Textbooks

It's bad enough to pay thousands of dollars a year to send a child to college. But there's more: Many students and parents don't realize how much they'll also have to spend on textbooks. The cost of textbooks has soared in recent years, and many campuses now estimate that students will spend upward of $1,500 annually on course materials, according to the College Board. The expense is likely to hit particularly hard those attending low-cost community colleges, where the collective cost of textbooks often exceeds tuition.

Re "Aging textbooks to stay in classes longer," Aug. 8 As a former teacher who spent 10 years in the classroom, the decision to stop purchasing new textbooks is the most sensible thing I have heard yet in terms of solutions to the budget crisis in education. Every year, our school would spend an unbelievable amount of money on outrageously overpriced books that differed very little from the previous editions. And how much can the textbooks really change from year to year, especially in subjects such as math and English?

Calling online textbooks a boon to student achievement and school district coffers, state Education Secretary Glen Thomas announced Tuesday that 10 free digital high school math and science texts are available for use in California classrooms. But the likelihood of students tapping into them is virtually nonexistent, primarily because of school districts' textbook approval policies and teacher-training needs, educators said. Still, Thomas said the move marks the first step toward revolutionizing education in the state.

History textbooks in many California classrooms won't mention the election of President Obama or the subprime mortgage meltdown until at least 2016. Stem cell research and climate change could be absent from science texts even longer. And students will be using aging books for years longer than planned because of California's education budget cuts. The state budget that closed a $24-billion gap last month dramatically reduced state spending for textbooks. The state Board of Education won't approve new books for kindergarten through eighth grade until January 2016 at the earliest, and districts have postponed approvals of new high school books as well.

ABC Family, which may be seen as a kind of network-sized expansion of ABC's old TGIF franchise, continues its assault on the teen demo tonight with "10 Things I Hate About You," a smarter-than-some high school comedy adapted from the 1999 Heath Ledger-Julia Stiles big-screen modernization of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has the right idea about providing online textbooks to California students instead of the heavy and highly expensive books that have been a staple of education. But his proposal -- to have textbook companies provide free content in exchange for proceeds from purchases of other classroom supplies -- is financially clunky and digitally outmoded.

California teenagers may be spared having to lug back-breaking loads of textbooks to school under a proposal that would make it easier for campuses to use electronic instructional material. Allowing high schools greater freedom to spend state money on software to put textbooks on laptops and other electronic devices was backed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and approved Monday by the state Senate. The Assembly will consider the proposal, drafted by state Sen.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an effort Wednesday to make California the first state in the nation to offer free online textbooks to its students. His education secretary, Glen Thomas, will work with other state officials to make math and science textbooks for high school classes available online by this fall. Once textbook makers submit their materials, state officials will create a list of approved materials aligned with state standards. "As California's budget crisis continues, we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services," Schwarzenegger said in a written statement.

Zadok Ben David's breathtaking "Blackfield" installation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery hinges on dualities that are by nature reductive and simplified; the work's visceral power redeems it from lapsing into the simplistic. It is an emblematic landscape of extremes that presents a graphically stunning opposition between the Edenic and the ashen, promise and aftermath -- and ultimately life and death. The dark vision comes first. Entering the huge main gallery, you see an expansive 36-by-29-foot, cleanly edged field of fine, pale sand.