I don't understand. It doesn't mean the district spent less of their budget, it just means it can spend it on more meaningful things like promoting sports and the arts.
You don't understand. What happens is that once the teachers/professors (this happens more often in universities) realize that they can force the students to use their textbook, they do a deal with a publishing company and sell the book to the students for $120 a pop.
Yeah, this is unfortunately common, but it's also fairly common for professors to give their students a free book, or one that costs whatever the university bookstore charges for printing a spiral-bound softcover book. That usually happens with professors whose class notes grew over the years to the point where they basically formed a textbook, but for various reasons (disinterest, saturated market, etc.) they didn't take the final step of actually publishing a textbook.
Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum [...] distributed over the web.
I thought the whole point of the article is that the alternative taken up was a digital one. The scenario you describe seems unlikely, and very cynical.
