Tuesday, November 10, 2009

One Million Dollars

OregonLive.com:

Oregon math experts predict middle school math achievement will continue to surge now that new textbooks are in place. Most middle schools chose a widely praised series called Oregon Focus, written by six Oregon math teachers specifically to teach Oregon's new math standards to middle schoolers.

We need to get to the point where the obvious next step, particularly if scores do continue to go up with these new texts (whose quality I cannot comment on), is the state or federal government stepping up and just offering a big check to the authors to make the texts open content. They seem to be more or less self publishing anyhow. They could continue to sell printed books, consult, further develop the texts, whose influence would expand even more than if they were selling them one by one, and get a nice fat lump sum. I don't know how much money they stand to make selling copyrighted books, but I think the government could make them an offer they could not refuse -- and "incentivize" other teachers to take the same approach.

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