If you want to find out what math textbooks a district is using, just go ahead and ask the central office, right? According to University of Southern California researcher Morgan Polikoff, it鈥檚 not quite that easy.
Polikoff is in the throes of an ambitious study on textbook adoption, in which he and a group of students are looking at which textbooks are being used in the five most-populated states (California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas).
He took a moment out of his research to write a blog post today, in which he explains that .
How could a school district really not know what textbooks are used in its schools? That seems unfathomable to me.
鈥� Morgan Polikoff (@mpolikoff)
鈥淜nowledge of what is going on inside schools strikes me as the most basic function of the district office,鈥� he writes. 鈥淎nd yet I would estimate around 10 percent of the districts that have responded to my FOIA [i.e., Freedom of Information Act] requests have said they have no documents listing the textbooks in use, and probably another 30-50 percent clearly have to invent such a document to satisfy my request.鈥�
As Polikoff explained in an interview, California does collect textbook information from districts, but it鈥檚 in PDFs so there鈥檚 no standard reporting language. Deciphering that information has been one part of his research project. For the other four states, he鈥檚 sent three rounds of FOIAs to individual districts and so far about three-quarters have responded. (In a recent wrinkle, he found out that Texas also has textbook-adoption lists for its districts.)
An 鈥楿nduly Burdensome鈥� Request
In his blog post, Polikoff quotes a letter from a district that he told me was Chicago. Pulling a list of math and science textbooks by grade, the letter said, would be 鈥渦nduly burdensome in nature and would require extensive resources to both search for information, which would most likely require a manual school-by-school search, and analysis to determine the other data points you are seeking.鈥� Chicago denied his request. (Under the law, districts don鈥檛 have to create a document if one doesn鈥檛 exist.)
The New York City school district has sent six letters asking for one-month extensions, Polikoff told me. He expects to be denied there eventually as well.
鈥淭his is totally anecdotal, but districts that don鈥檛 know or don鈥檛 give me information tend to be at two extremes鈥攅ither huge districts or unbelievably small districts with, like, two schools,鈥� he explained. That said, many large districts in Florida, including Miami and Hillsborough County, have sent him textbook lists.
Polikoff has also studied textbooks鈥� claims of . He will present initial findings from this research study at an Education Writers Association conference in February.
One interesting tidbit on the results he did give me, though, was that many places told him they鈥檙e not using textbooks at all. 鈥淓specially in New York, there are a fair number of districts that are using EngageNY,鈥� an online collection of free common-core-aligned materials managed by the state, he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 got to be a quarter.鈥�
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