Textbook Rage

With all my ramblings about how some math and science content is really boring looking, I decided to look for some answers. I came across an article in The Faster Times that contained an interview with a textbook "professional." While the article is a bit lengthy, there was one section that really caught my attention:

KM: Doesn’t creating a textbook require specialized knowledge? Do you mean that anyone can do it, like learning to operate the espresso machine at Starbucks?

TP: Interestingly, you would think that highly skilled educators, historians, etc. would be required, but given the detailed format provided by adoption committees, making a textbook is like filling out a complex form. You need professionals, but you don’t need good writers, much less educators. That has been taken out of the hands of the publishers (and to their minds, good riddance). When textbook adoption committees tell you EXACTLY what you want, what you need is a task force that can fill out the form. That still takes skill, but not creative skill. Except to the degree that if you really did do it just as they asked, the result would be embarrassing.

To put it at its most drastic, these books are intended as crib sheets so students can pass standardized tests. The better their scores on these tests, the higher the rating of the schools they attend. The higher the school rates, the higher the real estate values go in the community that pays the taxes for the schools. Everyone wins when the students score high. The icing on the cake? The same publishers that make the textbooks do the testing! Now REALLY everyone wins. Except nothing is more tedious or conducive to high drop out rates than the tedium of cramming for tests, and the inevitability of failure for students who don’t do well on them. In Edison schools, kids who don’t perform well are actually excluded from taking the tests, to raise the average. These kids are classed as learning-disordered. This is the heart of the matter: Education that becomes all about testing becomes a factory. The best and the brightest, generally, will not do well in this environment. The more standardized this system becomes the more of these bright students will be carved out of the process, or lose their marbles.

Now I've highlighted the important parts in bold as most of you are accustomed to in educational textbooks. So if a professor wants to put some content into a math or science textbook, all they would have to do is fill out a form? Then a machine processes it and spits out a mediocre looking book but at least it has all your information in it right? But how well will your information get to your intended audience if it has no design to appeal to them? Sure your book may have 700+ pages but having a designer go through and applying at least the minimal amount of negative space, tracking, leading, etc. can make your book at least 700 times better! (Assuming 1 better page adds to the better whole of the book)