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David versus the textbook

The Vamos a Cuba flap is emblematic of a significant problem in the K-12 education system: the collision of competing values mixed with the lack of parental power in the system.  In fact, it’s sort of an offshoot of another highly contentious process: the selection of textbooks.  Fortunately, an army of Davids could help unravel this mess. 

This has been on my mind since I ran across it in May. 

As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal standards, as much as 90 percent of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.

And yet, few if any textbooks are ever subjected to independent field testing of whether they actually help students learn.

“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”

If America’s textbooks were systematically graded, Wang and other scholars say, they would fail abysmally.

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.

Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago. 

So who’s to blame for this situation?

The culprit is the system by which many states choose what books their students will read. Because the market is a small one, textbook publishers must cater to the whims of elected school board leaders in the biggest states that buy the most books: Texas and California, which control a third of the national market, the Association of American Publishers estimates.

Few elementary and high school textbook publishers “can afford to spend millions of dollars developing a textbook series and not have it adopted in these high-volume states,” the Fordham Institute said.

So the operating philosophy is one of “superficial compliance with the rules, not a focus on results,” Wang said.

Texas vs. California.  Red state vs. blue state.  Social conservatives vs. liberals.  Even if you haven’t read the article, you can probably guess where the discussion goes from there. 

Here’s the thing, though: with tens of millions of school kids out there, is the market for textbooks really that small?  Of course not; were the process liberalized, the market would prove to be massive.  But the actual purchasers of said textbooks–state committees–artificially turn the market into a de facto oligopoly.  Indeed, the article (page 2) suggests that the solution is indeed found in flattening the whole process:

Wang, Ravitch and others have what they call a radical proposal: do away with the approval process altogether and let teachers and local school officials choose their own books.

“The system is resistant to the entrepreneurial spirit,” Wang said. “There isn’t a mechanism for encouraging innovation in education because of systems like this adoption process.”

But there may be signs of change on the horizon: hordes of computer-wielding educators!  Enter Norm Nemrow.  Starting in the early 1980s, the master’s-level accountant began teaching college-level accounting as a pastime. 

In 1982 Nemrow helped form a company; he and his partners bought, managed, and sold more than 11,000 apartment units before selling their business in 1985. Having achieved some financial independence, he struggled to find his next pursuit. "I played some golf, taught early morning seminary, took art classes, built a home, and tried some other projects but was basically unfulfilled."

So in 1991 Nemrow and his wife, Cindy, moved their family to Provo, and he began to "pester" K. Fred Skousen (then dean of the Marriott School) and W. Steve Albrecht (then director of the School of Accountancy) for a chance to teach (at Brigham Young University).

"They didn’t seem too interested in me until I offered to do it as a volunteer," Nemrow says with a smile. "You know how budget conscious accountants can be." He now teaches Accounting Principles, the same course he taught as a graduate student, to about 1,200 students each semester. A popular professor, he has twice been voted Overall Best Teacher by the Student Alumni Association. On the BYU student-produced Web site StudentReviews.com, one student calls Nemrow "the best teacher I had at BYU by far. Going to his class was a treat, and two years later I remember everything."

What’s so special about Nemrow’s class?  Saying that textbooks "are going to be obsolete in a number of years," he built his entire curriculum himself.  

In his Accounting 200 class, Nemrow uses a CD instead of a textbook. Nemrow started using the CD format for his classes during Spring Term.

"I wanted to create a more effective and efficient way to teach the course," Nemrow said.

He said 75 percent of his Spring/Summer students prefer the way the class is done with the CD, rather than the traditional format.

Nemrow is presently on hiatus, so I verified this with Earl Stice, the BYU professor presently looking after Nemrow’s project: The six-disc set of CDs is sold at the campus bookstore for $65.  A new accounting textbook costs $130.  As they say, do the math.  More on his against-the-grain class here:

Norm Nemrow’s sixth-grade son recently approached him to ask for help with pre-algebra homework. Nemrow, a Marriott School accounting professor, scanned his son’s pre-algebra textbook in hopes of refreshing his memory. Thinking the text explanations weren’t very clear, Nemrow asked his son if the teacher had demonstrated how to work the problems. "Yes," his son said. "But I can’t remember how she did it."

This incident reinforced Nemrow’s strong-held belief in the value of his latest teaching innovation: introductory accounting on CD-ROM. This approach combines an audio-video lecture presentation with synchronized graphics allowing students to control the learning process. "With a simple mouse-click, students can listen as often as is necessary to learn and reinforce important concepts. There isn’t always time in class to repeat material for students who need assistance," Nemrow said. "But this way, students can stop the CD, slow down, take notes, rewind—whatever they need to fully understand the lecture concept presented."

In other words, it’s superior technology, especially for the computerized world of accounting.  

How have Nemrow’s peers reacted to his outside-the-box approach?  By all accounts, they can’t stand it.  It’s too new, too different, too radical.  But as Nemrow points out, this is where everything is headed.  Besides, he’s pretty much untouchable.  As badly as Nemrow’s colleagues

might love to take him out behind the woodshed, his runaway popularity among students likely gives him a lot of flexibility with school administrators.  

Rest assured, the digital invasion is the next move.  Many textbooks already include a CD-ROM of some sort to supplement the main text.  And in three classes I took in college, at least one of the required books–in some cases, the main book–was a customized course packet sold at a particular bookstore, generally costing around $30.  It wouldn’t be a big leap at all for a teacher to merely burn all that material to CD-ROM.  Better yet, what if all that content were simply put on the school’s server for students to download? 

In short, the Internet now threatens yet another Big Media behemoth.  But that’s the university.  Could this work for K-12–grade school teachers building their own digital textbooks?  Aside from the fact that the arrival of widespread digital media is pretty much unavoidable, I say such an approach–ground-floor control over content and curriculum fused to the ultracheap delivery means of digital media–would allow educators and parents alike to neatly sidestep the red-vs.-blue nonsense that appears to have hijacked the textbook industry.  California could teach six-year-olds about safe sex, Texas could teach intelligent design, and everybody else could figure out something in between. 

And I think there’s something more fundamental driving this sort of thing.  What led Nemrow to spearhead this sort of thing?  Because he saw a need to fill, because he saw something that could be done better–ultimately, because he enjoys what he does.  (In fact, he loves it so much he donates his salary back to the school each year.  So forget untouchable–he’s dang near bulletproof.)  As Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds said in An Army of Davids (p. 92), "Beware the people who are having fun competing with you!"  I daresay at least some educators would, well, have some fun getting to design their own curricula.  And if that happens, that curricula is very likely to be better. 

I further think this would go a long way to separating the wheat from the chaff where teachers are concerned.  What better way is there to get inside a teacher’s head, to really find out how well a teacher knows his or her core subject(s), than to see what that teacher proposes to teach his or her classes?  Could this turn out to be a reliable metric for reforms like merit pay? 

Of course, there are all sorts of issues here I haven’t touched on.  In particular, copyright issues would get awfully hairy (after all, who owns knowledge?).  Furthermore, this definitely factors into the national standards debate.  And the self-driven CD courses taught at a university are pretty much out of the question for third-graders.  But the means by which Ravitch’s proposed solution could come to fruition are, in fact, already here.  Homeschoolers have been doing this sort of thing for a while now.  Why should traditional schools be excluded? 

(For more on Nemrow’s course go here, here and, for a contrarian view, here.)