New text books for the No Child Left behind program are rife with errors. It is almost like the program was thought up by a complete idiot. Oh yeah.

Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase – 109,263.

That's the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008.

The total number of errors was nearly five times the total for last year, thanks to one publisher whose books contained more than 86,000 errors – 79 percent of the total.

Six publishers submitted drafts of their textbooks to the TEA hoping to get in line for selection of the next generation of math books that will be used in Texas public schools.

All had some errors, but Houghton Mifflin Co., one of the leading educational publishers in the U.S., had 86,026 errors in the series of books it submitted to the state. That was 79 percent of all the errors that were discovered.

"It looks like one publisher won the sweepstakes," said board member Bob Craig, R-Lubbock, eliciting laughter from other board members. "How can you make 86,000 errors in your textbooks? How do you do that?"

A spokesman for Houghton Mifflin, based in Boston, did not return calls seeking comment on Thursday. A majority of the company's errors were in teacher editions.

One of my jobs is working in a school and we use this company's textbooks.

I hate the NCLB program!