When you get new textbooks. You still have the "new books every year or so" vs "we finally got hand-me-downs from our neighbor district after 10 years" divide.

I'd also push back against the idea that district wealth necessarily determines instructor quality. There's a lot that goes into surviving a wealthier area, and it isn't necessarily a matter of skill or experience. How well you navigate the interpersonal gamut also plays in (e.g., are you willing to compromise your ethics to keep happy the over-involved parents who care more about the grade than academic progress?).

Back when they had textbooks. Increasingly the curriculum is online and restricts exploration

Textbooks don’t need a lot of revisions though. Basic math has not really changed that much. One of my favorite textbooks I used as a kid was written ten years before I was born.

When I started Chemistry in college, Professor Zumdahl said to by a copy of the CRC Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Whether it was new or used didn’t really matter - it’s not like Boltzmann’s constant is changing all that often.

Biology textbooks are usually out of date by the time they're published.

But then even if you have an up-to-date textbook, your knowledge will be outdated anyway by the time you finish school. Which is fine, most people don't need the latest understanding and those who do will not base it on school. You only need to have a solid understanding of the basics and how to update your knowledge when you need to.

Coming from somewhere else, US textbooks feel super watery - low signal to noise ratio, too much hand holding.

I would tend to agree with this. A combination between low-info fluff and childish presentation. It feels like being bombarded with a technicolor fireworks display of obfuscation and mystification. Maybe it's the gimmick of "edutainment" and the goofy idea that you need to inject fanfare and folderol into education to appeal to students that created this mess.

If you look at older textbooks, before education publishing became the extortionist big business it is today (like, say, Pauling's book on general chemistry[0] - which you can still get from Dover - to name one), you will find many that are lucid and intellectually satisfying. Heck, look at scholastic pedagogic texts (like the Summa[1]) and you can follow exactly what's being said. Even if you don't grasp something, or grasp it correctly, it isn't because the writing or presentation are shit. It's because you need to keep going, but you know how to keep going. You have handles on the content and not just some huge, impenetrable, and slippery orb looming over you.

It's eye-opening, because our entire media regime, and the sensibilities it entrenches, seems to suggest that education used to be dull, mindless, and joyless before the great "progressive" innovators blessed us with their wisdom, forgetting the origins of the artes liberales and some of the 19th and 20th century turns[2] that did actually debase education into something vulgar by comparison, something convenient for industry and the state.

[0] https://archive.org/details/generalchemistry00paulrich

[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1

[2] I am not claiming everything was perfect centuries ago, or that there were no good pedagogical developments since then.

The undergrad books not so much. There are tons of colorful padding. Pages after pages that describe what the next set of pages will describe, advertisement for apps and websites. In fact good 10% of the pages/area seem like marketing copies.

It seems like the publishers feel guilty about charging how much they do and try to add bulk in weight and volume to make the customers feel not so bad -- sugarcoat the rip off somewhat.

Sometimes it is so frustrating that it makes me want to yell -- stop faffing around and get on with it.

[delayed]

Folland is great, but no I am not talking about school books but undergrad books. Books by AMS, Springer are usually great. Some of the common trashy books are by Pearsons, Cengage etc, although Folland's calculus was probably published by pearsons