Controlling the Costs of K-12 Textbooks

How (ineffective) policy choices drive up the cost of education

Ontario’s Ministry of Education currently approves 311 textbooks for use in the province’s public and private K-12 schools. Predictably, most of those come from the big players in Canada’s academic publishing industry: Nelson (56 titles), Pearson (55 titles), and McGraw-Hill Ryerson (34 titles). As those publishers operate in a free market, there’s probably not a lot governments can do to push down the purchasing costs for textbooks. But do official life cycle approval policies contribute to budget abuses?

By “life cycle approval” I mean Ministry policies that determine when books must be replaced with something newer. Of the 311 titles in the list right now, 100 are designated as “not to be used in classrooms as textbooks after…” either August 31, 2024 or August 31, 2025. Which probably means that, between now and next summer, school boards will be shopping for millions of replacement volumes.

In the context of the official list, a book’s lifespan is defined by the date a book was initially approved and the date by which it must be removed. Using that metric, a full 25 percent of the books had a total lifespan of less than 72 months (six years). Since most textbooks are probably only purchased many months after appearing on the list, their practical lifespan is probably far less than six years.

Now consider how the wholesale price for a textbook could easily hit $90, how there might be 150,000 students requiring a full set of textbooks in each grade enrolled across Ontario, and how a reasonable proportion of a set of textbooks could physically survive for as long as 10 years.

It’s policies that trigger updates to official curricula and to approved book lists. But are curriculum updates always worth the many millions of dollars in textbook-related expenses that they’ll generate? And what about the very real possibility - discussed at length in previous posts - that curriculum innovations aren’t necessarily improvements and probably won’t be implemented in any case?

There’s something else I’ve noticed that’s weird. Many of the titles in Ontario’s list barely exist on the internet. That’s strange because it’s normally not possible to make even old and out-of-print books disappear. Take a look at the Amazon page listing my own books. Alongside my many world-changing literary treasures, you’ll see obsolete editions, books that aren’t currently being sold, and even one book that only existed as an experiment for a couple of weeks - although, inexplicably, it did somehow receive a five-star review.

Here’s what I think is going on.

Some of the titles on the province’s list aren’t actually books at all, but digital learning products of one form or another. The reason there are no working links to them online is probably because the products are custom-designed for a specific province or even a specific school board. It’s not that their Amazon links were taken down, it’s that they never existed in the first place.

There’s nothing at all wrong will any of that. But the use of such digital products likely adds significant new costs. Rather than a one-off $90 textbook purchase for each student, there will now be an annual license fee of, perhaps, $50 for each student. And that’s besides the technology costs involved with deploying the products to students.

Being an IT guy myself (and a recovering high school teacher), I can see the potential benefits of well-designed, purpose-built classroom software. But I’ve also suffered from plenty of awful software that should never have been released into the world. Historically, heavily hyped edtech has rarely led to good things.

My greatest fear is that technology adoption decisions are being made by the same people who handle curriculum development.

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The big picture. It’s all about the big picture. And you know the big picture of Canadian government waste is best viewed from the book: