Southern school board buy their textbooks in a block, lead by the purchase decisions of Texas's board. "Liberal" school boards make individual purchase decisions. That means that reactionary anti-sex-ed and anti-evolution agendas dominate the editorial decisions at textbook publishers, which has led to the elimination sex-ed from every current health text in America and will shortly do in evolution as well.There is a substantial buying bloc--namely, school boards in southern states--that follows suit with whatever the state school board of Texas does. These states buy textbooks uniformly, statewide. Most "blue states" buy district to district, so there is no unified bloc per se to counterbalance the southern states where points of politics are concerned. So this bloc of southern school boards has an unrivalled power to influence the choices of the major textbook publishers in the country--of which there are only like four, anyhow. Basically, they don't publish anything the school board of Texas doesn't buy.
You can see where this headed, but it's already shockingly total. Right now, a sex ed textbook that isn't "abstinence only" cannot be bought in the United States. Not a current one, not from any major publisher. There are inroads against evolution as well, but sex ed has basically been exterminated.
via BoingBoing via Ambiguous.org from Metroland
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