States move slowly toward digital textbooks

But allowing districts to buy digital devices and content doesn’t guarantee that they will do it. In the 2010-11 school year, only 11 percent of Indiana districts actually made use of the blanket waiver, according to a survey conducted by the state Department of Education. “There’s a whole lot of moving parts to replacing textbooks,” says John Keller, assistant superintendent for technology in Indiana.

One of those moving parts is a quirk in Indiana law that allows districts to charge parents a “rental fee” for textbooks. Under the law, districts couldn’t charge more than 25 percent of the retail cost for each textbook, with the state picking up the tab for students on free and reduced lunch. With the shift to spending on technology and other materials, schools can retain the fees they previously charged based on textbook prices. But those fees vary widely by district, meaning it’s easier for some schools to buy technology with the funds than others.

The districts have gotten creative to make it work. Some banked rental money for several years after the waiver was issued to be able to make a bulk technology purchase. Others have issued capital bonds to pay for devices. One middle school opted to resurface its gym floor every other year, rather than annually—no small sacrifice in the basketball-crazed state.

Finding the money

Keller believes the move to digital content will improve student learning, but that, particularly in the short term, it might not be a money-saver. The seemingly lower prices of digital content are deceptive, he says. Take the iBook. That $15 “book” is for one student’s use and can’t be passed on to anyone else. Print textbooks typically cost several multiples of that $15 fee, but they can be reused by students in successive years, bringing the per-use cost down. And that’s before taking into account the acquisition cost of the iPad required to view iBooks.

But some digital advocates say the shift toward more technology doesn’t have to mean significantly higher costs. Maine gives laptops to every middle school student in the state at a cost of less than one percent of the state education budget, according to Jeff Mao, learning technology policy director for the state. It’s expanding to high school students as well, with the goal of providing laptops for every student in grades seven through twelve by 2013.

Mao says that schools can find cost-savings in digital textbooks if they take advantage of content that’s available for free. He is one of a small but growing number of educational leaders pushing their states to use free content available online, known as open educational resources (OER), or develop their own. He’s used federal stimulus grants to pay teachers to create digital content that can be distributed for free to schools in the state. Mao stresses that tasking teachers with creating and vetting open content is intrinsically valuable, helping them sharpen their subject knowledge and craft.

Jeff Taylor, senior vice president for U.S. government relations at Pearson, the largest education publisher, says that open resources have a role in the classroom, but not a starring one.

“We as a commercial provider attempt to create a very complete product,” he says. “It’s very hard for that to exist in OER, because of the level of investment involved.”

Reuven Carlyle doesn’t agree. The Washington state legislator was instrumental in creating a statewide open resource project that is building course content for the 81 most popular community colleges in the state. But he turned his attention to K-12 textbooks after he noticed his ninth grade daughter Adi reading a school textbook on world history that was more than 20 years old. “The state of Washington spends $128 million each biennium on textbooks,” he says. “It is the legislature’s job to be an intelligent consumer.”

Putting teachers in charge

For Carlyle, the answer was to push for more open content. He successfully introduced legislation this session enabling the state, with an initial investment of less than $200,000 per year, to find and vet open resource material that can be used by schools. “This is an aggregation play,” Carlyle says. “Ninety-nine percent of the work will be to organize, manage and distribute material that exists.”

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