What's stopping them? Nothing. I think the only reason they didn't destroy this little vestige of the New Deal era's temporary relief for the working class is there hasn't been a board room meeting (yet) to make it happen, and/or :my-hero: hasn't tweeted about how Of Mice and Men "SUCKS!" in a way that moves mountains with sheer bazinga force.
The kids will certainly prefer to do reading assignments about Tony Stark instead (or the next big thing down the pipe), the way that fast food and junk food catering replaced cafeteria kitchens in public schools everywhere around me. The "consumer choice" momentum would be unstoppable.
It's a little thing to add to the hellworld pile, but it disturbs me.
Give it time. Soda and junk food "charity" toward impoverished school districts put that stuff on the menu and pushed out everything else.
There really isn't anything to stop book replacements except that they didn't get around to it yet.
It does, actually. Lifetime habits develop in formative years and if the easiest and most available food is junk food, junk food habits are normalized, which is especially bad in a closed environment such as a public school. Saying "it would have happened anyway" is both unprovable and sounds a lot like :LIB: inevitability arguments with pretenses of "let the market decide."