kitchen table math, the sequel

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(Family motto: It's always worse than you think)

Excerpt from Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.:

At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.

Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.

Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.

Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.

[snip]

Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors in grammar and punctuation and move on. There's a mortgage due after all.

When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.

And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.

[snip]

One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”

Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.

Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan

From Barry Eichengreen, a historian of the Great Depression:

Indeed, one might question the very premise that, two decades from now, there will be textbooks as we know them. Today, introductory economics is taught using a textbook in which an eminent professor authoritatively bestows the conventional wisdom on his or her (typically, his) students. Knowledge, as encapsulated in the textbook and interpreted by the professor, is delivered from above.

This, of course, is also how newspapers traditionally delivered the news. Editors and publishers assembled and collated stories, and the newspaper that they produced was then delivered to the subscriber’s doorstep. But the last decade has seen a veritable revolution in the news business. News is now assembled and disseminated via Web sites, wikis, and the comment sections of blogs. News, in other words, is increasingly delivered from the bottom up. Rather than relying on editors, everyone is becoming their own news curator.

Something similar is likely to happen to textbooks, especially in economics,where everyone has an opinion and first-hand experience with the subject. Textbooks will be like wikis, with faculty adopters and students modifying text and contributing content. There still may be a role for the author as gatekeeper; but the textbook will know [sic] longer be the font of wisdom, and its writer will no longer control the table of contents.

The outcome will be messy. But the economics profession will also become more diverse and dynamic – and our children’s economics will be healthier as a result.

Our Children's Economics

Number one: if it's textbooks not being a source of wisdom you're after, we've got that now.

And, number two: I prefer fount.

Font of wisdom sounds dumb.

Other people who have really bad ideas

One of these stories appeared as a front page, May 18th Philadelphia Inquirer article. The other one is made up. Which is which?

Story A:

Some teachers swear that the best way to establish their authority is to avoid smiling for the first two weeks of class.

David Hall takes a very different approach with his students at North Penn High School by cracking self-deprecating jokes and pretending to be the dude who thinks he is hip but so is not.

In the classroom, Hall brings social studies alive, bypassing textbooks in favor of original sources and creating his own lesson materials. Inside and outside the classroom, he spends time getting to know students, hoping to connect with them and inspire them.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hall, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Hero" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited Hall's field trips to courtrooms and prisons in Philadelphia and his work as an adviser for the school Gay-Straight Alliance. During summer vacations, Hall does corporate training on workplace diversity issues.

Lauren Ewaniuk, 28, who graduated from North Penn in 2001, called Hall her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was we didn't use the textbook very often," said Ewaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenham. "He taught us in different ways. The classroom was set up as a circle - it was all class discussion. We read court cases, we did interactive things, watched videos - it was very engaging."

Story B:

Some teachers swear that the best way to engage with students is to crack jokes and relate to them as peers.

David Hill takes a very different approach with his students at South Penn High School. He spends most of his time standing in front of the class and rarely goes off topic

Hill brings social studies alive by ensuring that students can make sense of it. His approach bucks what has become a common trend among award-winning teachers: creating lessons from scratch out of original source materials. Noting that students often find such materials confusing or overwhelming because they lack the necessary background knowledge, Hill makes teaching this knowledge his number one priority.

"My job is to get them ready for the kinds of serious, primary source research that occurs in college and graduate level courses," Hill explains.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hill, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Teacher" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited the well-informed essays that Hill's students wrote about the history of prison reform in Philadelphia and Hill's own original research on Gay-Straight relations in Philadelphia high schools. During summer vacations, Hill seeks out the most informative, interesting history texts and conducts workshops for teachers in what he calls "Textbook Resuscitation."

Evelyn Lemaniuk, 28, who graduated from South Penn in 2001, called Hill her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was how he renewed my interest in reading history," said Lemaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenberg. "Most of the approved textbooks are incredibly low-level and boring, and so the better teachers tend not to use them. The problem is that, without a textbook, we're really at a loss when it comes to understanding primary source materials and how they fit into the bigger picture."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

I mentioned the other day that our interim curriculum director recently told the community that: "We're getting away from textbooks."

In practice, "we're getting away from textbooks" means the curriculum is Google. Teachers Google lessons and download them from the internet.

I've been observing the Googleization of the curriculum for years now, but I was surprised to discover that even some textbooks have turned into Google.