical slights to minorities and women.
B. Graphics-heavy. To appeal to students, volumes of black type on white pages have gone the way of the Model T. In their place are graphics, short takes, blurbs, illustrations, extended captions and photos aplenty. To touch as many standards in as many states as possible, books have gotten thicker and shallower, critics complain.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 pans the 10 most popular biology texts, seven of which have an edition on Florida's adoption list. Some texts are just a "dictionary with pictures," says Project 2061's Jo Ellen Roseman. The problem: Too much content covered too briefly -- with misleading illustrations driven not by science but by graphic artists. Her group also panned five of 13 middle school math books. Florida did better in that evaluation. Of the five, only Glencoe's Mathematics: Applications and Connections is on the state adoption list.
Meanwhile, on the state-adopted list are two of the top three rated texts: Dale Seymour Publications' Connected Mathematics and Creative Publication's MathScape.
C. Usually factually accurate, but not mistake-free. Scott Foresman's Science 2000, which is on the state adoption list, for instance, has the wrong color in a photograph of a bottle of litmus paper. Its Addison Wesley Math 1998 edition, also on the state adoption list, in one example mistakenly uses miles instead of hours and, in another example, uses centimeters instead of meters. (This isn't to pick on Scott Foresman, a Pearson unit. To its credit, Pearson lists all errors on its websites.) Textbook errors became such a hot issue in Texas that it levies approximately $80,000 in fines a year on publishers who don't fix errors. Florida requires only that an industry group, the Association of American Publishers, pass along to publishers any complaints of errors in books.
Teachers see errors as inevitable and only minor irritants. "Yes, there are mistakes in the textbooks," says Jo Combs, a board-certified teacher and science department chair at Broward's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. "We kind of like to find them, and the kids like to find them."
D. Not generally evaluated for effectiveness. Publishers present performance research only at the final adoption meeting -- after the books have been read and impressions formed. Emphasizing research results would work against production of innovative or cutting-edge, but not yet thoroughly validated, materials, the state says. Some local administrators restrict publisher reps from airing performance results -- seeing it as just sales blather. In Broward, publishers make informational videos on their products for teachers and others to view. Textbook administrator Radinson edits out anything that says the books are the "greatest thing since sliced bread." Says Radinson: "My nickname is the textbook police." Publishers say they expect evaluations based on research and performance to become more prevalent.