Full federal control would prevent the Texas School Board from buying 5 million textbooks that teach creationism. That would give every other school board the option to buy books that don't teach creationism.

As a market, the state was so big and influential that national publishers tended to gear their books toward whatever it wanted. Back in 1994, the board requested four hundred revisions in five health textbooks it was considering. The publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston was the target for the most changes, including the deletion of toll-free numbers for gay and lesbian groups and teenage suicide prevention groups. Holt announced that it would pull its book out of the Texas market rather than comply. (A decade later Holt was back with a new book that eliminated the gay people.)

I don't want your book. I want a book that is at least approved by a chain of command I can vote against. There's nothing I can do about Texas books or Oregon books but publishers aren't going to come out with a special edition for New Mexico.

I grew up with Texan biology books. They're bullshit. And they're why museums of creationism exist.