Who's responsible for rotten schools? Round up the usual suspects: Lazy teachers and the unions thatprotect them, incompetent administrators, spoiled students, clueless parents, unscrupulous businesses. Businesses? Wait a minute. Aren't businesspeople the good guys, victims of a dismal school system thatfails to send them competent employees? Well, not always.

In "The Great American Textbook Scandal," an article appearing in a recent issue of Forbes Magazine, David McClintick addresses the issue of sleazy practices in the textbook industry.

McClintick begins by describing the shock that physicist, Silicon Valley tycoon and public schoolvolunteer Leonard Trameil experienced upon viewing Prentice Hall's astronomy textbook, Exploring the Universe. He discovered three errors on a single page, and went on to find dozens in the entire book. The article goes on to cite many other examples.

This is hardly news to us teachers. We are used to finding mistakes in our textbooks, from mere misspellings and typos to major factual errors. The worst among my recollection were revelations that fresh water freezes at zero degrees Fahrenheit, that World War II ended after President Truman ordered atomic bombs dropped on Korea, and that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamationin 1963. In response to the last, one acquaintance unhelpfully told a black friend that his family had cheated some cotton planter out of a century of work.

Sometimes problems with textbooks include more than mere sloppiness. In fact, textbook publishers' promotional methods sometimes border on fraud. Two years ago, for example, salespeople for a major publisher made the claim that, since their company was involved in producing the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the test used to evaluated Texas students and schools, only their textbooks were truly aligned to the test.

A few years ago a major textbook publisher produced for use by Texas schools an English-as-a-second-language ("ESL") textbook that was in reality little more that a recycled, ordinary reading text. Although the passages in the book were originally written for native speakers of English, a teachers' manual provided techniques to adapt them for English learners. The publisher shrewdly selected college professors from several different sections of Texas to contribute to this manual. The sales pitch was then, "Why, Professor ______ from the local university contributed to this text." The clincher was the zinger that worked so well in television commercials for Pace Picante Sauce." The other publisher's textbook was written, I believe, in New York City!"

It was obvious from both the inappropriateness of the selections and the low quality of the teachers' manual that the publisher had been more concerned with buying the endorsements of contributors than with producing a decent ESL textbook.

Shady business practices in dealing with schools are of course not limited to textbook publishers. In my experience, computer companies, among others, have also done more than their share to rip off taxpayers.

In 1991 my district bought a network of sixteen computers with 8086 processors, sans hard drives. The entry-level computer at that time was the 386, available in stores from about $1700, including a thirty meg hard drive. One could still find a few 286's in computer stores, but 8086's could only be found in clearance stores, flea markets, and at close-out auctions. Nevertheless, our school district paid about $2000 per unit.

When a teacher expressed concern that the 8086 processors would be too weak, the salesperson liedthat it was only the speed of the file server, not that of the stations, that mattered. When anotherrequested 1.44 meg floppy drives, the company agreed to provide them, only to later replace them with 720k drives after we discovered that the 1.44's would not work with an 8086 processor.

The computer purchase was intended for use instructing recent immigrants who were only beginning to speak English. The software package, however, was a generic language arts package written for native speakers. After I explained to my principal that I had little use for such a system, he explained that, since our superiors were sold on the system, we had to take the package as it was, overpriced and loaded with software that was of little use. The principal offered to find me $7000 for additional software, and there were a number of quality ESL programs on the market, but I had to pass on the best because our new computers were not powerful enough to run them.

While calling around the computer company trying to get information that our paid trainers should have provided, I was told by a technician that the company hadn't sold computers with 8086 processors in some time. When I told him the product name and model number, he replied, "We only sell that model to schools." I sincerely hope that his company someday bankrupts beneath the weight of an inadequately trained workforce.

Such abuses no doubt continue. A fool and his money are soon parted, but a fool with the taxpayers' money is a salesman's dream. Nevertheless, it should behoove all of us, employees and vendors alike, to put selfish interest aside in dealing with institutions as important as our schools. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, this is one group of suckers who should be given an even break.

Jerry Jesness is a special education teacher in a south Texas elementary school. His email address is: jjesness@hiline.net

Are unscrupulous businesses to blame for "rotten schools"? Are textbook manufacturers and computer companies guilty of "shady practices" when dealing with schools? Who should be held responsible when public education funds are wasted?