The actuel Prime future...

[Sukiari]

(05-14-2015 06:55 PM)iconmaster Wrote:  The market controls the standards. And that market is the educators, not people like I. I mean, the College Board deals with calculators only to regulate what features may or may not be usable on tests, for instance.

The market isn't educators. It's government bureaucrats, who decide which textbooks become the new standard, and it's the textbook publishers who push the TI calculators. It's a really cozy business arrangement that stretches from your local school board right up to the Department of Education, and you can bet that the academic publishers are invested in TI and vice versa. If you look at the past Secretaries of the US Department of Education you'll find a bunch of former employees of academic publishers, consortiums of banks offering student loans, and so on.

The free market does not exist when you have a half dozen layers of governments, many of which are headed by former employees of the companies that constitute the marketers of all things educational, controlling the choices. Milton Friedman had a lot to say about this.