Where were the textbooks?

As teachers struggled to retool every instructional strategy they knew for Common Core, one key support was glaringly absent. Textbooks.

“The negative part (of the switch) was the frustration some teachers felt not having any materials, not having any models,” said Albert Gonzalez, who helped the Merced Union High School District convert its math program. “There wasn’t much out there. They ended up developing it from scratch, looking at standards and creating their own,” he said.

Despite the long lead-up to implementation and the nationwide market, as late as 2014 curriculum experts saw striking disconnects between the standards and commercial offerings. To fill the void, teachers made do, nonprofits stepped up, and as laptops spread so did students’ virtual wings. Textbooks have now arrived, but the days of their monopoly on learning may be over.

Initially, most texts shifted chapters and slapped “Common Core-aligned” on the cover, according to research by Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California, Rossier School of Education. Few facilitated the shift to student discovery instead of lectures. Fewer still spent enough chapters fleshing out fractions and ratios, which get greater emphasis under Common Core.

“We know textbooks matter. We know textbooks shape teacher instruction,” Polikoff said at an Education Writers Association seminar in Los Angeles in February. Polikoff’s current research examines which textbook schools have adopted, a key detail most states do not track.

By 2012-13, only 3.4 percent of California schools had adopted a Common Core math text, growing to 24 percent by 2013-14, Polikoff said, adding that his research shows the consistency of a grade-over-grade progression in a textbook series benefits students.

“I’m very skeptical of teachers creating their own textbook material,” he said.

But that is exactly what teachers had to do.

To help fill the void, dozens of nonprofit websites, including PBS Kids and Edutopia, offer free materials for teacher and parents. The American Federation of Teachers developed banks of resources under Share My Lesson.

Modesto City Schools pulled its own materials together initially, using the district’s in-house print shop to produce math workbooks – about 1,800 copies of each, per grade – as it launched Common Core in 2014-15. It uses Engage NY and Mathematics Vision Project, both free online curriculum with for-sale training and printed materials.

Engage NY, with its spinoff, Eureka Math, remains the fifth-most used curriculum nationwide, Polikoff has found.

Not until 2014 did California adopt a list of approved math texts, and districts are buying again. But few teachers appear to have returned to the textbook lock-step of old.

The Merced Union High math teachers pulled together their own courses in 2011-12, said Gonzalez, now an associate principal at El Capitan High in Merced.

“They said, ‘Give us examples. Give us samples!’ But there was really nothing out there,” he said. The Merced district used only teacher-curated curriculum until buying textbooks this year.

While the Merced teachers volunteered to take on the job, he said, it was going above and beyond.

“Teachers aren’t necessarily curriculum writers,” Gonzalez said. “If all they were doing is developing curriculum – but to be teaching at the same time? That’s a lot.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2016 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Where were the textbooks?."