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The Textbook Monopoly

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"Some publishers are known to offer thousands of dollars to professors
and instructors just to review textbooks for potential inclusion in
their coursework. The same publishers sometimes offer commissions on
textbooks sold or (in what is almost outright bribery) offer kickbacks
to professors for textbook adoption (Bartlett)."




The Textbook Monopoly in American Education
Control over educational policy in the United States is split between
the federal, state, and local levels of government, which, under the
direction of their respective constituents, are tasked with defining a
system of educational standards that codify what students under their
jurisdiction ought to learn. Schools then implement curriculum in
response to the combination of standards specific to their region, often
in conjunction with the use of privately-produced textbooks. Over time,
unfortunately, the efficacy of this system has diminished severely as a
handful of companies have wrested control over the majority of the
textbook industry. As of 2013, just three textbook publishing
conglomerates - Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, and
Pearson - assert control over "more than 80% of the $8.8 billion
publishing market" internationally (Vohra 9). At surface level, the hold
of these companies on the textbook industry is like any other classic
monopoly, with drastically increased prices and comparably-reduced
competition. Upon inspection, however, it can be shown that this
oligopoly-nearing-monopoly held by the companies aforementioned has
deeper repercussions, having, over the last several decades, transformed
an effective private-public partnership into a nefarious machine that
serves to inflict disastrous consequences on the potency of democracy in
education in ways that supersede the democratic process and shift the
ideological battle over what America’s youth are taught from Congress to
the classroom. By almost every metric, the textbook monopoly has
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demonstrated itself to be both financially and academically detrimental
to students and citizens alike.
Like any other monopoly, the most immediately-visible disadvantages of
the textbook monopoly are financial in nature, manifesting most
conspicuously in increased prices. According to the American Enterprise
Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy think tank, textbook
prices have increased 812% since 1978, outstripping inflation of the
cost of medical services, new home prices, and the consumer price index
in the same time period (Priceonomics). College students, who often need
to buy textbooks themselves in addition to tuition, housing, and
university costs, are generally hit the hardest by increasing textbook
prices. Per the College Board, “the average student at a four-year
public institution spends $1,200 annually on books and supplies” (Allen
1). This figure adds significant burden to the current average annual
cost of attending a public four-year institution of almost $15,000 (Ma
et al. 11, 20). Textbook prices are already hefty for a number of
reasons, including a monopolistic lack of competition in the industry,
reseller markup, and author’s royalties. None of these factors, however,
are quite as impactful as the funds spent on marketing the textbooks:
enabled by increased revenues from textbook sales, a worrying amount of
publishers engage in ethically-questionable textbook marketing practices
with professors that hurt students the most. Some publishers are known
to offer thousands of dollars to professors and instructors just to
review textbooks for potential inclusion in their coursework. The same
publishers sometimes offer commissions on textbooks sold or (in what is
almost outright bribery) offer kickbacks to professors for textbook
adoption (Bartlett). While these deals can be lucrative to professors
faced with inadequate salaries, they can be especially detrimental to
students, who are forced to purchase said textbooks at the inflated
price in order to pass (and in some cases, even participate in) the
class. To capitalize on
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textbook purchase lock-in, publishers resort to tactics such as textbook
revision: many publishers release new ‘revised’ editions of existing
textbooks every 2-4 years, marketing the ‘revamped’ books as new then
selling them at same or greater prices (Priceonomics). While these
updated versions can include new content, many textbooks, especially
those written on mathematics and other technical subjects which do not
warrant frequent revision, are updated solely for the purpose of
revenue. In the same vein, publishers push web-based homework submission
applications to professors (a theoretically beneficial proposal), but
take advantage of students by requiring a special online code to access
the application, often sold at unreasonable prices or only bundled with
a physical textbook. With the increased revenues from textbook sales to
students who have no choice in purchasing their goods as a result of
such tactics, textbook publishers are able to better fund their
unethical textbook-marketing practices.
These anti-student behaviors are made possible by the sheer magnitude of
influence textbook publishers such as Pearson have over American
education. While it operates internationally, Pearson finds most of its
business in the West, with the North American market accounting for 59%
of the company’s revenues and 66% of its total profits (Rushton). The
conglomerate has business in the composition and publication of
textbooks and the creation, distribution, and grading of teacher
qualifications, student exams, and standardized tests - in fact, the
British company is thought to control approximately 60% of all North
American standardized testing (Reingold). The corporation also played an
instrumental role in the development of curriculum for and the
implementation of the vastly-controversial Common Core education
standards, especially in elementary schools (Rushton). The oligopoly
over and general privatization of American education that companies such
as Pearson have achieved has created a single point of failure that has
allowed certain parties to exert a disproportionate amount of
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influence over what American students are actually taught, in ways that
are detrimental to presenting a well-rounded and unbiased worldview in
the national classroom.
In a nation that has become increasingly polarized over the last
decades, the ideological battle for what content and worldview is taught
in the classroom has become even more significant, especially in regards
to religion. This disagreement has historically been resolved within the
government: conservative states tend to pass legislation requiring the
inclusion of religion-supported perspectives in science and history
teachings in addition to federal education standards, while liberal
states tend to act in the opposite. The result of this process is a
common core (no pun intended) of educational standards defined at the
federal level, with some adjustments at the state and local levels - a
victory for democracy and dual federalism. The textbook monopoly,
however, has undermined the efficacy of this process: while
textbook-publishing companies were previously able to assemble a single
textbook version that would be admissible and marketable in all fifty
states by catering to national standards, this is no longer exactly the
case. Because of the actions of a select group of regulators, textbook
publishers are now forced to consider a different lowest common
denominator in terms of educational standards; a change that undermines
the system of our government and shifts the ideological battle of what
is taught to our nation’s youth - arguably the most intellectually
vulnerable demographic of our population - from public politics to
private industry.
This threat to American students is most strongly exemplified in the
actions of the Texas State Board of Education. A unit of the Texas
Education Agency, the Board is responsible for setting curriculum
standards for the state, effectively dictating what content is
permissible for instruction in every Texas public school. For most of
the last couple decades, the state’s populace has chosen to elect (in
the words of former chair Don McLeroy) “solid religious
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conservatives” to the fourteen-member State Board of Education (fifteen,
including the appointed chair) (Chancey 325). In their tenure, this
majority has acted to ensure that their view of “true American history”
is taught in schools by emphasizing the link between the ideology of the
Founding Fathers and Christianity and asserting that the country was
“built on biblical principles” (Chancey 325-326). On one hand, some
organizations and citizens (including the Texas Christian Coalition and
Chuck Norris) have praised these changes for their more-faithful (pun
intended) representation of the country’s founding. On the other hand,
Texan educational reform groups on both sides of the spectrum (albeit to
a much lesser extent on the right) have lambasted the Board’s changes
for having "heavy-handed religious and ideological bias, historical
inaccuracy, whitewashing of unappealing aspects of American history,
[and] inattention to diversity issues” (Chancey 326-327). Regardless of
one’s opinion on the issue, the Board’s actions are not inherently
harmful or undemocratic - the members of the State Board of Education
are elected, and the Board’s influence is only supposed to extend within
the state; so by all means, whether one agrees or disagrees with the
Board’s actions, the standards changes should simply be democracy at
work.
However, because of the textbook monopoly, the Board’s actions have more
far-reaching implications than what might initially be apparent. In the
words of Dr. Mark A. Chancey, a prestigious Duke scholar working as a
professor of religious studies at the Southern Methodist University in
Dallas, the Board’s changes to standards would “likely find its way into
[textbooks] adopted across the country” considering the fact that
textbook “publishers must develop textbooks that cohere with the Texas
standards” in addition to those of the federal government and the other
49 states (Chancey 326). This possibility is especially likely given
Texas’s relationship with textbook publishers: the Lone Star State’s
deals with textbook
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publishers amount to hundreds of millions of dollars (Rushton). Because
of the reduced amount of textbook publishers in the North American
market, and the relatedly reduced competition and amount of textbooks
published in the region, textbooks published in the present day bear the
increasing risk of presenting information that is not representative of
the decisions and values of local governments. In a jarring upset to
dual federalism, the undue influence that the textbook industry has
(advertently or inadvertently) been allowed to wield has created an
environment detrimental not only to academia, or only Texas, but to the
country as a whole — the existence of which has become increasingly
apparent. A scholarly review funded by watchdog and activist group Texas
Freedom Network of 43 proposed history, geography, and government
textbooks written in accordance with Texas education standards for
grades 6-12 found that several of the proposed textbooks contained
arguably misrepresentative portrayals of American government and
history, including exaggerations of the "Judeo-Christian influence on
the nation's founding," biased statements "inappropriately [portraying]
Islam and Muslims negatively," failure to address "legitimate problems
that exist in capitalism," and inclusion of potentially offensive
"anthropological categories and racial terminology in describing African
civilization" (Strauss 1). Regardless of whether or not such
representations are accurate, it is clear that the Texas State Board of
Education, as a result of the textbook monopoly, now possesses an
unprecedented ability to influence national academic policy. It is clear
that any organization, not just the Texas State Board of Education, with
a sufficient stake in the private textbook publishing industry, can
informally bypass the checks and balances underpinning our democratic
determination of educational standards. It is clear that because of the
textbook monopoly’s ability to shift the ideological battleground of
educational standards from the public sector to the private sector,
America’s system of education is now more than ever susceptible to
abuse.
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Like any other monopoly, the textbook monopoly creates an
anti-competitive market characterized by increasing prices and
diminishing quality, the success of which perpetuates the monopoly,
posing pertinent financial consequences for all consumers, especially
students. Unlike a typical monopoly, however, this particular
near-monopoly exercises a unique capacity to shape both the beliefs and
ideological future of this nation’s students, and by extension, the
nation itself. The monopoly’s potential for the distortion and
misrepresentation of the tenets of knowledge undermines the
decision-making processes embedded in our democratic republic. Rarely
before has such monumental influence over an area of public concern,
especially one so imperative to the future and development of the United
States, been concentrated in the hands of so few.





-- 
The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,
to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable, 
and challenge the unchallengeable.

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The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-25 13:42 -0800
  Re: The Textbook Monopoly nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) - 2025-01-27 16:06 +0100
    Re: The Textbook Monopoly Maciej Wozniak <mlwozniak@wp.pl> - 2025-01-27 18:56 +0100
  Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-27 10:53 -0800
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      Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-27 20:52 -0800
        Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-28 11:22 -0600
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            Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-30 13:55 -0600
              Re: The Textbook Monopoly bertietaylor@myyahoo.com (Bertietaylor) - 2025-01-31 08:44 +0000
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            Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-29 14:22 -0600
              Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-29 13:03 -0800
                Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-29 15:13 -0600
                Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-30 10:45 -0800
                Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-30 12:53 -0600
        Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-31 01:40 -0800
          Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-31 11:34 -0600
            Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-31 10:43 -0800
              Re: The Textbook Monopoly Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2025-01-31 13:06 -0600
                Re: The Textbook Monopoly The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2025-01-31 13:47 -0800

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