Because its cheaper to just create a book that includes all the rubbish Texas wants and force everyone else to buy it, too.

Successful?

The whole point of the Tea Party is to be un-successful. They want to be part of government so that they can do nothing, and prevent others from doing anything. To date, they haven't really accomplished much of anything, other than passing some pretty offensive local laws. In national government, they've mostly only managed to keep the government from doing anything of value.

If that's success, then its a success I don't ever want to emulate.

Clearly you don't live anywhere near DC.

I used to work in DC (Dupont Circle) and I'd see people going off to protests all the time. I probably saw a protest every other month. There were protests at the White House on a nearly daily basis. If something important was happening (WTO, UN talks, some diplomatic visit) there might be a few protests in a day.

The number of people arrested would be minimal. For the daily protests, it was rare for anyone to be arrested. Only the really large protests got arrests, and only for doing blatantly disruptive or dangerous stuff. Yeah, some people got arrested during some of the WTO talks for "expressing their displeasure with US trade policy" However, I don't have much sympathy when they expressed their displeasure by starting a tire fire on a parkway used primarily by non-governmental commuters.

Yeah, I'm not surprised that some Anonymous people got arrested for their protest. They were protesting... something, and decided that a good way to make their point was to block up traffic consisting mostly of non-governmental people just trying to get home to their families. DC police and the park service are very experienced in handling protests. If you want to protest, they will actually help you. But you don't get to be unsafe. You don't get to threaten the safety of other people, and you don't get to block up traffic just to draw attention to yourself.

I think you misunderstand the scope, here.

While I respect Feynman, and I don't doubt the honesty of his report, again: That high profile anecdote is very, very far from the standard experience. The experience I related happened in a decent (Top 100 or so) middle school. The books were presented to the teachers in... a cardboard box. I think there might have been priority shipping. Committee meetings were held during lunch or after school while they all wished they were somewhere else. Teachers examined the books at night in their own homes (while not getting paid). They never saw a single representative from the publishers. There were no lunches. No one from any company ever even talked to them. There were apparently some emails and maybe a phone call or two to some district clerk. I'm confident in saying there was no bribery because there no opportunity. This idea people have in their head that these things are always political and that some smooth-talking corporate shill is around to wine and dine teachers is straight out of people's imagination. I'm sure it does happen in some rare cases, but to think that even a majority of the high-profile districts experience that? You've got to be living in TV Land.

This is the point. If you're not a high profile district in California, New York or Texas, the publishers don't care about you. At the same time, the selection is pretty much done by normal teachers looking at the books and trying to find something that includes the most useful stuff and the least blatantly racist or outright incorrect information.

No, actually we can't.

Various lobby groups (primarily conservative, but that could easily be coincidental) have created laws that prevent the tracking of individual students. They're scores can only be analyzed in aggregate, and the aggregates are largely useless because they are effectively randomized from one grade the next. Furthermore, you can't track the number of special education students. Or the number of students who are still learning English. Or the students who recently transferred. Or students who were away from school for a significant period of time. All of these things must be ignored, according to the law. And you can't even blame the teachers. These are the rules put in place by politicians based on the demands of parents.

Of course, this doesn't stop politicians and administrators from using those numbers in coming up with various conclusions. Example: "Teacher A had a 3% drop in test scores this year. We should sanction them." Nevermind that the margin of error is 5%. Or that two student were sick the day of the test or that the entire class had 5% more non-native English speakers. Ignore the fact that you made laws to ensure that the statistics were useless, but you them anyway. I'd like to say that this is caused by politicians and administrators who are clueless in statistics --and that's largely true-- but I no longer believe that is the biggest problem.

Its because its not about actually finding the truth. It's about numbers and doing whatever we can to raise those numbers so we can claim that the USA is the best.

Some additional information:

1. You don't get a 2 month vacation. Its more accurately a 2 month furlough. How come when steel workers or some weapons contractor is forced to take a 2 week furlough, its a horrible tragedy, but when teachers don't get paid for two months (and often continue to do work), it's called "vacation"? Beyond that, they get the same days off that other government workers get off, fewer days than banks do, and usually only 2-4 other days to take off at their discretion. It's probably the worst vacation plan you can get with a Masters degree.
2. Until you build up some seniority, schools actually have some of the highest chance of layoffs among university-degree positions. Often the layoffs are simply fire-then-rehire-elsewhere, but its as disruptive as getting laid off at some financial office and having to go somewhere else.
3. Many states prevent exactly the sort of union activities that people here pretend are endemic. A number of states outlaw them outright. Many more allow them, but leave them utterly toothless.
4. Even if your state allows unions, they're hardly ironclad protection against firing. People act like teachers never get fired, yet I've seen loads of it. Of course, in many cases it is "hidden" by statements like "Teacher X moved to a different career" or "Teacher X transferred to another district".
5. The Ontario school district is not at all characteristic of the school districts in the rest of Canada, much less the US. It's actually the exception. Most teachers here pay more for health insurance than I do (and my insurance isn't impressive) and have no retirement plan at all. Also, remember that the top end of teacher salaries are usually for Ph.D's with post-doc university credits. For that level of education, the pay is actually rather low.

"Teacher Opinion" might be a little misleading. It's not really bribes like the OP suggested, but the reality is somewhere in the middle.

I've known a number of teachers who were part of textbook selection committees. The shortest one I remember was a six-month process. The last one I heard about was a ten month process (the entire school year) and involved looking at two dozen books, narrowing the field and requesting full materials on just five, and some back-and-forth on supplying samples of online/digital materials (many of which were still being produced).

Were any of the teachers bribed? No. Did any of them get free material? Nope. Did any of the administrators get any... perks? Can't say. I'd assume not. That said, the process was not purely based on the selecting the best book. Instead, it was based on picking the least-bad book. The books being examined were history books and every last one of them showed a bias toward a some group. For example, one of the books spent an entire chapter on the history of Texas. Texas is big and all, and it's story is interesting, but I don't think it warrants more pages than the settling of the (rest of the) West, or industrialization or World War I (!!!). However, Texas buys a lot of books, so books are written to appeal to Texans, even to the point of including pseudo-factual propaganda about how special and cool Texas is.

So, no bribes that I know of... except for the fact that all the major developers pander to a few select parts of the country.

Sadly, I believe you'll find that --as far as education is involved-- Slashdot is not a place that welcomes people with experience. Instead, people are valued for uninformed opinions and political stances based on anecdotal experience. To them, it is better to punish a hundred people (teachers) because one of them annoyed them ten years ago than try to actually try to analyze the problems.

If someone posted on a story saying "I'm a restaurant waiter and I think we need to seriously look at adding some restrictions on the Open Source system" they would get 800 comments laughing at them for talking about something they know nothing about. But say: "I'm a coder with self-diagnosed Aspergers and people should listen to what I have to say about the education system" and somehow its considered "informative".

They don't care about your experience. They don't care about logic. The vocal minority (I hope) here simply thinks that their limited experience is both typical and sufficient for them to draw conclusions about a diverse system spread across a country.

Hey, quit injecting your facts and experience into their wild speculation.

Most of those people are idiots looking for a reason to hate Medicare/Medicaid/Any-Service-That-Doesn't-Help-Them.

The truth is that the abusers are a tiny minority, and the amount of money they scam from the system is utterly dwarfed by the amount of money scammed from the government/other-citizens by our national heroes in the finance industry. Suggest policing healthcare programs and you're a responsible citizen fighting corruption. Suggest policing the Fed or investment companies and you're a filthy hippie who hates freedom.

I get that, and my comment wasn't so much aimed at you as that one small aspect of your post. I don't want to diminish your point: Yes, even intelligent parents have trouble being rational. People who start with poor education or poor critical thinking are pretty much doomed, and while I might lament the fact, I'm not surprised that they trust TV "journalism" with its simple words and friendly presentation over scientists with their complex messages and discomfort with ten-second explanations.

My point is tangential: Parents need to realize they're being irrational (like you do) and fight it. This irrational behavior is more risky for parents and children. It's actually counter-productive. That's why I said I wasn't trying to criticize you. I was simply using you as a gentle example.

And I'll thank you for not using the "If you had children you'd understand..." argument. I'm tired of my arguments being ignored because I'm being rational and unbiased.

I get that a lot. It's very annoying.

I think my biggest fear about becoming a parent is the sudden loss of rationality and ability to intelligently analyze anything that involves children. I like using my brain, but it seems that once you have children, you get free rein to stop using it and make snap decisions based on shallow criteria and can just flash you Parenthood card to avoid having anyone ever question you.

Okay, I realize that's harsh and that's part of the point. Not all parents act like this. I'd like to say that most parents don't, because my problem is with the few that do and all the problems they cause for the rest. Yes, I'm sure being a parent is stressful, but as I tried to point out, these stressed decisions that parents are making are often worse for their children. It's not about being selfish or being uncertain, it's about some parents' failure to actually act in their children's best interest because they (seemingly) willingly refuse to act rationally.

There was a parent here, on Slashdot, who publicly admitted that their daughter was a bad driver and had trouble keeping control of cars. His response? He bought her the biggest SUV he could (Expedition or similar), so that when she got in an accident, she would be more likely to live. Of course, actual statistics shows that average drivers are two to four times more likely to get in an accident if they are in an SUV, and SUVs only reduce the chance of fatal accidents by 75% over midsize cars, and considering that most SUV accidents are caused by their reduced maneuverability and stopping... what he actually did is keep his daughters chance of being in a fatal accident the same (being generous and calling her "average" in skill), while quadrupling (or more) the chance that she'd kill someone else in the almost inevitable event of an accident.

Yes, I know he was trying to keep her safe. Yes, I know he doesn't care about anyone's life but his precious daughter, whom he is compelled to protect by millions of years of instinct: The point here is that he and many other parents are making bad decisions. I'm fine with parents being protective... when they actually succeed, but this vaccine thing as well as numerous other examples show supposedly protective parents failing horribly due to an utter lack of rationality.

You want to protect your children? That's great. I want to protect them, too. Irrational decisions don't help that, and trying to bring up the "I'm scared about the responsibility I have" argument doesn't help either. Fear makes people make bad decisions. When parents use this, they are basically admitting that they are making bad decisions, and those bad decisions should be questioned and challenged.

I'm not trying to be insulting or confrontational here, but..

You're actually not being rational. You're obsessing over a syndrome that science has a hard time even defining. All the research seems to indicate multi-factor causes and multiple-path development toward the syndrome. You'd have more luck trying to avoid cancer. At least we recognize most of the mechanisms behind cancer. Cancer is also far more likely.

And that's an important point.

The reason I'm saying that you (and thousands of other parents) and being irrational is that you're worried about protecting your child from a very real risk with possibly severe side effects because of an extremely tiny risk of that treatment being one of the two dozen components which might trigger a syndrome. I could almost understand that tradeoff... if you hadn't driven your car to the clinic -- an action that is probably an order of magnitude more likely to kill your child than the shot is to give them autism.

I repeat this story often when this subject comes up, and I really need to spend some time to find the original article: There was a story about a school district where a parent had spotted a stranger near the school while students were going to buses after school. The school insisted that staff was keeping a close eye on students and offered to increase its presence in the area. A number of parents let their fears override their rationality, and began driving their kids to school instead of letting them take the bus. The more parents who stopped using the buses, the more that followed suit. After a month, the school sent out notices, begging parents to use the buses. Over the month, two children had been killed in car accidents, and two more injured. The stranger was never seen again, and there was never any evidence to suggest they were anything more than a coincidental passer-by. But in order to "save" their kids from an unsubstantiated, extremely rare threat, the parents willingly subjected them to an even greater threat, which had very real effects.

Dude, stop drinking the cheapest crap you can find.

News flash: It tastes like crap.

Good wine is very tasty. Microbrew beers (assuming you're from the US, considering you equate beer with piss) can be quite good.Tequila that you don't have to crawl on the floor to buy can be fairly smooth and good for flavoring meat. Vodka that doesn't come in a plastic bottle is more likely to have a clean, crisp flavor. I will often have wine/beer with a meal because it makes everything taste better. Of course, that requires that you not shop for the cheapest swill that some convenience store is willing to sell you. This shouldn't be shocking: Really cheap meat is crap. Cheap cheese isn't even cheese. Cheap bread has no flavor. Cheap fruit is often bland and far from ripe.

Of course, that lesson isn't likely to make a difference. People buying cheap alcohol are usually alcoholics, college students, idiots, or some permutation of the three.