Textbook Publishing

The nature of the textbook market -- a small number of buyers and an even smaller number of sellers -- combined with the influence of politically motivated interest groups and the impact of textbook-adoption states results in high-cost, instructionally confused, and content-poor textbooks, argues Mr. Sewall.

By Gilbert Sewall

IN A LANDMARK essay on school textbooks written in 1990, James Squire and Richard Morgan stated that the U.S. textbook industry "provides our teachers with a greater choice in quality textbooks than any nation in the world."1 No longer. Choice is diminishing. Sameness and slickness challenge "quality" at all levels. And the textbook industry, instead of responding to ample and well-considered complaints -- not from cranks but from leading historians and book critics -- has become increasingly hermetic and unyielding. As a result, educators are forced to use basic instructional materials that are apparently shallow and flawed.

When Squire and Morgan wrote some 15 years ago, educational publishers, editors, salespeople, and, above all, textbook authors took great pride in the quality and content of their products. But commercial imperatives are too powerful to ignore. School publishing sales add up to almost one-seventh of U.S. publishing revenues, about $4 billion in 2004. Textbooks must sell, however diminished the content, and the four companies that have gained an iron hold on general school publishing during the last 15 years must provide whatever product is in favor with the educators and committees that buy textbooks.

The underlying problem with textbooks is a commercial one: a flawed production system. Four companies -- Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, and Houghton Mifflin -- offer "elhi" textbooks in all major subjects and at all grade levels for states, districts, and teachers to choose from. Elhi is the term universally used in the industry to describe the school market. The biggest sellers are reading and math books, sold as multi-volume programs for the lower grades. Some of the most visible and controversial textbooks are in social studies. The commercial appeal of school publishing is its reliability. With successful textbooks, publishers have the opportunity to create high-margin revenue streams that can last for years. If a successful program or volume becomes a familiar classroom friend, it can ring up huge net earnings over time.

The four big publishing companies have absorbed dozens of independent textbook companies. Several major educational publishing houses have disappeared as a result of these mergers and acquisitions. They have become brand names inside large companies. Some are recently extinct. These familiar names include Macmillan, Merrill, and Glencoe (imprints of McGraw-Hill); Prentice-Hall, Silver Burdett, Ginn, Addison Wesley, Longman, and Scott Foresman (imprints of Pearson); Holt, Rinehart and Winston (imprint of Harcourt); and D.C. Heath and McDougal Littell (imprints of Houghton Mifflin).

McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Reed Elsevier are all companies that are traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. With a long history in business and technical publications and databases, McGraw-Hill, like its competitors, is interested in extending its global English-language franchise. New York-based McGraw-Hill owns elhi, college, and testing lines as well as Standard & Poor's and Business Week. Pearson and Reed Elsevier are U.K.-based firms that have similar global ambitions. Pearson owns Penguin/Putnam, the Financial Times, and The Economist. It acquired Prentice Hall and Scott Foresman as part of its global strategy. Reed Elsevier owns Harcourt Education, which has elhi and testing assets; the remainder of the firm consists of thousands of scientific, technical, and medical journals from dozens of major imprints as well as trade publications including Publishers Weekly and Variety.

Houghton Mifflin, the nation's fourth educational publisher, was sold for $1.66 billion by troubled Vivendi Universal in December 2002 to a consortium of private equity groups -- Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group. (It can be assumed that the intention is to bring it back public in the future.) For now, Houghton Mifflin -- formerly a Fortune 500 company, like McGraw-Hill -- is a black-box private firm with next to no reporting requirements. It is almost totally free from shareholder and public oversight, including annual reports, 10-Ks, and other windows into the company.

Why are there so few alternatives to the textbooks produced by these giants? Entry barriers to educational publishing are formidable. At every stage of production, from paper to printing, economies of scale favor mammoth enterprises. States and many local districts require publishers to post performance bonds, provide free samples, maintain textbook depositories, and field teachers' consultants. Aggressive sales forces often build tight relationships with district-level textbook purchasers that become habitual over time. Any company that plans to compete nationally in school publishing must be capital intensive and "full service," that is, it must offer study guides, workbooks, and technology, along with discounts, premiums, and an array of teacher enticements. In some states, including California and Texas, Spanish versions of texts, as well as teachers' editions, binders, and answer keys may determine which books are adopted.

The textbook market features a relatively small number of volume buyers (i.e., school districts) and an even smaller number of sellers. This market is efficient, profitable, and reliable -- but also deadly to quality. Whatever visual trick -- or content fudge -- is necessary to sell a book and its ancillary ornaments, runs the contemporary line of editorial thought, so be it. Each of these four publishing giants is intent on maximizing its revenues and is essentially indifferent to the means of doing so. Field representatives, sales forces, market researchers, product managers, and editorial directors help determine the content of a textbook. So do state frameworks, advocates for diverse groups and causes, and numerous focus groups that round off any sharpness or edge that may be perceived in a text.

Mass-market educational publishers cannot afford to have deep convictions about what their books contain, how "hard" they are, or even if they are "printed."2 The complex phenomenon known as "dumbing down" is a rational activity on the part of value-free sellers who seek to capture a larger share of a nationwide market. Textbook buyers are mainly concerned that their textbooks be accessible to all students, including those who don't read well and those who are least academically capable.

Educational publishers are defensive about their products. They have constructed a powerful trade association -- the school division of the Association of American Publishers -- to protect their positions. AAP lobbyists in Sacramento, Austin, and Tallahassee are determined to preserve the lucrative business of state adoptions. To be sure, textbook publishers have long suffered from capricious and often politically inspired campaigns. For publishers, unenlightened legislators, state school board members suffering idees fixes, and ambitious state superintendents cloud the process. From phonics zealots in California to anti-Darwinists in Texas, highly motivated groups make pests of themselves with legislatures, school boards, and adoption committees, much to the consternation of publishers who are trying to sell their products to a very broad national market.

Publishers are attached like barnacles to frameworks such as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Texas law mandates this scope-and-sequence framework as the basis of the state's curriculum and thus of textbook content. If the TEKS specifically mentions South Africa's Desmond Tutu, for example, as it did in 2001, it is guaranteed that Desmond Tutu will obtain a prominent position in new editions. If a largely unknown figure in antiquity, Erastothenes, appears on the TEKS list, he too enters textbooks with a flourish. Erastothenes was a Hellenistic astronomer who discerned that the Earth was round. These are not necessarily bad changes, but they are grafted onto already overburdened world history textbooks with little regard for coherence.

Of course, publishers are responsive to crudely applied political pressure. They produce textbooks designed to pass group- and cause-related "litmus tests." Compromised content, some of it highly partisan, must meet the tests of numerous gatekeepers and shadow authors. In the case of Islam-related subject matter, a California-based Islamic council with opaque legal contours exerts censor-like influence over publishers. Allowing the council to act as a textbook consultant and arbiter, social studies editors gloss over sensitive and troubling subjects such as jihad, holy law, slavery, and the status of women in the Muslim world.

Diversity-based content decisions confuse the curriculum. Pandering to the sensitivities of representatives of Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Christians, Jews, Islamists, et alia ad infinitum has necessarily become a number-one editorial priority. Publishers fear any organized conflict over content, pretending that gross biases in many materials are simply "balance." They know from decades of experience that pressure groups are zealous and quick to use history content to advance their particular cause politically and culturally. Each of the groups listed above has an impressive track record in making trouble for publishers. Academic historians who are politically engaged add to the problem.

According to the AAP, 22 states hold adoptions, in which they publish a prescribed list of textbooks. Books on the list are eligible for state funding. California, Texas, and Florida -- all of them adoption states -- have grown more influential in educational publishing since 1970 on account of a demographic shift to the West and South. Non-adoption states are "open territory." Defenders of state adoptions argue that state control helps ensure textbook quality. In open territory, local school districts -- or even individual schools -- select and purchase textbooks themselves, often backed by substantial state funding.

Publishers profess that state adoptions increase the cost of selling books. Once a publisher has succeeded in making a state's list, its sales force has a limited time to enter each district or county in the state and sell the textbook to the local committees -- just as they do in such non-adoption states as Connecticut or Ohio. State committees -- made up of political appointees and, in states such as Texas, elected board officials -- create new specs and new demands for ancillaries and after-market services. What's more, the penalty for not making the state list is draconian. As one industry luminary observes: "I do not know a single textbook publishing figure who would not be delighted to see an end to the state-adoption system."

The long-term trend, no doubt, is away from state-level adoptions and toward local choice. State adoption today is in large part a sham in any case. Two recent history adoptions -- in California (1999) and in Texas (2002) -- indicate that these two influential states are no longer very selective about the textbooks adopted. While lack of choice varies from subject to subject, a reduced number of books are available to choose from across the curriculum. These two large states are no longer picky about the degree to which these adopted textbooks meet state standards. Nor can they be, given the handful of giants that control the national market.

Companies have shrunk their editorial and production staffs and, more significantly, their use of real authors. To reduce costs, they are moving toward a writing-for-hire production system and abandoning the royalty-based author system. Some new secondary-level history textbooks have no authors at all. Authors have been replaced by a long list of contributors, censors, and special pleaders, concerned first of all that history meets their particular goals.

The publishers claim that they are simply responding to state pressure and state standards. They say the state adoption process is already an open, public process. In fact, textbooks that states adopt may conform minimally and mechanically to state standards. State and local textbook adoption procedures rarely, if ever, address matters of style and quality of the text. The main point of state review, as far as publishers can discern, is to comply with detailed guidelines for representation and to give pressure groups and potential censors a chance to give vent to their concerns.

Deeply embroiled as they are in these production practices, the four major educational publishers are no longer confident about how to represent the nation, its civic ideals, or the world. Nor are they interested in deciding how to do so. They are willing to leave content to standards committees and focus groups. But they are deeply interested in selling instructional materials, and, after the history wars of the 1990s, they are warier than ever of content disputes. Without concern for consequences -- or perhaps deluded into thinking that their revisions constitute a thematic correction and a step forward -- history textbook editors continue to give the nation's students a misshapen view of the global past and a false view of the global future.

New textbook editions across the curriculum reflect lowered sights for general education. Textbook makers are adjusting to short attention spans and nonreaders. Too many children cannot -- or do not want to -- read. Nor are they eager to digest concrete facts or memorize events, principles, and concepts. Among editors, phrases such as "text-heavy," "information-loaded," "fact-based," and "nonvisual" are negatives. A picture, they insist, tells a story and takes the place of a thousand words. The results are high cost, unconscionable bulk, and instructional confusion. Textbooks across the curriculum are being transformed into picture and activity books instead of clear, portable, simply designed, text-centered primers. Bright photographs, broken formats, and seductive colors overwhelm the text and confuse the page. Type is larger and looser, which results in many fewer words and much more white space per page. The text itself can get lost. And what text remains is dense and often unintelligible.

Fifteen years ago, Squire and Morgan urged greater attention to the "soundness and adequacy" of textbook content, more teacher education and state funding, and increased author responsibility. Publishers, they asserted, "need to reconsider marketing and sales practices which seem, at the least, to divert attention from the instructional quality of textbooks" and to overemphasize "customer entertainment and excessive 'give-away' programs."3 Except for state funding, commercial trends have moved in opposite directions from their recommendations. What might be done to correct this state of affairs today? We can again turn to Squire and Morgan. "Writers and developers must have a clear sense of purpose before they initiate their work," they said. "Providing this sense of direction is clearly the responsibility of overall program editors and authors."4 But if editors have abdicated their traditional roles and genuine textbook authors are vanishing, what options for reform exist?

When it is feasible, high school teachers can turn to college-level textbooks, some of which are not too challenging for, say, able 10th-graders. But this is an option available only to a select minority of classrooms in a few upper-level grades.

Teachers and students need textbooks that unpack sound lessons from instructional chaos. Abridged text-centered versions of textbooks currently in print, stripped of trivia and discursions, would be one good solution. But it is almost unthinkable that major textbook publishers would undercut or tamper with their established products. A more plausible solution would be to bring older textbooks back into print with appropriate revisions. These older books are often more text-rich and legible than current instructional products touted as newer and better.

Pressure from purchasers, elected officials, editorial writers, and, above all, educators will be needed. But it is not clear that sufficient public will exists to force publishers to change. Some demand for improved textbooks from the National Education Association and its state affiliates would be essential. (The American Federation of Teachers has a much more impressive record in standards advocacy and in the support of solid curriculum designs for improved courses and textbooks.) Some fresh thinking about what textbooks should do also needs to take place within schools of education, namely within the curriculum and instruction departments that too often champion low-content materials and course plans.

Given persuasive research and commentary on what can be done to improve history textbooks, it is disturbing that people who call themselves educational publishers -- charged as they are with the public trust -- are close-minded and fatalistic about their products. Educational publishers could and should be producing cheaper books that are text-centered, simpler in design, and more honest in content. They are failing to do so, and in this they are shirking their public obligation.

1. James R. Squire and Richard T. Morgan, "The Elementary and High School Textbook Market Today," in David L. Elliott and Arthur Woodward, eds., Textbooks and Schooling in the United States: 89th NSSE Yearbook, Part I (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education, University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 123.
2. Reflecting on the future of printed textbooks and CD-ROM disks, Richard Blake, vice president of the Association of American Publishers school division, said in 1997, "Our people can go either way." Since the collapse of electronic euphoria in the last four years, it may be assumed that printed textbooks have reasserted their authority in publishers' business plans
3. Squire and Morgan, p. 123.
4. Ibid., p. 117.