In your last paragraph you cite "serious feasibility concerns" if there were more free textbooks and lesson plans, and then conclude that the NCLB act makes it difficult for administrators to choose from competing free choices. I think that this conclusion is founded on an incorrect assumption: that "free" implies that is made in spare time by people who are uncoordinated.

I think that although allowing teachers to contribute to, remix, and share textbooks is important, a free textbook does not need to be written by people who do not receive compensation, and who are uncoordinated. Somebody currently gets paid to write text-books. I don't think its too much of a stretch from the lessons free software to imagine an educational non-profit (or governmental agency) paying some experts to write a series of textbooks under a free license geared towards the NCLB tests. Once the book exists, updating it would not be too hard, it could be modified to fit local needs and it could be printed on demand at low cost. If that non-profit or agency developed a trademark that signaled that they approved of the particular distribution, but required that it be removed from distributions that they did not approve of, then I think that your concerns of school boards and administrators separating the wheat from the chaff disappear. Indeed, this is how many free software projects, parts of which are as arduous and tedious as textbook writing (in my experience, implementing a system to store files in a computer is quite boring), currently operate.

I think that acknowledging and addressing that coordination is feasible in free educational tools, and then looking at what this means in the current education system would do much to bolster this paper.

-- JustinColannino - 25 Nov 2009