I am so pleased that finally a strong conservative voice of reason has emerged on this debate. Reading several posts from our more “esteemed” conservative and GOP party elders, one would think this was 1955. Do these folks even know what the “Internets” is? Apparently in addition their lack of appreciation about how children learn today (guess what? It’s different from the way we learned), they have a myopic view of where Texas is not only in the nation, but the world. Do you know what’s happening in China, India, and Brazil??

Thank you Mr. Sullivan for bringing some sanity to this debate. I was getting ready to renounce my conservative convictions.

Let me echo that other comment--yours is a sense of balance and calm in a storm of fear artificially created by a minority few with clearly only special or limited interests to protect. I've long viewed this as a good conservative bill as it went through the legislative process. The local control aspect alone should be something we can all cheer for. Thanks, MQS for a more calm, reasoned and balanced look at this issue.

So glad to see you sounding off! The anti-technology nonsense from "conservatives" give the rest of us a bad name. They might as well oppose color TV. Wonder if they opposed the introduction of A/C into public buildings, or police officers carrying radios, too?

As a 25-year public school teacher, who loves liberty and supports more education choices and even vouchers (gasp, yes, there are a few of us!), I just cringe when I hear people suggesting we shouldn't have e-textbooks in the schools. I cannot tell you the number of errors in texts I have had to annually warn kids against -- the kinds of things that could easily be fixed with an e-reader. In the real world, as Sullivan writes, everyone is moving away from old-style books. Like it or not, it's reality.

My love is for learning, and instilling that love in others, not in printing presses or (as Mr. Sullivan writes) institutions.

HB 4294 is not about technology. Under current law, publishers can and do submit materials in electronic form. It is about two things: taking a hatchet to the conservative State Board of Education and allowing textbook dollars to buy hardware. Here's the catch: the textbook budget probably is insufficent to develop both the content districts want and the hardware that the lobby pushing this bill wants them to buy. Therefore, in two to four years, the same computer lobbyists that are pushing this bill will likely come back to the Legislature and tell lawmakers that are kids will be luddites and behind the times if the technology and instructional materials budget isn't raised dramatically. Are you prepared to endorse raising the margin tax to 1.5 percent so that school districts can buy all the latest gadgets? Didn't think so.

You argue that "Rather than clinging to a selection process for pulp-based books, the SBOE should be ensuring our dollars are used to achieve academic success and providing the benchmarks to measure effectiveness."

Here's the problem: Bill Ratliff and Paul Sadler stripped that authority away from the board in 1995. The Commissioner of Education dictates the content of BOTH the state's accountability system and the state testing system. The board has no authority even to require disclosure, much less rate a district unacceptable or raise standards on state exams.

Furthermore, successive commissioners starting with Mike Moses and continuing to the present have turned the Texas Accountability System into a bad joke. The superintendents basically dictate very low standards so they can go tell their taxpayers how wonderful everything is when they want more money. It is gotten slightly better under Robert Scott, but it is still a serious problem.

You further state that: "In fact, that's what some of HB4294 does -- it gives the SBOE more oversight for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the stuff kids are required to learn. Under the new law, districts would have to certify that their textbooks, electronic textbooks and other instructional materials for core subjects, at each grade level, cover all elements of the TEKS adopted by the SBOE. This requirement does not exist today."

The problem with this language is there is no mechanism for its enforcement. Let me repeat: this clause gives the board NO ADDITIONAL ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY. In 1999, the Plano Independent School District board and superintendent rammed fuzzy math down the throats of Plano ISD parents. A group of parents wrote to then-Commissioner Mike Moses noting that the fuzzy math book Connected Math does not contain all of the curriculum. The school district said it would supplement the book with its own materials, and Moses took their word for it and didn't do anything. That clause is absolutely meaningless because there is no mechanism for parent or board enforcement.

Bottom line -- HB 4294 will result in lots of money going to computer hardware manufacturers with no standards for what kids should learn about computers in return. The SBOE clings to textbook selection authority because its the only way it can ensure that its curriculum actually shows up in classrooms, since the appointed commissioner designs both the tests and the accountability system.

You state that local voters will hold school boards accountable if they adopt poor e-textbooks. These non-partisan local elections are more like popularity contests than about issues, more akin to a high school election than anything else. And that's if they're opposed, as many of the school board members run unopposed. It's also really hard to go "negative" on an issue like textbooks in a local non-partisan race without looking like a jerk; most of the time the local yahoo voted for it because the local yahoo superintendent told him to because he liked the rep from ABC Textbook Company the best, or worse the Marxist curriculum coordinator recommended it. Nonpartisan popularity contests make it easy for liberals to hide.

I think what this comes down to is as a libertarian, you believe the market will address these issues, but at the local level we have a market failure, because 1) it's not really a market (locally elected yahoos spending other people's money to buy state-regulated books issued by textbook companies who receive their revenue at the public trough) and 2) the educrats are in control, as most school board members blindly follow the superintendent and their curriculum recommendations. So the effect of this bill is to allow superintendents and the educrats pick textbooks to buy with taxpayer money instead of the SBOE picking textbooks with taxpayer money. They'll "certify" whatever textbook the superintendent tells them to certify.

The public schools are such a convoluted mess that what you may not consider is that the second-least-worst solution (other than abolishing them altogether) is to give control of the curriculum and textbooks to a statewide-elected partisan board with a mandate from the saving conservative remnant of the state who can override the local yahoos who are too easily swayed by superintendents with their Cracker-Jack-box educational "doctorates" and the local textbook rep.

This is what I've seen in the real world in a district that voted 85% for McCain over Obama.

The Luddite element is somewhat reactionary, I agree, but the point is the lack of SBOE control. The SBOE actually governs as conservatives and it's curious you would support a bill that takes away their power and gives it to the unelected commissioner. You can't say you like a certain element of a bill and ignore the other necessary consequences of it. You can't say "well it would work if we corrected A, B and C and we should do that instead of opposing this bill". The real world doesn't work that way: you know how hard it is to change any law. You should never justify a law by saying let's support it even though it's worse for now and then change other laws later to make it better.

In politics and medicine: FIRST DO NO HARM.

Just when I was about to give up hope on conservatives, this piece hits my e-mail box from a friend. The Republican SBOE members have been flooding me with such nonsense that this was a welcome reprieve. Too many Republicans on the SBOE seem to want public education kept in 1957. That doesn't serve our kids, or our state, very well. If the SBOE cannot keep up with the times and the tools, we need to ditch the SBOE.