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Math Textbooks a Textbook Example of Bad Textbooks
theodp writes "Over at Salon, Annie Keeghan does an Upton Sinclair number on the math textbook industry. In recent years, Keeghan explains, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of lagging U.S. students. But with state and local budgets constrained, math textbook publishers competing for fewer available dollars are rushing their products to market before their competitors, resulting in product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed. Keeghan writes: 'There may be a reason you can't figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter's math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn't yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.' The comments on Keeghan's article are also an eye-opener — here's a sample: 'Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product. Sadly, most teachers are not curriculum experts and are swayed by the surface pitches. Teachers make the decisions, but are not the users (students) nor are they spending their own money. As a result, products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful.' So, can open source or competitions build better math textbooks?"
This issue is found with all textbooks, and has always been a problem. Even in the 70s and 80s, pretty much every textbook I used in high school and university had mistakes, omissions, and unsolvable chapter-problems.
The difficulty with learning maths and sciences stems from the fact that they tend to deal with abstract concepts, procedures, and algorithms for performing mathematical calculations. In the age of calculators and instant-gratification web searches, not only aren't students willing to put in the time to learn "how" to do something, they aren't even interested in learning "why" they should do something.
Instead, they point to their computers and the web as being able to do the work for them, and question the sanity of learning "the old way" of doing things. If the only purpose of an education was to prepare people for the workforce, I'd agree with them -- but the point of an education is to learn how to learn, how to interpret, and how to understand material. An education isn't about the facts taught, but about the learning process that prepares you for a lifetime of learning as you deal with new technologies, products, and ideas during your time on this planet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Its not like Math changes every year. The text book industry and publishers are just ripping students off every year. If they would just publish one edition of their text books, we wouldn't have this problem.
The reason to keep reinventing the wheel is because reinventing the wheel costs lots of money.
The monopolistic nature of the public education system means that customer demands - the parents - can be ignored. So, we've got a textbook industry that can ignore cost and can ignore efficacy, since their customer is the school district, but can't ignore political fads.
If you want textbooks to get relentlessly better and relentlessly cheaper then the people who are urgently concerned about the safety and effective education of the kids - parents - have to assume direct control over education.
That's in the process of happening with the spread of charter schools, vouchers, parental trigger and tax credits but we're only just now getting to the point that those changes are starting to impact education. But another two to three years should see the monopolistic complacency of the public education system shattered as the nature of public education, and the costs of that nature, are more widely understood as they stand in contrast to the alternatives.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Capitalism has nothing to do with public education in the US. It's a social-bureaucratic system with curriculum preferences driven by California and Texas.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
"Capitalism simply does not deliver good education."
Where exactly is the capitalism in the current education system? Money flows are so disconnected from the ultimate consumers (students), that there exist hardly any market signals.
Actually, it has. A couple years ago my high-school aged son was stuck on a math problem: Plot a linear approximation through a set of points. I didn't remember the exact technique so I looked it up in his textbook. "Step 1: Enter the points into a graphing calculator. Step 2: Press the 'linear regression' button."
For better or worse, computers and powerful calculators are part of the curriculum. My younger son's Algebra 1 book has frequent "Spreadsheet Activity" and "Graphing Calculator Activity" sidebars.
Insert generic "In my day..." rant here. You could borrow the one used by my parents when my generation got to use 4-function calculators, or the one used by their parents when they got to use slide rules.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The textbook providers are capitalist enterprises. The article correctly points out that their incentives are to do whatever it takes to sell books, not to provide the best possible books.
The fact that this even affects MATH texts indicates how pervasive and corrupting the process is. Unlike history and science, there is no need for the content to change from decade to decade. We could have optimized math texts long ago.