Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has an ambitious plan to reduce the cost of education in California. He intends for the state to develop digital open source textbooks for high school math and science classes. The books will be available for free and will be used at public schools across the state.

Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009. Thomas will be collaborating with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the president of the State Board of Education.

The governator will surely be able to stop the digital textbooks from gaining sentience and subjugating humanity, but there are trickier challenges that will be even tougher to defeat than the impending Skynet apocalypse.

Public education is costly in California and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the state government's annual budget. The state's current financial woes have forced Schwarzenegger to search for ways to cut some of the fat out of school spending.

"As California's budget crisis continues we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services," said Governor Schwarzenegger in a statement. "California was built on innovation and I'm proud of our state's continued leadership in developing education technology. This first-in-the-nation initiative will reduce education costs, help encourage collaboration among school districts and help ensure every California student has access to a world-class education."

The idea of open source textbooks is not new, but this could be the first statewide initiative to put open content in classrooms. The state's high-profile adoption of freely available open source textbook material could compel other states to follow and adopt similar initiatives. There are, however, many unanswered questions about the plan and how it will be implemented.

The governator will surely be able to stop the digital textbooks from gaining sentience and subjugating humanity, but there are trickier challenges that will be even tougher to defeat than the impending Skynet apocalypse. Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome.

California's textbook troubles could be tough to overcome

Previous efforts to build open source textbooks for California by various independent organizations have largely been unsuccessful. One such attempt was made by an organization called the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) in 2002, which aimed to produce a digital K-12 history textbook under an open license in collaboration with the Wikibooks project. COSTP claimed that it could help California save over $200 million per year. The program never gained traction and failed to produce a complete textbook.

There is already plenty of textbook-ready material available on the Internet in the public domain or under open licenses, but the real challenge is compiling and editing it so that it will meet the state's exacting standards. California is known for having the most demanding textbook evaluation practices in the country, with publishers forced to go to extreme lengths to meet state requirements. The arduous review process is forcing some publishing companies to stop selling books in the state and is also a factor that has contributed significantly to the rising cost of K-12 textbooks in California.

Among the state's most controversial policies are those which require books to reflect society's diversity by including representative references to individuals of minority ethnicities. Critics say that these requirements are overly burdensome and have made political correctness a higher priority than quality in the textbook production and review process. The situation has raised some bizarre challenges for publishers. For example, some textbook publishing companies controversially enlist able-bodied children to pose in wheelchairs so that they have a sufficient number of pictures of "disabled" students to appease state textbook reviewers.

Now that the state is taking up the task of compiling textbook material itself, it will be forced to contend with its own labyrinthine mess of ambiguous and conflicting requirements. It's not a problem that one can simply crowd-source. The open textbook development process will likely be closely scrutinized by critics and advocates on both sides of California's divisive textbook standards debate.

These controversial issues are probably the reason why governor Schwarzenegger is currently limiting the effort to science and math rather than attempting to produce a complete suite of books across all subjects. California has faced volatile controversy over the manner in which the history of certain religious groups are depicted in textbooks approved by the state. One lawsuit over related textbook changes that were made in 2005 is still ongoing.

This also reflects the reasons why the traditional wiki approach is untenable for California teaching material. Individual changes to textbooks can become a source of fierce debate and there are a multitude of special interest groups battling over what the textbooks should say and how they should say it. It would take the concept of Wikipedia edit wars to a whole new level.

As a Californian who has watched for years with morbid fascination as the textbook battles play out in courtrooms, the media, and the state legislature, I'm a bit skeptical that Governor Schwarzenegger's open source textbook plan will get free books into classrooms in a timely and cost-effective manner. The idea of open source textbooks makes a lot of sense in principle and seems like a very worthwhile undertaking, but I fear that the state will incur some hidden costs while unwrapping its own red tape.

Listing image by Helen Cook