- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following Salon Premium Member:
Published Letters: 11
I work in a role where I have a broad view of similar types of changes that are occurring in who publishes educational materials and how these are distributed to K-12 students and teachers.
Through mergers (including the same Houghton Mifflin - Harcourt one discussed in this article) there are now just 3 major basal publishers for the millions of school children in the U.S. These companies are heavily dependent on cyclical state-wide textbook "adoptions" (a nicer word than "purchases") in a handful of major states - CA, TX, FL, NC, and GA - to name the big ones. They publish massive sets of materials - mostly print, but increasingly digital items - to fiercely compete to gain 25 to 30% market share in these states. Huge amounts of money are spent on these programs which turn out 7 pound U.S. history books that students don't want to read and teacher's don't use to teach.
New players and tools are arising to develop and distribute content. Open source websites are growing where teachers and writers can post lessons and materials which are downloaded for free. Some of these take the form of Wikis as well. Many districts are using on-line Content and Learning Management systems where content from a variety of sources can be posted in an easy-to-access format for students and teachers. And there is rapid growth in full digital course materials created for K-12 on-line "virtual schoolers" which are also being used in traditional brick and mortar classrooms.
Perhaps Salon can write a similar story to describe how the content that our school children use on a daily basis is rapidly changing in interesting ways.
