It's just a bill (yes it's only a bill) and it doesn't have bipartisan sponsorship at this point. It's similar to the bill that Senator Durbin introduced in 2015.

Senate Bill 1864

House Bill 3840

Scholastic is something of a bit player in the education space. Revenues for the Education segment were $45 million for the quarter, down about 20% from the same quarter last year. This is about a quarter of Scholastic's overall revenue.

The company attributes the decline to the timing of orders

Hot on the heels of last week's announcement that OpenStax is partnering up with UK Open Textbooks, today's announcement is from Poland and Katalyst Education.

There's a clever Twitter hashtag if you want to follow OpenStax's European adventure.

A short article that reveals a lot about the textbook-purchasing decisions of the Fairfield-Suisun School District, which serves about 22,000 students just northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area.

"The staff has reviewed free and open-source textbooks but has not found resources that meet the needs of students, staff or the district".

"Superintendent Kris Corey said the price will be about the same whether the words are in print or an electronic device."

“Publishing companies are very wise,” Corey said. “They’re not going to lose money.”

From the student newspaper of the University of Houston. Most professors are missing the state-mandated deadline for submitting their textbook selection, which is 30 days prior to the start of the semester.

This matters because it gives students a heads-up on textbook requirements before they register. Perhaps more importantly, it allows the school bookstore time to optimally source the books and price buybacks accordingly.

This program offers $3000 for faculty to adopt open educational resources and $7500 to create new material.

If you click through to their OER page, you'll see that U of A provides substantial support, on top of the financial incentive, from librarians and instructional designers to help develop and adopt the materials.

The actual report is here.

There's a curious stat therein: "SPARC member institutions saved students an estimated $5 million through the use of OER in the 2016-2017 academic year." That's a surprisingly low number, given the number of institutions included (65). Meanwhile, there are stories about students saving millions of dollars per year at just one community college. It makes me wonder if some institutions are engaging in some optimistic estimating when they report their successes.

There's an interesting contrast revealed in this story. The Board of Trustees suggests standardizing all sections of a course on common textbooks and cozying up to Pearson. While in the physics department, which allows teachers to choose their curriculum, faculty are selecting free textbooks.

The article alludes to a Textbook and Instructional Material Affordability report. That is available here (pdf).