Amy Laitinen raises an issue that should be of particular interest to conservatives and libertarians. Under the leadership of Hal Plotkin, the Departments of Labor and Education have been collaborating to make all taxpayer-funded online educational resources freely available to all comers. The idea is that if Uncle Sam pays for these resources, everyone should be able to use them, from the unemployed to for-profit businesses that want to improve on them to homeschoolers. Kevin Carey described the possibilities back in May:
The $2-billion Labor-Education project could transport the open-resource movement to a new level of prominence. Because the materials will be developed under the auspices of a federal-government competition, they will carry an assumed mark of quality absent from random lectures posted on YouTube. The departments also plan to organize the materials so that educators can search and shape them into rational sequences of learning. Private companies will be able to repackage, improve upon, and sell the materials they like, as long as they acknowledge the original developers.
Now, however, there has been a counterattack in a proposed House FY12 Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations bill, as Laitinen explains:
SEC. 124. None of the funds made available by this Act for the Department of Labor may be used to develop new courses, modules, learning materials, or projects in carrying out education or career job training grant programs unless the Secretary of Labor certifies, after a comprehensive market-based analysis, that such courses, modules, learning materials, or projects are not otherwise available for purchase or licensing in the marketplace or under development for students who require them to participate in such education or career job training grant programs.
As a believer in the potential of for-profit education, I’m not averse to the argument that the public sector shouldn’t simply duplicate what is already available in the private sector. That is reasonable. But that’s a bit like saying that Linux duplicates Windows 7 or Mac OS X. Open, free platforms are meaningfully different because they are far more accessible.
The idea here isn’t to rip off the textbook publishers that want to kill open educational resources. Rather, it is to provide people around the country, and around the world, with the basic building blocks they need to help themselves. The major textbook publishers, in contrast, would go out of business if it weren’t for large, subsidized public educational institutions that will pay almost any price for low-quality instructional materials because they’re not paying for them with their own money. By making a small investment in open educational resources, we can comfortably reduce the amount of money that flows into government purchases of other instructional materials by much more. That is the ultimate promise of the open-resource movement: it can save taxpayers money while delivering a higher quality of service.
To repeat: the textbook publishers might be “private,” but they depend on lucrative public sector contracts. That is why they pour money into lobbying public officials, many of whom they later hire to lobby their former colleagues. We’d be much better off supporting for-profit entrepreneurs who make money by improving the quality of instructional materials rather than by improving their ability to chisel more money out of taxpayers. They are not the same.
If I may I 'd like to point out the National Endowment for the Humanties a small independent federal agency has been developing open educational resources for over 14 years. The program which is completely accessible online is for K-12 humanties teachers and their students. Please take a look
External Link
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Salam:
As someone who has worked in higher education publishing for nearly twenty years, I found this claim of yours to be remarkable:
"The major textbook publishers, in contrast, would go out of business if it weren’t for large, subsidized public educational institutions that will pay almost any price for low-quality instructional materials because they’re not paying for them with their own money."
Now perhaps you intended this comment to only apply to the K-12 education market, and I admit that I am mostly unfamiliar with that market segment. If you are lumping higher education publishing in your assertion, however, I wonder by whose standard our materials are "low-quality"? Much of our developmental budget is used on soliciting feedback from classroom instructors across the country and making sure our final product has been peer-reviewed and found to be worthwhile by a large segment of the market. Contrast this with many open-education resources, which are often designed for niche markets or written around whatever trendy educational notions are being bandied about at the various graduate education departments in this country. Do you really think taxpayer money ought to go towards funding an open-education project centered around the idea that algebra can be learned without the student having to understand the Quadratic Formula? Which bureaucracy gets to decide which projects are worthy of the taxpayer dollar?
To the degree that K-12 educational publishing might have its quirks, much of that can be attributed to the fact that 50 different state legislatures seem to want 57 different things from educational materials. Can you imagine how hard it is to create a social studies book that satisfies both Massachusetts and Texas, or Wyoming and Vermont? Did you see that the California legislature recently required that the contributions of gays, lesbians, and transgenders be reflected in the curriculum? Don't you think that poses some challenges for K-12 publishers?
Honestly, Mr. Salam, your hostility towards educational publishers sounds more like something we would hear coming from the whiny college kids at Zuccotti Park than from a blog at National Review.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseReihan,
I think you are dead on here. As some one who is self educating rather than going back to school and taking on more debt, it's amazing the resources that are currently available, but I run into some frustrating gaps. It makes all the sense in the world to open source resources that tax money have already paid for.
The course lectures on Youtube provided by the UC system (and to a lesser extent Yale) are creating a tremendous resource for auto-didacts, especially for boilerplate freshman courses. How much money could be saved if motivated students could self educate and test out of Bio, Chem, Org Chem, MacroEconomics, MicroEconomics, Stats, etc. The lectures are there a lot of the supporting resources are not. (Though a lot are)
I do public health research as part of my job and I'm often surprised and frustrated that reports and studies that were paid for with public monies are often hidden behind paywalls.
One of the best roles government can play is to create this kind of infrastructure - these building blocks. It is one of the greatest contributions they can make to a citizenry that wants to author there own lives as you put it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat post.
I agree with this argument entirely.
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