A small policy change adopted today in Florida has the potential to unleash significant changes in early elementary classrooms and school budgets all across the country. Florida's state legislature today decided to approve FreeReading.Net, the nation's first open-source, free, and on-line textbook materials provider. The website's resources will be approved for a limited number of Florida students next year, as a supplemental reading program for grades K-3.

While it is a comparatively small development from the perspective of the number of students affected, the willingness of the state legislature to break free of a textbook publisher dominated system of classroom materials production signals possibly profound changes in the years to come. Experts estimate that schools spend between $5 billion and $8 billion a year on textbooks and materials, money which could be well-used in other instructional capacities such as teacher quality enhancement.

The challenges faced particularly by low-income urban and rural school districts in purchasing enough up-to-date textbooks is well chronicled in America. One South Carolina school built in the 1890s that was featured in the powerful movie, the Corridor of Shame, had textbooks which boasted that man might, at some point, even be able to fly to the moon. To be able to free up much needed resources for these schools to spend on teachers and capital enhancements instead of on textbooks could be very helpful. Moreover, the benefit of open-source texts is that they are continually renewing and improving, eliminating the need of buying updated editions of books.

The schools that could, in the future, benefit most from a switch to online, open-source texts are the new schools that are just being built and opened. For these schools, the initial capital investment needed to purchase books for students can be overwhemling. My school in St. Louis, for instance, had to purchase reading, writing, science, math, and social studies books for 300 students. At a cost of $150 per book (plus supplemental resources), the total price tag would have exceeded $200,000 dollars out of an annual school budget of less than $2 million in state funding. The school decided instead to purchase just a class set of each book, which has caused parent and student critiques of its own.

What are the possible weaknesses of a move towards open-source and online texts? Probably the major one is that it might exacerbate the existing digital divide between students who have the internet at home and those who do not. Between one quarter and one half of my students do not have internet access at home, so to ask all students to access their textbooks online would cause them some problems. This isn't a deal-breaker for the open source text as a whole, though--since it's no different than having only a class set of textbooks as we do now anyway. Another drawback would be one of a political nature -- textbook publishers are not likely to approve of the change since they are the big losers in the end. But let me offer a "visionary" idea to any textbook publishing execs out there: instead of fighting something that seems to be good for kids, why not use your existing knowledge and resource competitive advantage to transition your current and future materials to the web, and change your profit engine to online advertising??