@bay:
You are missing the point entirely. It isn’t that Illinois law requires them to use “Texas textbooks”, it is that thanks to the fact that Texas buys textbooks at the state level and because this is such large purchasing power, that textbook publishers write the books to meet Texas’s approval, and that is the problem. Textbook companies publishing traditional books cannot afford to make custom additions, so they try and create textbooks that will sell widely, and to do so they write them looking at a state like Texas because they buy so many books. It is kind of like in the auto industry, because California is such a large car market, when California passed strict emission standards cars companies within a couple of years basically adopted the california model as the all 50 state mode, so what California wanted said what you could buy elsewhere (it is a rough analogy, but it does apply).
No, School districts don’t have to use the books the Texas BOE approve, but get this:
“Texas originally acquired its power over the nation’s textbook supply because it paid 100 percent of the cost of all public school textbooks, as long as the books in question came from a very short list of board-approved options. The selection process “was grueling and tension-filled,” said Julie McGee, who worked at high levels in several publishing houses before her retirement. “If you didn’t get listed by the state, you got nothing.” On the other side of the coin, David Anderson, who once sold textbooks in the state, said that if a book made the list, even a fairly mediocre salesperson could count on doing pretty well. The books on the Texas list were likely to be mass-produced by the publisher in anticipation of those sales, so other states liked to buy them and take advantage of the economies of scale.”
So in other words, if you want the state to pay for them, you needed to choose what was on their list…and what school district is going to pay for books they can get for free? Among other things, Texas has had curricula that totally omitted talking about the New Deal and its impact on American History, promoted the idea that income taxes were against the Will of God, and also claimed that the NRA had significant impact on the growth of Modern America (really? The NRA developed the internet, the semiconductor, computers, modern medicine, and so forth? Didn’t know that).
The point isn’t that other states mandating buying 'Texas books", it is that to maximize profits, publishers write books that make Texas happy. I know someone who worked in the industry, and they said Houghton Mifflin actually came out with a biology book that said that evolution was a best guess as how life evolved but that there were other theories about how it happened,but when samples of the book were passed around they got such negative feedback from everywhere but the bible belt that they never produced it (evolution is not a ‘best guess’, it is not a guess, and other ‘theories’ about how life came to be are religious dogma, not science).
The good news is that hopefully, soon, textbooks, physical books, might go the way of the dodo bird, more and more are being done electronically, which is great, because electronic matter can be differentiated a lot easier and cheaply then real books, for obvious reasons.
From what I can tell, like in most places, the people who make up the BOE are elected in weird ways, so you end up with fundamentalist Christians running the show, add up some rich 'Christians" and elections done in the middle of nothing and so forth, and this is what you get. Personally, I blame colleges for this, when states do thing like ban evolution, like Kansas did, the easy answer to this kind of bowdlerizing of textbooks and curricula would be to say we don’t feel students from that state public schools meet our standards, and won’t be considered. When the religious right and the idiot farmers passed the law in Kansas taking evolution out of the curricula, parents who had ambitions for their kids realized how stupid it made their kids seem and quickly moved to change the state school board and overturn the decision.