The Basal Conspiracy

By Susan Harman

The publishers of elementary school reading textbooks--the heavy, several-hundred-page "basal readers'' and their accompanying workbooks, work sheets, and other paraphernalia--are engaged in what amounts to a conspiracy to deprive the nation's schools of quality education.

The K-8 reading-instruction market is worth half a billion dollars a year. The big five sharers of this lucrative market are Macmillan/ McGraw-Hill School Publishing Co. (which owns Merrill, SRA, and Barnell Loft, which all publish basals); Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (which owns Holt Rinehart & Winston and the Psychological Corp.); Silver Burdett/Ginn; Houghton Mifflin (which owns Riverside); and Scholastic. Although Scholastic is the fourth largest of these suppliers of elementary school materials, at the moment it does not publish a basal. However, Scholastic has one foot in that market with a teachers' guide that "basalizes'' the children's literature--real books-- the company is famous for publishing, and its other foot is rumored to be poised over a basal of its own.

Whole city and county school districts, and even some states, adopt basal series for their entire districts and keep them for many years, because having once invested in a particular series, it makes fiscal sense to keep on buying the workbooks and other "consumables'' that come with it, year after year. So, the choice of a basal program has a serious financial impact on both the school district...