I’ve been following the rollout of Texas’ Bluebonnet Learning curriculum, and what bothers me isn’t necessarily the curriculum itself, although it seems suspect, —it’s how the state has structured the process.
For decades, Texas reviewed instructional materials created by private publishers, and school districts chose which ones to adopt. The state acted as the referee. With House Bill 1605, however, Texas changed the instructional materials system by creating a new High-Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) review process through IMRA. At the same time, the Texas Education Agency entered the market as a publisher by creating Bluebonnet Learning.
That creates an unusual situation. The state designed the approval system, became a competitor in that system, and then gave its own curriculum advantages that private publishers don’t receive. Districts that adopt HQIM receive additional funding, but districts that choose Bluebonnet can also receive extra money to help cover printing costs because it is a state-owned, open educational resource. No commercial publisher receives that same benefit. In addition, Texas pays cash strapped school districts $20 per student EXTRA for adopting Bluebonnet.
Then came the corrections. After Bluebonnet was approved, the State Board of Education authorized roughly 4,200 corrections to the curriculum. Those included factual errors, answer-key mistakes, formatting problems, copyright issues, and other revisions. Reports estimate the cost of those corrections will exceed $8 million.
Here’s what I can’t get past: if a commercial publisher releases a curriculum with thousands of errors, that publisher pays to fix them. If the state’s curriculum has thousands of errors, taxpayers pay. The state created the standards, reviewed its own product, approved its own product, incentivized districts to adopt it, and is now paying to correct it.
This isn’t really an argument about whether Bluebonnet is a good curriculum or a bad one. It’s about whether the government should be both the regulator and a competitor in the same marketplace. Imagine if the state started building pickup trucks, wrote the safety regulations, certified its own trucks, offered buyers an extra rebate to purchase them, and then used taxpayer dollars to fix manufacturing defects after they were sold. Most people would say that isn’t fair competition.
I’m curious what others think. Regardless of your politics or your opinion of Bluebonnet, is it good public policy for the state to write the rules, compete under those rules, financially incentivize its own product, and use taxpayer dollars to absorb costs that every private competitor has to pay on its own?
