I have little doubt that a group of people well educated in any given subject can do better than the average high-school text book. They're often riddled, not just with mistakes, but fundamentally wrong lessons. First year university physics courses often review a substantial amount of high-school material to correct fundamental mistakes in students understanding of the basics.

I think the problem lies with the notion that people who teach physics are more qualified to write a text-book than people who do physics. The result is a pretty text-book that uses all the latest teaching tricks, but teaches things that are wrong.

I'd like to see text-book companies moderate some kind of collaboration between teachers and do'ers to produce a book that is both correct in its content and easy for students to learn from. In a sense, first year physics profs can also be viewed as the ultimate consumers of minds educated by high-school texts. They have a good idea of what students need to learn in high-school to be well grounded in their subject area for their first year of university. Instead, we design text-books to help students perform well in standardized tests that frequently prioritize the wrong things and make the same mistakes as text-book writers.