This is all good stuff. The way it works in California is as follows (I would assume it's similar in most of the other large states):
- after a publisher readies a book, it has to pass
a textbook committee review to make sure that it conforms to the frameworks.
- Once a book has been approved, it's available for
any district to adopt. The districts have their various curriculum experts, teachers, interested parents, etc. determine what's the best fit for the district. btw, it's more complex at K-5 [elementary school], where amorphous 'topics' like 'language development' take on the flavor of entire integrated programs, and are more complex, (but ideally suited to open content development).
So, this is one way it gets interesting is with open content developed in modular format via Wikipedia. It turns out that many, many excellent teachers have developed very good materials on their own over the years. Often, this material is published by a district, and distributed to all the schools in that district.
If a specific book is published via Wikipedia to adhere to standards, once the content is approved at state level, various districts could either self-publish, or request that a commercial publisher include those teacher materials specific to the district that had been published by Wikipedia. This would save time, money, and other resources - not to mention the benefit that(again, I would start with one (recommending California), and migrate to many...in fact, eventually, one could tag various modules within a 'book' as specific to one or another state, and go from there).
This is just one advantage of the modular approach, from a practical 'on-the-ground' approach. There are many others.
Sanford
That's not how I heard it. After reading ''The Language Police'' by Diane Ravitch, I have a clear view of why my textbooks (as in at school, not at wikibooks) are so dull.
First, the textbook companies self-censor for the PC left and religious right in order to get the big contracts with the state and to not get sales hurt by a big lawsuit, initiated by a disgruntled pastor or feminist who doesn't like the fantasy in Aesop's fables or the imbalance in the roles of women as compared to men in history. These lawsuits are consistantly lost by the parents who want to censor the books, but it is enough for the textbook to stop selling almost completely. The textbook companies don't like this, so they self-censor.
Often three, two, or even only one textbook is approved in a state as big as California, and they're not forced to accept every textbook that just meets standards. They want to accept only textbooks that will prevent big public outrage. And they do have standards mandating gender-neutral language and such, but those aren't as harsh as the censorship the textbook companies themselves use.
Then, even if the book is approved by the state, it still needs to get through the school board, which isn't always that good on allowing objectionable material through (eg. not perfect race balance compared to recent US Census or something talking about the advantages of the UN in extreme cases).
Then, parents complain anyway, even after all of this censorship, not about the censorship, but about the lack of more of it.
I'm sorry if this letter sounded like a conspiricy-theory rant and I'm paranoid, but that's just what it seems like. So I don't think we should be aiming at schools. Maybe colleges or homeschoolers? In colleges, the professors pick out the textbooks, and they look around for the best one, unlike gradeschool teachers who have no power over the issue whatsoever. Homeschoolers tend to dislike textbooks, but that's probably because they're so terribly written. Or we could go for a place where this censorship isn't so bad, possible Europe or Canada? -LDan
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com