Textbook purchases are being put on hold!  It’s amazing to find out, not from my school district, but when someone says, “I saw in the paper….”

studying the latest math TG

My dad passed on the article “Budget Cuts Put New Textbook Purchases on Hold,” by Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2009, just after I’d commented in this blog (post 8/12) about the impressive math textbook purchases in my school district for 2009-2010.  I didn’t see an article in the bay area newspapers.

The article puts in print what I’d been thinking.  Turns out the state legislators, closing that $24 billion budget breach last month, did it partly by waiving the textbook purchase regulations in the California Education Code.

This waiver came about in spite of the California State Department of Education’s longtime insistence on keeping up with “modern, state-of-the-art textbooks, not outdated, antiquated textbooks,” as stated by Jack O’Connell, state Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The article included lots of back and forth about pragmatics in the current California school budget crisis versus actual need for new texts as often as set in the Education Code.

In my view, I understand how high school history and government classes may want materials every 6-8 years to reflect the latest changes in the world.  I remember, though, when I was in high school not very long ago, we read many supplemental books, newspapers, and other paper articles to get another point of view.

Now, I teach elementary school in which the literature texts, math texts, and even social studies texts are current for much longer than the regulations say.

I agree with the commentators in the article about state money designated for textbooks only: in this crisis, use the money to keep teachers in schools, to keep the custodial staff in schools.  A clean, safe elementary school with highly-qualified teachers is the first requirement to make sure students succeed.

At the same time, if school finance was fixed, if California finance in general was fixed, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?