The Education Business Blog

I'm jazzed to report that I started as Filament Games' new CEO this week. I consider Filament the global leader in crafting learning games with an emphasis on the classroom. Over the past eight years Filament has worked with more than 40 organizations, built over 50 learning games, and won numerous awards. It is a very cool company doing important work.

Long time readers know that I am passionate about tackling the power of games for formal learning (see the Serious Games thread), so this is a natural move.

The learning games space is experiencing a boom - more than half of the most recent SBIR grants from the DOE were for cutting edge learning games. Filament was one of the awardees. Games are a bright spot in a troubled industry.

When we announced that PCI Education had been sold back in December one of the founders of Filament Games, Dan White, called me. I've known the Filament team since 2007 and PCI had partnered with them on a series of science games. Dan was the CEO at the time. He had been looking for someone with expertise in education publishing and distribution to partner with the founders to take the business to the next level.

Dan's expertise is in instructional design, and in his new role as Executive Producer he can focus his energy on building kick-ass learning games. I'll take on most of the business stuff and focus on the go-to-market side of things.

Filament has developed and refined a unique development process that blends instructional design and game mechanics to build engaging and informative learning experiences. The team includes teachers, commercial game developers, instructional designers, researchers, and veterans of the education technology space. It is a heady environment bursting with ideas and energy and poised for even bigger things to come.

Leslie and I will be relocating to Madison over the next couple of months. I've already had a dinner of summer sausage and cheese curds and am looking forward to next year's Grilled Cheese Month.

As time goes on I'll report back on what we are up to.

In the meantime, if you have an idea for a game and need a great team to help you realize your vision, give us a call.

The Common Core Standards are causing a lot of angst across the world of education.  Fortunately Brandt Redd is here to help.  

Over at Of That he lays it all out in a lucid and well linked overview "The Common Core State Standards - For My Concerned Friends."   He cuts through the BS clearly and cleanly and describes how CCSS fits in the overall scheme of the Gates Foundation's vision for personalized education.  

Last week's announcement by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that they are opposed to CCSS has added to the uncertainty hanging over the direction of the market in the next 3-4 years.  If CCSS becomes more than minor skirmish in the political wars we'll have a period of extended uncertainty about how materials should be crafted.  The angry maw of lens hungry politicians could make a six course meal of various conspiracy theories.

Take the five minutes to educate yourself and read Brandt's piece, then you can tick off the following competency for being a member of the education community...

CCSS.EBB-Industry.L.8.5 - "Articulate the contribution CCSS is expected to play in the path to individualized learning.  Compare and contrast with historical standards and models." 

You should probably also read the RNC's resolution to understand their perspective on this issue.

Education publishers have taken a lot of fire in the last few years - many believe that we are too big, too powerful, and that things would be better if teachers just wrote their own materials or used free stuff.

So why do we continue to exist? Are publishers a necessary evil soon to be eliminated by a tsunami of free OER content, or is there an ongoing beneficial role in public education that publishers can fill?

This post is one publisher's take on what justifies our place in education. This isn't intended as a direct refutation of critiques of publishers, any industry as large as ours (over $10 billion) has plenty of opportunities to improve what we do. Rather, I focus on some of the lesser appreciated positive contributions we make. It also isn't a takedown of OER materials, which have earned a permanent place at the table.

So howl away at how boring some materials are and at what scumbags we all are*, but take a few minutes to look at this issue from a different perspective.

The key points are:

• Publishers save teachers time.
• As professionals teachers need pro-grade tools
• We help keep the extremists at bay.
• Publishers help innovative best practices spread quickly.
• Publishers externalize the risks of R&D while provisioning a thriving marketplace for instructional ideas.
• Commercial platforms provide long-term sustainability, particularly in the digital age.
• K12 Publishers save schools money.

In what follows I don't make a distinction between types of publishers,** I'm speaking in broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Thus, for every assertion I make I can guarantee there are exceptions.

Publishers save teachers time.

If you sit and listen to teachers you understand that the single most precious resource in their lives is time. Class sizes have expanded, prep periods have been eliminated, mandates and tests have proliferated, and teachers still have a life and families outside of work. A high school teacher with 4 sections of a class can have 110-130 essays to correct for a single homework assignment.

Anything that takes teachers away from working directly with students undercuts their ability to fulfill their central role in learning. By purchasing materials that have been carefully designed to support good classroom practice teachers can focus their energy on students.

Artisanal curriculum sounds nice in theory, but in practice it isn't practical for the vast majority of teachers given all the other demands on their time.

As professionals teachers need pro-grade tools

Teaching is an art and a profession. Educators demand research to support product claims and have become quite discriminating about evaluating materials. In response publishers use a disciplined creative process to create well crafted, classroom tested, research based, and engaging materials.

I've often heard educators complain about parents who think they know how to run a modern school because they went to school 20 years ago. They have a point. The notion that anyone who has used a textbook can write professional grade resources is just as demeaning to the craft that publishers practice.

Yes, there are some highly skilled teachers who also have strong project management skills, peerless writing talent, deep editing discipline, graphic design chops, software coding expertise, and a knowledge of the legal framework around IP. But they still have 120 essays to correct this weekend.

Or, more likely, they are already working at a publisher. A significant majority of product developers at educational publishers have classroom experience. Publishing is their advanced craft, learned by apprenticing with others who have made the same shift from teaching. At root they are still educators, they have just chosen to work on a broader canvas supporting frontline educators.

We help keep the extremists at bay.

Publishers have to keep track of acceptable use policies on a national scale, which provides a level of insurance to local decision makers that the materials have been carefully screened for objectionable material.

There are legitimate gripes that sometimes this results in materials that don't address controversial subjects as honestly or thoroughly as they should, but in this regard publishers are responding to the need not creating it. Most School Boards don't want to be on the front page of the local paper because someone got their knickers in a twist over an issue with a textbook, so purchasing processes tend to encourage toeing the line.***

Then, when things do go bad we provide a convenient scapegoat. Most publishers assiduously go out of their way to avoid this, they want to be in the local paper even less than the school board. But it comes with the territory.

Publishers help innovative best practices spread quickly.

Publishers have a competitive imperative to stay on top of rapidly evolving research, standards, and assessments.

For time beleaguered teachers innovative products often serve as the foundation for new practices in the classroom. A good case is SDAIE and SIOP for ELL instruction. The foundations for these approaches came out of academia, but the publishers who embraced them and wrote materials around them supported their diffusion across the market.

It isn't just a case of building the products, distribution is also essential to spreading ideas. Education in the United States is a vast enterprise, second only to the military in size, and typically one of the top 3 employers in any city or town. Unlike the military there is no true centralized control, education remains a distributed process - 50 states, 16,000 districts, 110,000 school sites, 3 million teachers.

Raising awareness for new ideas in a fragmented market is a massive undertaking. Having the scale to reach broadly with new approaches requires organizations with strong distribution networks. National educators organizations like ASCD and IRA are one leg of this stool, publishers are another.

Publishers externalize the risks of R&D while provisioning a thriving marketplace for instructional ideas.

The risks that publishers take in creating materials allow educators a wide range of choices appropriate to their students, budgets, and infrastructure.

A Google search for "commercial first grade reading program" returns over 60 million results. No, there are not 60 million separate programs, but this is evidence that there is a boat-load of commercial content available.

More often than not these materials are created in partnership with researchers and academics who serve as the authors or designers of the programs. Bringing their ideas to life takes the financial, production, and distribution resources of a publisher.

Schools can then test competing products/ideas at scale in the real world to see what delivers the goods.

Commercial platforms provide long-term sustainability, particularly in the digital age.

The average basal program is used for at least five years. There is a lot of efficiency for schools (and taxpayers) in using a good program for as many years as they can. Programs like Plaid Phonics and SRA have been continuously offered and incrementally updated for decades.

More critically, educators now demand that all products have digital components, even those with a lot of print materials. It is one thing if a publisher goes under and a school still owns the books - quite another if they are relying on a website and it goes dark. Software requires ongoing enhancement and maintenance.

Products that are grant supported die when the funding stops. Companies have more flexibility to pitch and roll with funding shifts and can bring to bear resources to maintain and support products for the long haul.

K12 Publishers save schools money.

Given the hyperbole around the (always "outrageous") cost of textbooks how I can make this claim? Most people conflate the cost of higher education textbooks with K12 textbooks, but the markets are fundamentally and radically different. The notorious $200 textbook is a creature of academic niches in higher education, not general purpose textbooks and materials in K12.****

The average K12 textbook (including ancillaries) costs about $60 and is used for 5-7 years at a cost of $10 per student. For high quality, professionally designed, and academically sound materials that save teachers time this is a great deal.

A basal reading program can cost north of $30 million to produce. Because publishers can spread the development costs across the entire country they can keep these prices down. If a state or district decided to do this on their own the cost would be exponentially higher per student.*****

Conclusion

Taken as a group these benefits outline some of the positive contributions commercial publishers make in education. Associations, universities, think tanks, foundations, non-profits, and government at all levels provide these same benefits and many others, but only publishers cover this particular combination completely.

A state could chose to write their own curriculum, but that would more expensive and restrict the choice districts and teachers have to meet specific needs. Foundations sponsor OER repositories, but the consistency of design and research support behind most of the materials is non-existent. Associations help spread ideas but they don't have the risk capital to develop robust programs.

In the next ten years we will see a profound shift in the products and services publishers provide. They will be more digital, will include more professional development, and will evolve with standards and research findings. But the benefits outlined above are independent of platform, media, and ideology and should always have a place at the table.

--------------
Footnotes & Editorial Snark Repository

* In the midst of the reading wars an entire company I worked for was referred to this way by a high ranking government employee who disagreed with our pedagogy. Classy.

** I include basal textbooks, supplemental materials, software, professional development and cloud based services from commercial providers.

*** My personal favorite along these lines as was a middle school biology game. One of the characters was a slob who was prone to illness as a result of his less than stellar personal hygiene. The designers built him with a visible butt crack - which would have tickled middle school funny bones while making an instructional point. His pants were pulled up in the final product to avoid controversy.

**** In higher education the decision maker and the buyer are different - professors select materials and students buy them. In K12 the same institutions selecting the materials also provide the funds to buy them - providing an economizing incentive entirely missing in Higher Ed. In addition, in Higher Ed the student as purchaser has little bargaining power. K12 buyers are usually Districts or even states - the institutional nature of the buying process and the bargaining power of the purchaser create a much more level playing field.

Nevertheless market forces are creating the same economies we see in K12. Services like Chegg rent books. There is moral pressure being applied to professors to select reasonably priced materials.

That said, it is unrealistic to assume that a specialized book on Nanotechnology ($180 at Walmart.com!) will ever achieve the kind of economic scale that it can be priced the same as a High School Physical Science program ($69).

***** More expensive for the state which has to fund the development and maintenance - but maybe not for the districts who then get it for "free." From a taxpayer standpoint it isn't more efficient - it just buries it somewhere else in the budget.

We've all heard the voices of DOOM about the looming budget cuts from the sequester. I call BS, at least as it affects K12 education.

Laziness often drives how we talk about education funding. Because it is easy to track federal spending we focus our energy there. But this willfully ignores the plain fact that 90% of funding for education comes from state and local government, the Feds only account for 10%.

Do the math. A 10% sequester driven cut in Federal spending means a 1% cut to total education spending.

Where the hell were all these crepehangers when education went over the cliff last year? "Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?" No doubt a 1% cut will cause real pain, but relative to what has already been done to education it is a coda, not the main event.

A Little History Lesson

In the fall of 2011 there was no political will left to tackle the ongoing gap in resources at the state level for education and the stimulus was allowed to lapse with no more support from the Feds. State budgets were still in crisis, in fact many had not bottomed out yet. As a result, at least one estimate I've seen said that overall spending for K12 declined over 15% in 2012.

To the educators, local policy makers, and companies that serve this market it was and remains a genuine crisis. Speaking only for the companies, It was particularly brutal because on average we saw year over year declines between 20% and 50%. Schools protected people first and delayed or cancelled materials purchases. That isn't a criticism, they made the best decision in a tight corner.

So when I hear people associated with the Military moaning about the impact of 10% cuts (while we are winding down the wars of the last decade) my uncharitable reaction is that they need to man up and get on with it. Education already did their part.

If we are going to jam kids into larger and larger classes, cancel teacher training, cancel physical education, and close libraries then maybe we don't need more F-35s (which don't work anyway).

There will be a few places where the new education cuts will be further insult to injury - notably Special Education and high poverty Title 1 schools. Federal programs generally make up a much larger percentage of these particular services - in Special Ed Federal spending is somewhere between 15%-20% of the total. That means sequester cuts of about 2% of the total.

I don't mean to minimize the pain even a 1%-2% cut will inflict on school systems where they have already squeezed any slack out of the system. It will cause cut backs in essential services. But this will be an extension of the much deeper cuts from last year, not something new, and the scale will be significantly smaller than what we have already lived through.

A Look Ahead

The bright side of this story is that state budgets are finally recovering as the housing market stumbles out of its funk. This will be a slow grind over the next three years - there is no miracle in sight. This turn will have a far bigger impact on education and the companies that serve it than any failure to legislate in DC. I suggest you direct your attention there as you look to the future.

Unless of course the deficit hawks throw the whole freaking economy back into recession. Frankly I'm with Charlie Pierce on this one "Fk the deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money." But that argument doesn't seem to be carrying the day. So I suppose we'll have to jam this fork into the electrical socket and learn what cutting an additional 1 million jobs means when the overall economy and state budgets are fragile.

PCI Education was sold to PRO-ED, Inc. in mid-December 2012. Since then I've fielded a lot questions about the sale. This post is an attempt, from my perspective as PCI's former CEO, to answer the big questions in one place.*

What Is The Rationale For The Deal?

There are several good reasons for combining the operations.

PCI has long been a large distributor of PRO-ED products, particularly the EdMark Reading Program. There were obvious efficiencies in putting the two organizations together.

PRO-ED has two business, one very much like PCI which the PCI operation will fit into naturally. It is a good home for the mission and purpose of PCI.

PRO-ED also has a clinical and specialized assessment business. PCI was not in assessments, but many of our products will benefit from a closer affiliation with relevant tests.

What Kind of Deal Was It?

PRO-ED made an asset purchase of PCI's products, brands, and distribution business.

What Were The Terms?

Both companies are privately held and don't release that information.

What About PCI's People?

PCI had enough lead time to help its staff start preparing for a transition, running a regular workshop on strategies and techniques for a modern job hunt. As of today about half of the staff have landed in new positions. This made the actual sale less traumatic than most I've seen - people were aware the news was coming and had been given tools and resources to help them get a jump start on making the change.

For PCI employees the sale was the end of a life affirming mission. When we sold products something good happened in the world - a struggling learner got help. Many of the employees have a personal connection to individuals with special needs. For others the opportunity to serve was an essential part of why they worked at PCI.

PRO-ED has been able to absorb PCI's operations without taking on any of PCI's employees. Many good people with a strong background in developing, selling, and supporting products for special needs populations are available - if you are interested my contact information is on the blog.

I'll write another post about my own plans for the future, but in a nutshell if you need a consultant/advisor or are looking for a CEO/GM give me a buzz.

Looking Ahead

I'm glad PCI's products landed with an organization that really understands the segment of the market that PCI served. One of the distinguishing characteristics of PCI's culture was its sense of mission and service, and knowing that it will continue is important to all of us - customers, staff, and investors.

The team at PCI did some amazing work and changed hundreds of thousands of lives for the better. Everyone involved, employees, investors, customers, suppliers, distributors, and fans can take pride in the work we did to support teachers and help students learn. This is true for any educational materials publisher, but in PCI's case was made all the more acute by the realization that the students we were serving had some of the greatest needs.

That work lives on at PRO-ED and we look forward to seeing what they do with it.

-------
* This post represents my opinions, it is not an official announcement from either company.

Last December I penned (keyed?) a relatively optimistic piece about education spending, with the conclusion that the textbook adoption market was in a crash but supplemental materials were in a short-term stall. I had it right on the first point and wrong on the second - we have seen a full blown market crash across the board this year. There are still sound reasons for long term optimism, but the near term remains grim.

After the election I decided to read Nate Silver's book "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't". I was hoping to find insights on why I'd gotten it wrong, and so far I've not been disappointed.

Early on he outlines the distinction between risk and uncertainty in a way that is highly relevant to how we understand where we are in education publishing.

"Risk…is something you can put a price on. Say that you'll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11. This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a "bad beat" in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you'll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000. There is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt." [emphasis added]

Looking back I actually used the word "uncertainty" in my post to describe the situation, and I even outlined all the major sources of uncertainty that I was aware of; the end of the stimulus, state budget crises, technology shifts, etc. etc. But even so I don't think I appreciated what that implied for management options for addressing a climate of uncertainty.

The reason has to do with another point that Silver makes repeatedly, every bit of data we use comes with bias embedded in it. Sometimes this bias is overt, sometimes it is subtle. But it is always there.

In this case my bias arose from the long term nature of the education materials market - historically it has been fairly predictable and wavered within a fairly narrow band of 5-10%. Put into Silver's terms, the risk in the market was well known and could be managed with some finesse.

The convergence of trends in education publishing however created an unprecedented situation - none of us has ever seen this market deal with this level of uncertainty on so many fronts at the same time. There has never been anything remotely close to our current situation. So all our experience was getting in the way of addressing the current climate because our bias was to assume we could manage the risks involved.

But in an era of uncertainty the scalpel of finesse is the wrong tool. You have to use a sledge hammer to clear things away and give your company room to maneuver in unpredictable ways as you learn from the market where things are headed. All bets are off.

The current climate is going to continue for at least a couple more years. As you look at where your business is today challenge your biases about what is likely to happen and don't take half measures in getting yourself on a footing to address uncertainty. Then pay very close attention to where the trends are taking us.

Last Tuesday the Secretary of Education said

"I think we should be moving from print to digital absolutely as fast as we can over the next couple of years. Textbooks should be obsolete."

He was clear that he sees the digital transformation in schools as a "critical game changer" for the American education system.

He gave three reasons for the advocating a rapid shift:

• Providing 24/7 access to learning resources, expanding learning time
• Improving equity of access to high quality resources for all students
• Bolstering international competitiveness

The question and answer are at 34:05 into the video below:

In the context of the event this appeared to be a passing comment. But last February the DOE and the FCC announced an initiative to put digital textbooks in all schools within five years.

The initiative is based on the work of Project RED, sponsored by Intel, HP, SMART, Pearson, and Apple with most of the major education associations offering support.

With this kind of momentum behind it the outlines of a serious policy shift are emerging. Pay attention.

Four Questions for the DOE

As someone who has spent the better part of the last 25 years working on technology in education, the CEO of a company that provides a blend of software and print materials, the Board President of the Association of Education Publishers, and a parent who observed my son's school adopting iPads last year I appreciate the Secretary's focus on this issue.

Based on my experience and perspective I have four questions intended to get at the devil in the details.

They touch on:

1. Funding
2. Evidence
3. Market Behavior
4. Quality

1. Funding. Where is the legislation that will provide a minimum of $65 billion over the next 10 years to launch and sustain this effort? This is just at the High School level.

I did an analysis last spring that showed that iPad based textbooks cost at least five times what traditional materials cost. Without rehashing the full post the nub is that the devices and the network infrastructure investments are massive. To do this (at just the High School level) it would require a sustained investment of at least $6.5 billion incrementally per year for the foreseeable future. For all grade levels it would approach $15 billion in incremental spending per year. And yes - I factored in significant discounts for the volume involved.

Project RED came to similar conclusions about the near term incremental costs. Their estimate was $16.2 billion per year (p 91). They added long term benefits to society like dropout prevention to come up with a net savings. While useful from a macro standpoint of understanding the policy implications this larger view doesn't solve the school budget problem. The benefits accrue to society in general in the future but leave schools holding the bag for funding it today.

Don't be distracted by arguments that OER will solve this problem since the actual materials are not where the real differences lie. Just think about how adding 800 devices to a High School's network explodes bandwidth requirements to get a sense of some of the other investments required to support this move.

We also start in a hole. The instructional materials market has been hit hard by the post-stimulus funding environment. Schools are spending roughly 40% less this year on materials than they did last year. This is currently projected to only improve marginally over the next 2 years, the Secretary's timeframe for driving this transition.

The reality is that you need to add a couple billion more per year just to close that gap at the state and local level, so in the near term the number may be closer to $8-$9 billion per year. To put that in context, Title 1 is roughly $14.5 billion (before sequestration).

Given the funding crisis at the state and local level this initiative would need to be a major new Federal program in the same league as Title 1 and IDEA ($12-$15 billion annually) to cover all grades. It would be a major stimulus for local government and would provide a healthy shot in the arm to computer, networking, and content companies.

As stimulus it is close to perfect from both economic and political perspectives. It makes a long-term investment in American competitiveness while providing a meaningful jobs boost in the near-term. If anyone wants help crafting that proposal I'm standing by to help.

2. Evidence. Given the costs, where is the evidence that this investment will be worth it?

We are still on the near side of the technology chasm - with some essential basic questions about how to effectively deploy these kinds of devices at scale in schools. We also face a pretty massive training effort.

In Higher Education the students are resisting this transition. In some cases students are reverting to print after experiencing digital texts.

This reflects are larger truth that I see at play. Books actually do a few things better than technology. The trick is figuring out what the technology does particularly well, and then redesigning print and tech as an integrated system that uses the best of both worlds. Rich simulations, database driven content, and peer to peer coaching are all uniquely strong on technology. Random access, note taking, and battery life (infinite!) are better with print.

Would it be more prudent to move in a more organic way as we do the research to uncover best practices, or are we going to effectively throw the whole education system into the deep end and hope it can swim?

Project RED made a great start on this and did find improvements in outcomes (notably dropout prevention and engagement). But it is one study and their findings are colored by the appearance of self-interest (all the sponsors stand to benefit and the authors are long-time advocates of 1:1 initiatives).

I applaud them for making a serious effort to answer the questions swirling around this issue and know and respect the work of the team. The report is required reading for anyone who cares about this issue. But before we start dropping billions a year on this it would be reassuring to have independent third parties replicate the findings. The DOE is uniquely equipped to fund a crash research project on this.

My fear is that without a clear body of evidence we will face an inevitable backlash in the middle of the process that will derail it. As the saying goes "the middle of anything looks like failure." We need strong research to power past that point in this transition and it would be best to take the time to do that research at scale. Again, the Department of Education is best equipped to muster the evidence needed.

3. Market behavior. Current purchasing patterns show that educators believe a blend of digital and print is best - will this be valued or dismissed?

It isn't just Higher Ed students shying away from a full transition. Buying decisions being made today in K12 indicate that educators want a blend of print and digital, not a pure digital world. The tech partisans will tell you teachers are just dragging their feet, but I don't think so. Teachers recognize that most students learn better with technology some of the time. It isn't a cure all. They need a rich blend of resources to address the learning needs of all students all the time.

For example, the PCI Reading Program is a world class reading program for students with intellectual disabilities (Autism, Down's Syndrome, etc). The vast majority of our customers purchase the print and the technology versions of the program together, even though each can stand on its own. General education publishers I've spoken with have seen the same thing, and in many cases have seen customers who went pure digital coming back after the fact and adding the print to the mix.

This should give pause to calls to completely abandon print materials. The real trick, as I noted above, is to figure out how both print and digital should be designed as a system to optimize learning outcomes.

4. Quality. Transitioning 54 million students to digital textbooks in two years is a moon shot - how do we maintain the quality of learning resources in the mad dash to get it done in that timeframe?

Everyone wants quality materials - teachers, parents, policy makers, the students themselves. That isn't the issue. But the market left to its own will take several years to sort out what that means. Is the DOE going to be an active participant in accelerating this sorting out, or will they let it happen organically?

Standards will emerge, best practices will be refined, business models will evolve, licensing issues will be sorted out, etc etc etc. But if we don't place a a very high priority on the quality of resources in the rush to just get it done we'll end up with a crap-ton of junk content on really cool digital devices.

We have two very concrete examples to demonstrate this point.

First, digital whiteboards are now in roughly 50% of classrooms but the bulk of resources available are still at what I call the "Hypercard" stage - simple static animations. Schools have put hundreds of millions into deploying the technology and are now focusing on what to do with it. They will figure it out - I don't doubt that for a second - but we are in the "middle" right now and quality is a real mixed bag.

Second, a short troll through the back alleys of the iTunes education store will make clear how real this danger is. Alongside some truly high quality stuff there are thousands of poorly executed "classroom" aps (e.g. no method to give teachers feedback on student progress, crash prone, bad UI, etc.).

Another angle on quality is the maturity of the tools to produce content. The fastest way to get quality content would be rapid conversion of good stuff that is in print today. It isn't the end - because really the materials need to be re-imagined for a digital world. But it would be a fast start. Unfortunately the tools to do that are immature.

Take Apple's iBooks Author program which is used to create digital textbooks. It doesn't read InDesign files - the format for most existing content. Doing a conversion is a massive pain in the neck because you have to extract all the separate content (text, images, etc.) and then completely reformat it. You can't just move your files over and tweak them. This is an eminently solvable problem - but publishers are currently balking because it isn't ready for prime time yet.

If the funding issue was seriously addressed the investment decision would be clear and, good tools or no, you would see publishers moving ahead aggressively. The economic downturn has hit publishers hard and making massive new investments in the current climate is possible but difficult.

Summary

I applaud the Secretary for putting a bold stake in the ground - it is only with this kind of leadership that we will see a sustained effort at redefining what a world class education means in the era of 24/7/365 access to learning. All of us who have been chipping away at this problem, many since the late '70s, are excited to have an advocate at the top calling for this transition.

But we have also learned a few things along the way. Heeding those lessons will lead to a better outcome. We could start by getting some clear answers to the questions outlined above.

Quick - what percentage of your iTunes library is produced by amateurs? For that matter how many books on your eReader of choice are self-published works?

If you are like most people the answer to both questions is "slim to none."

The point is that quality matters in any medium. Moving from analog to digital doesn't reduce expectations of quality - in many cases it increases it.

Free music and self-published books, and teacher created lessons have always been a part of our media ecosystem. With the advent of digital distribution they can play a bigger role - but in the grand scheme they remain part of a much bigger marketplace.

There will always be a role for professionally produced content in education. The next time someone touts free OER as a panacea look to your own behavior with music and novels and ask why teachers should be any different with instructional materials.

Also, remember that you made an aesthetic choice - educators have their job on the line. Risk aversion rises with the stakes at play.

Carry on.

These are grim days for the world of education. Funding cuts past, present, and future loom over schools and districts. Class sizes are swelling, essential services are being trimmed, and any spending decision that can be delayed is sitting in limbo.

The companies that serve schools are feeling the pinch even deeper - while school budgets are down roughly 10%-15% scuttlebutt around the industry has most education companies down 20%-40% from 2011. Data systems, some technology niches, and companies with strong international presence are doing better, but those are the exceptions not the rule.

Relatively speaking schools have bad colds, we have pneumonia.

I'm here today to spread a little optimism amidst the gloom.

It may be tough to remember in the midst of the fray that what we are facing is a market crash, not individual company failure. Those who can hold on through this period will see better days ahead.

Why do I believe this? Two reasons.

1. Education lags the rest of the economy by 3 years - largely driven by property valuations. Housing prices fall one year, the next year they are reassessed, and in the third year tax receipts and budgets are adjusted (up or down). In other words we are now where the rest of the economy was in 2009. Things will get better moving forward - but slowly just as the rest of the economy has. All major housing indicators are now moving upward.

2. More importantly the population we serve is growing not shrinking. The chart below shows public K12 enrollment through 2019.

Source - USDOE

Note that we are just entering a period of sustained growth in enrollments after several years of plateau. Schools will see about 5% growth in the population served over the next 6-7 years.

While funding may be a challenge - the NEED to education children will always be there regardless of what is happening in the economy. For the foreseeable future it will also be growing, not declining.

As the economy recovers (with education funding lagging along behind it) there will be plenty of opportunity ahead.

There are other existential challenges we face - new technologies, different funding patterns, evolving demographics. But we do not face a market in decline, only a market in temporary crisis.

As my friend Randy Wilhelm would say - "go out and do something good for kids."

I've been on a bit of a blogcation since June. It has been a crazy summer both personally and professionally* and something had to give.

I'm back.

The K12 market has been in full meltdown since last November. Schools are struggling with state finances post stimulus, the Feds are not helping with threats of sequestration, and tablets are sucking up what little oxygen remains in the room. To top it off the uncertainty around the election is putting a pause on decisions.

In other words, those of us in the business have an opportunity to show what we are really made of.

I'll be touching on all those subjects in the coming weeks and months along with a few other ideas that have been tickling my interest including:

• What Japanese pop culture means for ed-tech
• Is K12 the largest used book market in the world?
• A comparison of K12 and Higher Education
• More on the economics of iPads
• What do NCLB waivers mean for instructional materials?
• Why is LRMI important?
• An overview of the trade associations that serve our industry

Since the blog is now 5 years old I'm also planning to start re-running some of the earlier posts that undergird my view of the market and where we are headed (if you have favorites let me know).

Let's go.

------
* For those interested in the details our youngest graduated from High School, we bought a town house in San Antonio and moved, we remodeled said town house, and at work we've been dealing with the market conditions. My new studio is finally done and thus I can perch here in the mornings and write again.

iPads in the classroom are all the rage in the education publishing market - somedays the oxygen for discussing anything but learning tablets has been sucked out of the room.

As we move beyond the giggling crush stage there are a couple of points to consider that might give publishers a more grounded perspective on where we really are in the adoption cycle.

Falling Off The Learning Cliff

Practical matters first. My son's high school, Westlake, in a pioneering move gave every Junior and Senior an iPad this past school year.* As a parent, ardent iPad user, and publisher I was a bit stunned by the following end of year surprise.

• Exams were over on May 30th.

• iPads were due back on May 24th.

"Fortunately" my son did not use the iPad as his primary note taking tool, nor did he have digital textbooks that he needed for his finals on the iPad. It is hard to see students (or teachers) fully embracing the device once they grok this fundamental flaw in the system.

The school is in a tough spot here - as a practical matter you need to start corralling the gear before everyone disappears for the summer. But, if you want this to be the primary learning device then students need access to it right up to the bitter end.

Obviously a new process needs to be invented by some clever person (if your school has sorted this out please post a comment).

This is one of the best examples I've ever seen of the market slowing friction of unintended consequences. In the seminal work "Crossing the Chasm" this kind of problem is what separates early adopters from the broad market, it is the chasm.

Early adopters are willing to sacrifice their own time and reshape themselves to the technology. The broad market demands solutions that adapt to them. Sometimes this is a feature of the product, sometimes it is a complimentary process improvement, sometimes it is a cultural adaptation. But the chasm can't be truly crossed until these problems are sorted out.

In other words getting from the early adopters to the broad market is hard work and takes time and focus.

iPads - The Early Adopters Have Adopted

So what is the market penetration so far? According to AAP Apple has succeeded in seeding the education market with 1.5 million iPads since its introduction. It isn't clear if this is K12 and Higher Ed - but assuming this is just K12 this represents 2.5% of the addressable market of 55 million students and 3 million teachers in the US.

It is an impressive demonstration of market momentum, but isn't the kind of game changer we've been promised - yet. I have absolutely no doubt that it will be, but until the early adopters sort out the kind of practical disconnects outlined above the broader market will hang back.

As publishers we need a credible strategy and story for incorporating tablets into instructional materials. We must participate in solving the practical problems that will smooth the way for broad scale adoption.

But from a market opportunity we'd be better served by putting relatively more time into helping schools sort out digital white board solutions (with over 40% penetration ). Just saying….

We Are Teachers has a bitter sweet post up about the funny things people say to teachers - with appropriate responses.
Here is a sample:

The comment: “Johnny NEVER misbehaves/has trouble paying attention/hits other kids/acts out at home. I wonder what you’re doing in the classroom to make that happen.”

The comeback: “That is strange that Johnny has such different behavior in the classroom. Let’s figure out a way to get to the bottom of this. You’re welcome to observe my teaching any time you want. When can I come to your house?”

It is worth 5 minutes of your morning to get a refresher on why teachers deserve more respect than they are getting.

Related Post:

What Do Teachers Make