A lot of my reading the past couple of weeks has dealt with the business of textbooks. It's pretty simple, really: publishers need to make money, so they want to produce what consumers (schools) will buy. This means producing materials that are in line with state textbook parameters, which are largely dictated by the two largest consumer states--California and Texas. However, a lot of the readings I've been using are from the mid-80s to early 90s, and it occurs to me that the commerce element of textbook publishing (and book publishing in general) is changing radically right now. It makes me wonder--how relevant will textbook content processes even be ten, fifteen, twenty years from now?
Students can already do independent research on the internet. With the increasing popularity of electronic books, the range of choices and resources available to students will only expand more. That is, available to students who have access to the technology, which of course is closely related to affluence. As the resources available to rich kids broadens, I fear that means that kids in poverty will be even more limited by the constraints on materials made by bureaucrats who put political interests ahead of kids real educational needs.
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