Red-state education restrictions leave textbook publishers in a bind - Publishers ‘desperate’ for clarity on web of new laws

[essentialsaltes]

Red-state education restrictions leave textbook publishers in a bind​

For many educational publishing companies and book sellers, sales are plunging as districts shy from purchasing content they fear might fall afoul of state laws restricting education on race, sex and gender — or draw complaints amid a historic surge in book challenges. Meanwhile, frazzled firms are spending months negotiating with education departments, politicians and school officials to ensure the books they sell won’t leave them imprisoned, slapped with onerous fines or banned from doing business in a state under the raft of new legislation.

In Texas, publishers and sellers must spend the next year screening every book they’ve sold to public school districts in order to recall any “sexually explicit” titles — defined as material that “describes, depicts, or portrays sexual conduct … in a way that is patently offensive” — under a law signed June 13. In Tennessee, book publishers, distributors and sellers who provide “obscene” material to schools could face six years in jail and a roughly $100,000 fine per a law that took effect July 1.

And in Florida, textbook publishers weary from last year’s contentious back-and-forth with the Education Department over allegedly racist content in math textbooks are now fighting over social studies textbooks. The department rejected more than 30 such tomes this spring and sought edits to an additional 47, partly in compliance with a year-old state law that prohibits making students feel “guilt, anguish, or … psychological distress” because of their race during lessons about America’s past.

Publishers ‘desperate’ for clarity

McGraw Hill emailed asking about a new requirement for Florida K-12 social studies materials: that “primary source documents … be included and unedited.”
“What does ‘unedited’ mean? Does it mean that we must include the entire primary source?” the executive wrote. “If we are allowed to use excerpts, what constitutes editing? For example, can we use ellipses?”
The Florida Education Department does not appear to have responded directly, per the email records; a staffer forwarded the queries to two superiors.

other states are undertaking novel, intensive examinations of educational materials, in part by mandating more “community reviews” of educational books and textbooks before schools and school districts can purchase the material.
In at least one state that wound up rejecting some of his company’s textbooks last year, the executive said, negative community reviews appear to have played a role.
[States obviously can't even provide any clarity to textbook publishers if individual citizens have power to reject textbooks for reasons of their own.]

Booboisie populism is throttling small government conservatism within the GOP.

 

[Diamond7]

For many educational publishing companies and book sellers, sales are plunging as districts shy from purchasing content they fear might fall afoul of state laws restricting education on race, sex and gender

It is crazy that textbooks cost as much as they do, yet they are still not making any money. My brother wrote a textbook once and it took him three years with all the research. Then there is a lot of work to keep them current and updated.

I buy outdated books for something like $5 because students are told they cannot use a book that is two times outdated. Even though if you look there is only one chapter that they have revised. If a person was on top of the situation they could borrow a friends book to read that one chapter and save themselves a lot of money.

My son took a literature class and the book had been updated 23 times. I never did figure out what they changed when we consider that literature itself remains the same and does not change over the years.