The Extraction: How the Curriculum Cartel Drains Your Town Every Year
Fourth in the series. Post 1 counted the spending that never reached the scores. Post 2 opened the black box. Post 3 named the buyers. This one follows the money out of your community, and asks what your town could do with it instead.
Every year, in every school district in America, a quiet transaction happens. Local tax dollars, collected from local property owners and local businesses, are sent to a handful of distant corporations for textbooks, workbooks, licenses, and subscriptions. The money does not come back. It pays for headquarters in Boston, Columbus, and London. It pays private equity distributions in New York. It pays lobbying operations in Washington and state capitols.
Your town gets the workbook. The workbook gets used for nine weeks and recycled.
Let's put a number on the outflow.
America's public schools spent $747.6 billion in 2021-22, rising past $794 billion by 2023-24 (NCES, Digest Table 236.15). Inside that figure sits a recurring materials bill that almost nobody in your town ever sees itemized:
- The supplemental materials market (workbooks, packets, practice subscriptions) was $3.8 billion in 2020 and was forecast to reach $4.6 billion by 2024, now headlined at $5 billion (Simba Information)
- Math alone is a multi-billion-dollar materials market heading to $3.3 billion by 2030 (Simba Information, 2025). Roughly $66 per student per year, before reading, science, assessments, and the subscription layer
- Single contracts dwarf the imagination: Los Angeles signed a $20 million, five-year deal for one product. Anchorage signed $6.75 million over seven years
Now zoom in. Every one of those dollars originated somewhere specific. It came from the mill levy on the house with the swing set in the yard. It came from the hardware store on Main Street. It came from the paycheck of the parent who teaches at the junior high. And it left. To Boston. To Columbus. To London. To a fund administrator in New York.
That is the extraction. It happens annually, it is automatic, and it is defended at every school board meeting by the phrase "research-based."
Which brings us to the receipts.
The machinery that keeps it running
This outflow is not a free market. It is a managed market, and it is managed in favor of the sellers.
The gate: textbook publishing is "a business primarily aimed at large states." Texas sets curricula for more than 1,000 districts through one agency and approves what can be purchased; the big books are literally customized for California and Texas. If you get adopted there, you get the nation. If you do not, you do not exist.
The lobby: the industry's trade association "use[s] the School Division of the Association of American Publishers to lobby state selection committees in large adoption states to obtain lucrative markets" (Sewall, 2005). Your district has a lobbyist working the committee that decides what your teachers are allowed to buy. You are not in that room.
The moat: one basal textbook program costs $15 to $40 million and years to produce, at margins around 10 percent. No startup can enter at that price, which means every year the cartel runs, the number of alternatives shrinks, and the founders of every real competitor end up selling or folding.
The games: bundles with dozens of ISBNs per book fragment the used market; anti-bundling bills got lobbied full of loopholes; authors were replaced with writing-for-hire teams; and by 2005 the industry's own analysts concluded the big publishers were "no longer involved in deciding the content of textbooks." The content is compliance output. It exists to pass the adoption committee, not to teach your child.
And what did the extraction buy?
This is the part that should end the argument. Across the entire consolidation era, the achievement line went flat. Post 1: +7 points on a 500-point scale in forty-five years, minus the 14-point fall from the 2012 peak. The five biggest publishing consolidations in American history did not bring down costs, did not produce measurable learning gains, and did not survive their own debt structures without changing hands five times in twenty years.
But here is the experiment the cartel would rather you never hear about.
In 2018, economists ran a randomized trial where middle-school math teachers were simply given access to high-quality, off-the-shelf lessons. That was the whole intervention. No new platform. No adoption committee. No multi-year contract. The results: student math achievement rose 0.06 standard deviations, and 0.09 when teachers got light support to use the materials. The gains were largest for the weakest teachers. The authors' conclusion: this approach is "more scalable and cost effective than most policies aimed at improving teacher quality" (Jackson and Makarin, 2018, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy).
Read that against the record. The consolidated empires have no randomized trials at all (post 2). The cheap, boring intervention, good lessons, handed to teachers, has experimental evidence and it works best exactly where children need it most. The extraction is not only draining your town. It is unnecessary. The thing that works is small, cheap, and local by design.
What would your town do with the money?
I will not pretend to a precise multiplier I cannot source. But the question itself is honest, and the direction is not in doubt. Every dollar kept in the district is a dollar available for the things with actual evidence behind them: the teacher who knows your kid getting paid like a professional. A local print shop printing next month's lessons. A tutoring program at the library. A parent at the kitchen table with real materials in her hands instead of a login screen.
That is not a fantasy economy. It is the model we build at Math Success: research-backed math instruction, printable materials, and teacher knowledge that go directly to teachers and parents. No adoption committee. No licensing ladder. No headquarters skimming the top. The materials the evidence says work are the materials we make, and they land where the child is.
The cartel counts on you never doing the arithmetic. So do it. Pull your district's curriculum budget. Divide by enrollment. Then ask one question at the next board meeting: what did we get, and where did the money go?
The benefit was never measurable. The outflow is.
Do the math. Follow the money.
Sources
- NCES, Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 236.15 (public K-12 current expenditures: $747.6B 2021-22, $794.5B 2023-24)
- Simba Information (Freedonia Group), K-12 Supplemental Materials Market reports ($3.8B 2020, $4.6B forecast 2024, $5B headline)
- Simba Information, K-12 Mathematics Market Survey Report 2025 (math instructional materials toward $3.3B by 2030)
- Jackson, C.K. and Makarin, A., "Can Online Off-the-Shelf Lessons Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2018); NBER Working Paper 22398 (+0.06/+0.09 SD; largest gains for weaker teachers; scalability and cost-effectiveness conclusion)
- Sewall, G.T. (2005) and Sewall/Cannon (1991), in ERIC ED498713 (AAP School Division lobbying of state adoption committees; $15-40M basal barrier; content homogenization; writing-for-hire shift)
- Wikipedia, Textbook (adoption-state gatekeeping; Texas TEA 1,000+ districts; California and Texas customization; bundling and ISBN fragmentation; anti-bundling loopholes)
- NBC News, May 12, 2026 (LAUSD $20M/5-year i-Ready contract; audit vote); Anchorage $6.75M/7-year contract (same report)
- NAEP Long-Term Trend 2023 (achievement trend across the consolidation era; nationsreportcard.gov)
Every figure above traces to a public source. Corrections with sources are welcome and will be noted.