The San Jose Mercury News reports that the Texas Board of Education in November was concerned to find that elementary math textbooks the state selected for use in its schools next year contain 109, 263 errors. Seventy-nine percent–86,000!–of those errors occurred in books produced by Houghton Mifflin, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of educational materials. Bob Craig, R-Lubbock, drew laughter from his fellow board members when he asked, “How can you make 86,000 errors in your textbooks? How do you do that?”
The publishers vowed to correct the mistakes by spring–well before school begins next fall. They’d better. The state has warned them they’ll impose fines of as much as $5,000 apiece for errors that make it through to finished books.