School Districts And College Students Are Being Held Hostage By Textbook Publishers

As the Deputy Executive Director of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and as an elected School Board member in Tumwater, I’ve come to embrace a simple fact: the more you learn, the more you earn! The data is abundantly clear that higher levels of education result in higher income.

Median Household Income By Education Level

High School Drop Out: $22,718

High School Graduate: $36,835

Some College: $45,854

Associates Degree: $51,970

Bachelors Degree: $68,728

Masters Degree: $78,541

Professional Degree: $100,000

Doctorate Degree: $96,830

We now know that a high school diploma alone is quickly becoming insufficient to compete in the highly competitive global economy. We need every student to complete high school and attend higher education in some form: apprenticeship, college, university, etc.

So with a high school dropout rate in Washington still hovering around 30%, how can we find savings within the current system to focus intensive resources on struggling students? Textbooks! Every year in the State of Washington, our public K-12 system spends at least $100 million in textbook adoptions and printed instructional materials. Sadly, many of these texts, especially in math and science, come woefully short of meeting the necessary content to get students to grade-level standard. $100 million on textbooks that come up short! With two world-class research universities, four outstanding comprehensive universities, and a community and technical college system that is one of the best in the United States, we need to write our own open-source textbooks right here in Washington. For a few million dollars of release time and production costs, we can produce textbooks by world-class professors and instructors that meet 100% of our standards; are free to all K-12 districts (big or small); are available in digital formats to be tailored, altered, customized, and enhanced as knowledge and teaching methodologies evolve. If we could save $50 million (half of the annual spend) per year, that would allow school districts to put intense resources on at-risk students in early grades. We can lower our dropout rate, take meaningful steps to close the achievement gap, and put more money into classrooms and less money into out-of-state publishers. To do anything less with what we know today is unconscionable!

For college students the problem is no better. They now spend well over $1,000 per year on textbook. If not for some used books along the way, the average college students would pay over $1,500 per year in books! The reasons are many: Bundling – the packaging of text books with supplemental materials (most of which professors don’t use, but students still must purchase). Excessive versions: Publishers pump out new versions of books annually, sometimes with changes so subtle that it makes no difference in learning or relevancy. Monopolistic behavior: Some publishers have almost explicit control over some specialized fields of study.

Textbook prices are rising at almost three times the rate of inflation and college students and their families are incurring ever-larger loan burdens just to keep up. Like the K-12 solution, we need to put our best and brightest together to produce dynamic, digital content, which is accessible 24/7, and totally customizable to meet unique classes. Some of the greatest universities in the United States are already making their digital content free and available on the web. Washington State needs to be a leader in digital content and open access resources. Knowledge should no longer be rationed and parsed out to those most able to afford it. Washington State should take an active role to crush the monopolistic behavior of publishers by creating publicly-owned content. This will expand knowledge, dramatically lower costs for students, and open up unprecedented teaching content for teachers and professors around the state, nation, and world.

These kind of “disruptive” solutions to old problems will be necessary to improve student achievement, lower costs for taxpayers and college students, and enhance learning fromK-12 to Ph.D.s We are not short on solutions, we are short on courage. I’m ready to work hard for better schools and colleges by taking on publishers!