Ambiguous
Ambiguous:
I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this before. There is a substantial buying bloc–namely, school boards in southern states–that follows suit with whatever the state school board of Texas does. These states buy textbooks uniformly, statewide. 1 Most “blue states” buy district to district, so there is no unified bloc per se to counterbalance the southern states where points of politics are concerned. So this bloc of southern school boards has an unrivalled power to influence the choices of the major textbook 1 publishers 1 in the country–of which there are only like four, anyhow. Basically, they don’t publish anything the school board of Texas doesn’t buy.
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great… just great. now students don’t get to learn more important things.
2 comments
This has always been the case. I learned it when working on environmental science stuff up in canada in the early 90s. We had to use content that was OK in texas, cause half the US followed them, and even Canadian publishers didn’t want to lose that market. Luckily for us creationism wasn’t an issue, but if you want your book to sell, you have to bow to the blue. Of course, now we dump shit on the net, and let Texans grow up stupid.
Presumably that’s why there was a book depository in Dallas in the first place.