Once upon a time, retail was a simple proposition - you buy a lot of a thing to get a good price, then you resell it in smaller quantities at a higher price. If you don't do anything stupid, you made money. Into this idyllic land came Wal-Mart.
Originally, Wal-Mart did a good thing. By using its purchasing power, it told its suppliers what it was willing to pay and gave them the option to meet that price or take a walk. Manufacturers examined their processes, discovered inefficiencies, and learned to produce their product more cheaply so as to meet Wal-Mart's demands. But then Wal-Mart's competitive landscape changed and it became a target for a host of new retailers. It had clearly staked out the "lowest price" territory in the market, so once its rivals began to match its costs, it had no choice but to squeeze its suppliers even further. Manufacturers began having to lay off workers and ship their operations to other places to be able to match Wal-Mart's demands. Now, the very people who are shopping at Wal-Mart because of its low prices are the ones who have been unable to find work because of Wal-Mart's practices.
Granted, that's a poorly researched and overly simple depiction of events, but it's true in essence. So how does this relate to publishing?
In America right now, there are only three major educational publishing companies - Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. Each of these school publishers is itself a small division of much larger media conglomerates. And thanks to their clout, they're taking a page out of Wal-Mart's book by dictating pricing to their myriad vendors, on which they depend to produce their products. Their outward goal is to reduce the pressure of competitive bidding in the production of their products, allowing them to focus on service. So what's wrong with that?
No matter what people in the publishing industry would have you believe, book production is
not merely a manufacturing business. None of the logic of supply chain management applies. Imagine an auto manufacturing plant that must operate without any idea when parts will be showing up. Their delivery dates don't change, so if the parts show up a day before that date, they have no choice but to produce the order in a day. And if they complain at all about the lack of parts, they're seen as unwilling vendors, unworthy of working for the reduced prices that the car market has said their product is worth.
That is educational publishing. Our parts are the products of the authors and editors that produce the manuscript. And if you've ever tried to dictate terms to a human brain, you can see what I'm getting at.
Currently, the only way to meet these demands for reduced costs is to produce the work overseas. Most of the college and high school textbook markets have been over there for several years now. Primary school books are vastly more complicated than that and rely heavily on a carefully tuned cultural sensibility that simply can't be had overseas, and so have remained mostly in the hands of domestic vendors. But now things have reached the point where price is trumping all else and the only thing left to give in this system is quality.
Sadly, no one seems to care in the slightest.
Parents, read through your child's textbooks at the start of every school year. Go flip through them right now. Odds are, you won't notice anything wrong at all. And that's what allows publishers to get away with this nonsense year after year. Because the simple fact is that most people, unless they are shown two books side by side, will never recognize that anything is wrong. In the absence of what is right, what's in front of us will pass as what's "right."
What's wrong with education in America today?
What isn't?
