Last night I learned that many K-12 teachers no longer use textbooks. In some cases this just means they've switched to e-textbooks, but often it's a more dramatic change: teachers basically assemble their own curriculum by grabbing stuff from the internet or elsewhere and rolling their own. I gather this is mostly a budget issue, not a matter of teachers rebelling against state-mandated textbooks.
Presumably this means that textbook sales have been declining. Here's a wild-ass guess at how many textbooks are sold annually:
This is taken from revenue data here (adjusted for inflation) and converted into units based on the proposition that real textbook prices have gone up 40% in the past decade. This is all probably hopelessly sketchy, but it does suggest that textbook unit sales have dropped, which is consistent with the claim that they're being used in classrooms less.
Plus, for you fans of anecdata, I just surveyed my nurse, who confirms that her 25-year-old daughter used textbooks but her 14-year-old daughter doesn't in some classes (same private school for both).
Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out for comment. Parents in my Twitter feed were unhappy with this trend because it made it harder to keep track of what their kids were learning. What says the hive mind?
Here's my totally uninformed hunch. Risk-averse teachers don't want to worry about textbook content that may piss off parents or school boards. Since content is easy to assemble from the intertubes and since they know what they want to teach, why not just create an ad hoc syllabus?
Because it is a lot more work and is waaaaayyyyy more likely to get you into trouble than a textbook that was approved by a textbook committed and represents an agreed-to standard.
In a sensible world, textbooks are created by folks who are particularly well qualified in textbook creation as well as in the subject material. Teachers, on the other hand, have a wide range in their qualifications in the materials they present, and generally have very little qualification in the specific skills of textbook creation.
In our world today in the USA, that previous paragraph is correct in the second sentence, but the first sentence is subverted by politics.
Fair use doctrine.
I don’t doubt there is some truth to the previous comments, but I suspect (as almost always) funding is also a factor. Here in Indiana, the state would rather spend education money on vouchers than public schools. That, combined with the fact that the state also requires students to rent textbooks, which greatly disadvantages lower income families, has probably made teachers look for better solutions. My kids (who are now in their late 20’s) always seemed to have out-of-date textbooks when they were in high school.
Ding, ding, ding. It's all about the money. Schools can't or won't supply updated versions or adequate numbers to provide to ALL kids. Low income families can't shoulder the burden. Teachers are left cobbling together materials that are recent, relevant, and available to all. Sadly, given the time, effort, and expertise necessary to curate curriculum in that manner, most teachers are doing a poor job at it.
Two kids one in 8th and one 10th grade. No textbooks. They do have online tools that range from absolute garbage (IXL math will make your kid hate math) to pretty darn good. And yes, many teachers just make up their own material and post it online in blackboard/canvas.
My kids also have no textbooks, and mostly hated IXL. But they also disliked all the other math apps.
I just helped one kid with quadratic equations last night. The teacher posted slides and videos, and it's pretty easy to Google for more help if you need it (I always have to look up what the terms mean - the math vocabulary has been forgotten over the decades, even if a bit of the "how to" has remained).
Kahn academy posts pretty great material for free. I think our math teachers got stuck using IXL because admin bought it and now they must use it. But most of the teachers provide their own material that is as good as any textbook.
The problem is when teachers don't post material and parents can't see it to help their kids. The online 'verse for education relies on teachers being a little tech savvy and some are not.
My 2 are now 1st and 4th year college students. One was self teaching and I didn’t have to do much but I feel like I’m homeschooling the other one—whatever instruction he’s getting isn’t doing much. I agree Khan academy is the way to go for anything math or math-y. You could string some of those videos together and have a decent curriculum. The dread IXL gives me flashbacks. I have no love of textbooks. Often out of date and irrelevant.
When I reviewed Kahn Academy, I found most of it pretty bad. It is not particularly engaging and adds little more than any other online tool.
As far as I know, there is no study (other than a bogus one of their own) that shows it to be effective.
I don't think many good educators rely solely on textbooks. But not having any at all? Yikes. That's a lot of extra lesson planning, at least for new teachers (those who have been at it a long time no doubt have lot of already-created and planned lessons ready to go).
"but often it's a more dramatic change: teachers basically assemble their own curriculum by grabbing stuff from the internet or elsewhere and rolling their own."
If this is true then that is complete insanity and it would go a long way toward explaining any shortcomings in our education system.
I have long thought that our culture has a very poisonous idea about what teachers are and what they do. I call it the "magic teacher" trope. This idea that teachers can all find their own way of teaching and just teach from the heart or figure it out on their own is just so much nonsense. We would not expect any other profession to work this way.
I doubt it’s the controversial content thing. Even in blue of blue, pasadena ca, I’ve seen a lot of cobbled together & online material. It seems of a piece with much of the classroom being more online, which I find awful for everyone: fewer fixed references, more flexibility in terms of deadlines that are outside of school hours. (ie late at night)
While I don’t love this trend, I do wonder if it’s easy to overlook the ways in which infinite knowledge and resources on the internet are simply changing *some* of the nature of what learning means. I don’t know. That’s my best attempt to not be an entirely grumpy old man.
Putting aside the "controversial content" issue (you mean talking about black history), I would expect a lot more quality variance.
Good teachers will likely produce great plans customized to where their kids are. OK teachers probably muddle through. Shitty ones will still be shit, and the self-motivated kids of theirs won't have a standard text to learn from.
I had a math teacher in high school for two years who was incredible. She split the class in half and treated one as sort of "AP", although we didn't have AP at the time. The "normal class" kids worked from the text book, we worked from photocopies she handed out. Aside from the usual, my Algebra 2 class took us through a substantial intro to calculus and some linear algebra. Three of us placed in the state math competition that year.
So I absolutely think the best teachers will be better, and kids with the worst will be even more adrift. The lump in the middle probably won't see much change.
Double Edged Sword.
Teachers can roll their own materials to be flexible and to overcome the weaknesses of textbooks. They can also leave out the parts they don't like.
My mother wrote history textbooks and there was always pressure from the sales side to meet the needs of Texas. While most school book decisions are made at the district level (decades ago...), Texas was unusual in that the decision was made at the state level so it was a big prize! Subsequently the Alamo got a LOT of play and things like the Scopes trial were downplayed or excised altogether. And then those same versions of the book were sold all over the country - giant holes and all.
Kids really enjoy not lugging giant textbooks around all the time. An e-text or similar is really superior in that way - although of course an e-text might be edited on the fly to make a messianic prophecy imminent, or invoke the Voldemort principle and just have "a noted birder and illustrator", deny history of many groups (looking at you Oklahoma), or insist biology isn't real.
Textbook prices have been rising much faster than inflation. An expensive college textbook in the 1970s, $10, costs $250 or $300 now. If the price tracked inflation, it would have cost about $50. Maybe that graph isn't as sketchy as you think. Perhaps textbook companies are raising prices to maintain revenue as demand falls. They have a monopoly, so they can get away with it.
The other problem is that textbooks have gotten worse over the years. You can blame a lot of this on the checklist qualification process. Textbooks used to have some sort of flow with one topic leading up to another in an almost coherent fashion. Nowadays, they're a grab bag with various applications and topics interjected. There's nothing coherent longer than a page or two.
Worse, they're horribly written. We did some tutoring and asked our students why they never looked up anything in their textbooks. One of them gave it a try. They found the index buried in the massive supplementary materials section and went to the right page. Then, they tried to make sense of the text. They gave up and asked for help. We tried to make sense of the text. It was next to impossible and we knew the material. The diagrams and examples helped a bit, but the text was meaningless. As the joke used to go you wouldn't give this to a dog to read.
Teachers have rarely used textbooks as books to be read from beginning to end. They've always chosen chapters and sections for emphasis, but a modern textbook requires a lot of curation and explication. If you have to choose readings page by page and add your own material anyway, it makes sense just to download a web page or two. Sometimes you can avoid having to add anything. If the class is stumped, you can usually find a web page that takes an alternate approach. (Note that a lot of states provide these pages as a teaching resource.)
TL;DR Textbooks have gotten crazy expensive and increasingly useless as teaching tools.
"Worse, they're horribly written." Amen! One summer about 15 years ago I tutored two very bright middle-schoolers in Algebra 1 so they could accelerate in our local public school's math program, and we used the standard textbook the school used. It was beyond terrible.
Sorry if this is a little geeky, but... The title of one section was "Solving functions by their graphs". This is simply gibberish. Functions are a central mathematical concept, but you do not "solve" them. (You solve equations involving functions, which is a basic distinction you'd think a textbook would want to get right.) So I looked in the index to find their definition of "function". The only (non)definition appeared a hundred or so pages *later* in the book, where it specifies that functions are things like x-squared, for example.
It is probably worth noting that the book had 27 co-authors.
The one person I know in a surgical residency program still uses textbooks.
Why aren't text books open source, it's not as if most high school subjects (math, chemistry, physics, history, social study) have changed substantially in the last couple of decades?
Once they are created, it shouldn't be that difficult to distribute them as epubs or pdfs.
Narrator: Money. The answer of why things are the way they are is almost always "money."
It's also why libraries can't photocopy all their books - even the ones that haven't changed in the last couple centuries - and make those available for people to check out. Or allow unlimited numbers of people to check out the same e-book at the same time. The possession of intellectual property is artificially constrained because the publishers make more money when only a set number of people can access the IP simultaneously - people end up paying to queue up for one of the purposefully-limited viewing slots.
It's also why publishers bring out new editions every two years or so, even when the changes and "improvements" are nearly trivial: to get around the secondary market in used textbooks.
It's not so much the 'mprovements' to the text (at least, for math, which I still teach), as it is the reording/reformulation of the problems at the end of each section and chapter. Problem 12 of section 3.1 for the current version will almost cetainly not be the problem 12 of section 3.1 from the immedieatley previous version.
Open educational resources have been a "thing" for quite a while.
The trick is, writing a textbook takes a lot time and effort. There is no pay for creating OER, and it doesn't help you get tenure. So there is little incentive to do it.
Many K-12 teachers and college faculty put out piecemeal content online, mostly to benefit their own students. Some teachers create content for Teachers Pay Teachers, but that is not textbook-style content.
But there hasn't been investment in OER that would make it able to fully replace textbooks from major publishers, which are updated frequently, aligned to standards, and now come with extra online content.
Boy, does it! I once set out to write "Linear Algebra as it Should be Taught" only to find out that a) there were a lot of people ahead of me in that particular line, and b) most of those were part of a staff, or at least had extra resources to draw upon, say a decent question bank.
This is an area where I have some professional experience. The decline in textbook adoption probably has a lot to do with the textbook market being effectively an enormous, often political scam.
Speaking as an semi-insider, textbook companies have to basically produce different versions for different states to match often contradictory content requirements. So there’s very little economy of scale for production.
Then you add in the charming practice of issuing new editions each year with different quiz sections so that electronic answers aren’t compatible between replacement sets. (This is utterly out of control in college texts.)
And finally there’s textbook bingo where districts will rapidly change curriculum vendors faster than teachers can master the previous materials.
Add it all up and no surprise that teachers are rolling their own.
I see you've ninjad me wrt the problems/quizzes. I'm surprised there isn't a law against this practice, or at least, there should be.
I am very puzzled by parents who apparently read their child's textbook. My parents never did. I never did. I would have conversations with them about school, which is a far better metric, I think.
To those who are worried that teachers are now inventing curriculum or teaching methods:
The curriculum is defined in a way that is independent of textbooks. It us usually defined by the state, and is mostly ok. It is a long list of bullet points. Teachers use lesson plans, and those are written and available to supervisors, I think.
Also, textbooks do not contain teaching methods or strategies. This is in the lesson plan. It always has been. Textbooks that are age-appropriate literature anthologies are still quite valuable, I would expect. Likewise algebra textbooks, but then maybe I'm the only person in the world who could learn algebra from the textbook. So maybe not so valuable.
When the iPad came out I was certain that it’d revolutionize the textbook industry— update exercises, edit out whatever the fuck Texas didn’t want to teach, allow new-edition revisions to be downloaded for a nominal fee— but nope. Not sure why that didn’t happen, but it seemed completely intuitive at the time.
I'm sure that there were a number of people who thought so as well, and whose specific job was to head those innovations off at the pass.
I hear that homework is becoming more rare, also, in K-12.
I returned to college as an older, non-traditional student, graduated in 2019, and professors were moving away from textbooks. Some students couldn't afford them and just relied on notes from class. As mentioned above, changing editions every year or so kept students from buying used books. The professors gave more readings from journals which could be accessed online.
Sounds like a textbook price death-spiral. Fewer use them, leading to price increases, so fewer use them etcetc…
Also, I damn Elsevier to Hell and back.
The schools transitioning to screens only are either blissfully unaware that there's a myopia epidemic sweeping the globe (current trend says 50% of the planet will need glasses by 2050), or they just don't care if it saves them a few bucks.
They’re not blissfully unaware, just shortsighted. 😉
Groan.
In our high school, the administration has begun to bemoan the cost of subscriptions for online texts. Some of them are quite good -- they have far more and far better resources in psychology and history (my topics) than the hard copies we used to use. But if you're a decent teacher (I include myself, of course) the wealth of free online resources is too tempting to ignore, especially if you want to engage students with projects tailored to their interests and widely varying abilities. For the students with poor reading skills, I often take the online text, copy and paste it into an editable document with lots of things for the students to do with the text: summarize, categorize, respond with an opinion, make a table, read a map, interpret a document, etc. I know the skills the less able kids need to work on, and the broad questions that the textbook makers include are not enough.
And in a modern, digital classroom in which students have their own laptops, it makes sense to have students make things using digital resources: websites, portfolios, presentations, comic strips. When I'm teaching about imperialism, it's better to have students read a lot of primary sources and not spend too much time on a badly-written textbook that was written for the broadest possbile audience with the Texas School Board looking over the editors' shoulders.
I use textbooks from Perusall, where they have to annotate the text and the annotations are scored by a machine learning algorithm according to the degree of interpretation the annotations present. I checked it by hand as a beta tester and got greater than 90% reliability.
This allows me to dispense with lecture with students having to actively engage with the material instead of just passively watching recorded lectures on YouTube.
There are also free books from sources like OpenStax and some states, including mine, are encouraging their use. The College Physics book there is vastly improved but the Astronomy book is a total dud.
Of course, I teach college, where the book will never die.
A few points here.
I've reviewed most of the texts for my kids in middle and high school and they are pretty good. They are comprehensive, in-depth and sometimes interesting. For the last, however, it is impossible to make an assigned reading interesting: only personally chosen readings can be interesting.
The main failure of many text books is that they are too comprehensive. The American History text is humongous. It has everything you would want to know about the subject, but it is too much to cover in one year.
Part of this problem is that everybody, especially people who have no expertise in writing textbooks, think they know what should be in there. None of them will remove anything though.
Knowledge gained through reading is different and often superior to knowledge gained other ways. Further, people should learn to get knowledge through reading and not through videos or graphic novels.
Finally, it should not be a teacher's job to create a text book. They have enough to do and do not have the knowledge to make a text book. I will go further and say that a teacher should never use their own textbook: the value of a teacher is to approach and present the information in a different way. You can't do that if the text book is already in your voice.