The Education Business Blog

Last week the New York Times published a piece titled $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math by Ashlee Vance.

Today we take up the challenge posed in the title and demonstrate that Open Source Textbooks are twice as expensive as books in the K12 market.

Let me state right up front that I'm all for using economic and technology forces to drive costs down while improving services. I agree that Open Source instructional materials have a place and will play a role in coming years in doing exactly this. But they are not the panacea painted by their advocates in the article.

Mr. Vance's normal beat is Silicon Valley, so it comes as no big surprise that the article is largely a big wet kiss to Sun co-founder Scott McNealy's publicist. Mr. McNealy rightfully gets props for his sustained commitment to Curriki which has built important infrastructure and tackled thorny questions about user generated lesson plans. But this article goes far beyond that effort in painting a misleading picture of what open source means for schools.

Worse, Mr. Vance's lack of expertise in education led him to make three additional fundamental and common mistakes in how he presented the facts and interpreted them. Lets start with those and then proceed to the "math."

The foundational errors are:

• K12 does not equal Higher Education
• Cutting textbook costs will not make a material difference to education reform
• Recreating the book experience on-line is not sound instruction
• Open Source technology is more expensive than books in education (today)

First Error - K12 does not equal Higher Education

These are two distinct markets with unique competitive and customer dynamics.

Evidence? The companies that serve them have completely different K12 and Higher Ed sales forces, marketing departments, and development teams. If there were synergies beyond buying paper and press time in bulk they would be taking advantage of them.

In Higher Education the books are chosen by individual Professors and purchased by the students. This results in very narrow niches and resulting exorbitant costs that the end buyer has little or no negotiating power to counter. When a Biology Professor is one of 6 educators requiring his own book you end up with the $200 books referenced in the title.

By comparison K12 is a bulk institutional purchase where the textbook decision is made at the State or District level. The buyers have huge bargaining power which they have instantiated in legislation and regulations around the adoption and purchase of instructional materials. The typical K12 textbook costs $35-$60 and is used for 4-5 years at a cost of $7-$12 per student.

So which is it $200 or $12? It isn't even close and I haven't gotten beyond the first word of the title.

Second Error - Cutting textbook costs will not make a material difference to education reform

I'm all for using the market and new technologies to save money and improve learning. But textbooks are such small potatoes in the overall education budget that it is laughable to think that even if you could magically eliminate this cost (which we will show you can't) that it would make much of a difference.

We spend $550 billion a year on education in the United States. K12 instructional Materials are 1% of that cost. Completely eliminate it and you have barely moved the needle.

Yes $5 billion is a lot of money - but in the context of of the whole it is insignificant.

Thus the whole premise of the piece - that a noble retired entrepreneur is leading the charge to fix education as we know it is silly. These efforts will, at best, nibble at one small corner of the overall challenge. Love him or hate him at least Bill Gates is tackling the real problems head on and at scale.

Third Error - Recreating the book experience on-line is not sound instruction

This error is perhaps the most fundamental of all and one I would have expected a veteran technology reporter to pick up on. Textbooks companies have in fact spent the last 20 years trying to recreate the book experience on-line. The results have been universally disappointing and are the equivalent of reading plays on TV. It is neither interesting or a good use of technology platforms.

Technology at its best allows us to do things in a new and more productive ways. For this to happen the experience needs to be redesigned and reengineered from a technical and cultural standpoint. This is why most technology diffusion takes 25 years despite the accelerating curve of innovation we find ourselves on.

The good news is that we are at 25 years of PCs in education and change is a brewin'. The bad news is that posting PDFs of textbooks isn't where the market is headed.

Where this really hurts the argument being made in the article is that doing new stuff in innovative ways can be expensive. If we replace textbooks with compelling on-line simulations and games designed for classroom use (my vote for the best use of technology in education) look to the budgets of game developers to get a sense of the scale economics that will be required to support this effort.

Innovation yes. Retreaded open source PDFs as the answer - feh. Been there, done that, didn't work very well.

Follow the Money

This is always good advice when you find arguments being made that don't stand up to scrutiny. In this case you don't have to look any further than the screen you are staring at right now. The hardware vendors are the ones who have been pimping the idea of "free" content on the web as the solution to schools problems coming on 10 years now.

Sun was a hardware vendor at heart that wrote software to move iron (e.g. Java). Apple has been instrumental in changing the adoption requirement in Texas that allows adoption money to be used for digital products. Their end game is allowing adoption money to be spent on their equipment (e.g. iPad).

This. Is. Their. Idea. Of. "Free."

Equity

But "the computers are already there you say - this would be leveraging existing infrastructure to trim costs." Wrong. The first error conflating K12 with Higher Ed ignores a fundamental difference between the two markets. Higher Education is a choice - and included in that choice is the student's responsibility to provide their own technology. K12 Education is legal requirement and the state is required to provide all the necessary resources in an equitable manner to ALL students.

Read that last sentence twice and never forget it. Unless EVERY student has access to the platform the state has what is called an equity issue. The fact that 4-5 computers may be present in the classroom doesn't mean that all students can access it - much less access it at home when they are doing their homework and using their textbooks.

In Higher Education the standard is much different. A company like Flat Earth Knowledge can offer their solution knowing that it is the student's budget that determines if they can afford a computer on which to run the "free" book.

Infrastructure Requirements

So to do the math on moving to open source digital textbooks one has to calculate the costs based on providing every student with a reader device that they can use on their own time. That device needs to handle the complex color charts and images contained in instructional content and ideally should be able to run simulations and other complex software that allows students to explore and play with ideas rather than passively absorb them. The screen needs to be large enough that students can read it without squinting since - hopefully - they will be staring at it for several hours a day.

In other words it needs to be an iPad or Android tablet. Dell's Streak starts at $300 and the iPad at $499. Both include a monthly subscription that runs to around $125-$160 a year. Given how hard kids are on technology (puddles, playground tussles, etc.) you will also need a service contract at roughly $40 a year.

In Which We Do "The Math"

If the device lasts 3 years your annual cost at the low end is $265 per year. A bulk purchaser might be able to negotiate something closer to $200 per year - but not much less than that given that the margins on the devices are already razor thin. At the mid-range it could go as high as $400 a year.

I'm being gracious and not including the cost of the networks and IT staff needed support this kind of enterprise wide implementation of a platform. Since instruction is the core mission of the schools the bulk of that cost should rightfully be allocated to this effort.

At last we arrive back at the original promise of the article. What does it cost to provide a student with textbooks? At the HIGH end for 5 classes it is $58 a year. If we throw in some supplemental materials we get to a cost of $100 per student per year. Or almost exactly the $5 billion+ that is spent in K12 on instructional materials (54 million students).

So back at ya Mr. Vance - $10 billion a year for technology or $5 billion a year for books - You Do The Math.

The Cost Curve

There is already a significant base of technology in schools - but it tends to be more in the supplemental side of things not in the basal instructional resource area that includes Textbooks. This is because of the equity issue.

To get some sense today of what it costs to implement a basal instructional technology program look at Scholastic's hugely successful Read 180. One actual proposal has the cost at $783 per student. This is for the digital/print instructional materials only and does not include an inch of network or a single keyboard.

We will ride the cost curve down and at some point - in the future - the benefits associated with the migration to the new technology will be justified for core instructional materials. It probably won't even be when it is less expensive. If technological delivery truly delivers more effective instruction it can be justified at a higher cost (see Read 180 above).

But I think it is clear we are not there yet for the broad mass of students and teachers. We should be experimenting with this today and building the tools and resources to take advantage of it when we get there. Again - kudos to Mr. McNealy for his sustained efforts on Curriki in this regard.

Summary

The New York Times has utterly failed in its mission to inform the discussion of this issue by presenting the grossly misleading promises of the open source movement. What the advocates of this move are really pushing for is a transfer of the costs from books to a much more expensive platform.

I'm not an apologist for the textbook industry. I've spent over 20 years as a vocal and public advocate for technology innovation in education (here and here). But we do students and educators a disservice when we don't provide them with a full set of facts to make decisions with. The open source debate is loaded with hidden agendas that the article did not touch on but which have a direct bearing on it's central claim that this movement will save schools money today.

On-line bullying has been a concern as long as the web has been around. Yet only now, with the proliferation of social networks, is it really getting its due. Today's New York Times has an outstanding article on cyberbullying and the confusing and inconsistent ways that schools are being asked to respond. I highly recommend this well written piece.

The central conundrum is that cyberbullying almost never takes place on school sponsored networks and equipment. Yet the bullying clearly has a direct impact on students, their interactions in the building, and their academic performance.

In old fashioned bullying physical presence was required. Because kids spent most of their day at school a great deal of it happened in the building. That gave schools a clear and well defined role in intervening and managing bullying - even if many didn't do a great job of it. At least the law and the expectations were clear.

From a school's perspective the rules for when and how to intervene in off-campus cyberbullying are unclear.

Further complicating matters is that the students themselves are developmentally at an age when they are experimenting with social interactions and often unaware of the consequences of their actions. The real goal should be educational, not punitive, so that as they mature they learn to manage these tools well.

Take it Kurt:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Implications for Publishers

When I interviewed teachers for the Best Practices in Implementing Video Games & Simulations in the Classroom white paper a couple of years ago they all told us that they had not experienced any bullying problems with software provided by the school. Most of the time the bullying takes place after hours and on equipment and networks that the school doesn't own.

So for publishers the good news is that if you build a system that schools will deploy this isn't likely to be a major issue. You should be ready to address it with research and a solid suite of administrative tools.

If you are encouraging kids to use external social networks and resources you may have think twice about how you introduce them and whether it would be possible to do on school sponsored sites like Nettrekker.

Yesterday the minority in the Senate ended the chances that the Extender's Bill would pass the Senate. While 57 Senators - a clear majority - wanted to do the right thing a determined minority used procedural votes to force mass layoffs of teachers, firefighters, and police across the country (300,000-500,000).

There are rumors that the two sides are still talking - but most analysts say that any action will likely take place after the Summer Recess in mid-Fall.

It isn't just education that is affected. Over a million people will be dropped from unemployment rolls. As a side benefit Hedge Fund Managers get to keep paying taxes on their multi-million dollar bonuses at a rate (15%) lower than most of the formerly employed teachers and cops (25%).

There is no way this is good news for the economy - none.

They may blather about other stuff - but that is the real effect of yesterday's vote. Don't forget that.

States and Local Governments (SLG) are facing $300 billion in budget shortfalls this coming year. Unlike the Federal Government they can not run deficits. They pay their bills or they go bankrupt (which cities like San Diego are actively considering). The only solutions to this problem is a Keynesian infusion of support from the Feds or mass layoffs and drastic spending cuts.

Keep in mind that 80% of education spending is for staff. The only way to address a significant shortfall in school budgets is to lay off lots and lots of teachers. Schools will cut the other stuff - but there is only so much they can do with that other 20%.

The impact on education will be long term and devastating. The children in the system now will bear the brunt of these cuts in the form of increased class sizes, shortened school hours, and over burdened teachers. This is the choice that was made in the Senate yesterday.

In crisis management mode simply keeping the lights on will be the priority - not reform. We'll continue to hear lots of bombast about global competitiveness, but when an entire state (HI) is considering a 4 day school week that rings a little hollow. If schools are facing a choice between laying off even more teachers or delaying materials purchases another year or two that is an easy choice from their perspective.

The political calculus appears to be aimed at the elections in November. I guess the theory is that if the economy is wrecked even further than it already is then the minority party will benefit from voter unhappiness. Sadly, as political bets go it will probably work.

I know. to many of you this is a harsh indictment. Given the history I don't see any other conclusion. Lets take a look at the two primary reasons given for voting against the bill.

"It wasn't bipartisan"

Hard work and real compromises went into crafting something the minority could support. The original $200 billion deficit financed proposal was cut in half to $110 billion, and to ally concerns of the minority only $30 billion of that was deficit financed. No one denies there is a crisis, there just appears to be one party determined to do nothing about it even when they are included.

We can't forget that a solid majority of 57 supported the bill. It is only the procedural votes - which are not Constitutionally defined - that require super majorities. If you want to see where requirements for super majorities on budget issues will take us just look to California. Feel better?

When this post on bipartisanship in the current political climate was written in February I thought it was over the top:

Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

In the wake of this vote the analogy is eerily prescient.

"OMFG The Deficit!"

Yes the deficit is a concern. But it has been a concern for 30 years and according to most credible economists we are not in any danger there. If we were in danger the bond markets would be sending a clear signal - they are not.

I have a hard time with lectures about fiscal responsibility from the folks who supported $1 trillion in off the books deficit financed wars. Or $700 billion in TARP money for the Wall Street. Or the Airline bailout after 9/11. Yet when it comes to $30 billion in deficits to support teachers and kids it is "the end of America as we know it." Sigh.

What these clowns should understand (and probably do) is that State and Local Government funding lags the general economy by 3 years. It takes this long for economic swings to be reflected in tax receipts and budgets - particularly property taxes which fund a huge amount of education spending.

That means that we are just entering the worst phase of the recession from local government's perspective. While the general economy may be picking up - SLG needs the ongoing support of the Feds for a year or two more.

Where to from here?

July will tell the tale for school budgets. Normally it is our busiest month of the year. We will see if it signals a pullback to keep what funds schools do have in reserve while States sort out funding priorities in the crisis. That will take some time, meanwhile all our business could suffer.

Is it the end of the world? No - billions will still be spent on education. But decisions will take longer, new initiatives will be fewer and farther between, and genuine reform will be put off for another day. Marginal suppliers will go under, others will have to scale back and hold on. The learning opportunities of a generation will suffer.

As an industry we should not forget this vote. It directly affects our customers in an extraordinarily negative way and it does so for pure political gain. There is no argument that can be sustained about good governance in opposing this bill.

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own.

Common Core Standards (CCS) will have a profound impact on the instructional materials market. The big players like Pearson and McGraw-Hill are on-board as endorsing partners, but smaller supplemental publishers have as much (if not more) to gain if the initiative is successful.

Common standards will reduce structural barriers to entry, reduce costs (and hopefully prices), and make it easier for new players to enter the textbook market. They also make it easier for open source publishing and have the potential to stall the market during implementation.

In this post I am not going to wade into the politics of whether Common Core Standards are good or evil. My goal is to look at this from the potential economic impact on the companies that serve the education market.

Publishing companies will have a major role in the CCS plays out. As the initiative's web site states:

"Standards are not curriculum...The curriculum that follows will continue to be a local responsibility (or state-led, where appropriate). The curriculum could become more consistent from state to state based on the commonality of the standards; however, there are multiple ways to teach these standards, and therefore, there will be multiple approaches that could help students accomplish the goals set out in the standards."

It is also important to note that the CCS only covers Reading Language Arts and Math for now. Since these two subjects account for over 70% of the market from a publisher's standpoint CCS will drive the market. If the RLA and Math standards are successful we can expect the other subject areas to follow in short order anyway.

State of the Market Today

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

Andy Tanenbaum - Computer Scientist

It helps to understand the impact of separate state standards on education publishing as it exists to see why there are compelling reasons to support this effort.

We'll look first at Adoptions and then at Supplemental materials.

1. Competitive Framework: Adoptions have very high upfront fixed costs and a zero sum competition on the back end.

The whole market structure sets up extraordinarily high barriers to entry. You need the capital to develop and sample a program, the staff to reach every district in a state, and a deep backlist to draw FWO materials from.

It can cost $30-$40 million to develop a submission for TX or CA (with rumors of some at $125 million+). Once the materials are developed companies then compete for state endorsement which can take up to a year. If you make the cut publisher then go district by district to win the actual business. All along they are sampling like crazy and flying fleets of people around to present and schmooze.
Budgets are fixed ($35-$75 per student on average) and until very recently the money could only be spent on books, so price competition is low. The textbooks are all developed to the same scope and sequence - meaning they are essentially identical commodities (yeah - a bunch of editorial folks are going to have my scalp for that one).

For a competitive edge publishers sweeten the deal with Free With Order (FWO) materials - software, supplemental texts, test prep, on-line versions etc. With high sunk costs publishers are eager to close as much of the business as they can and the incentives all point towards competing to a marginal profit of zero.

This may sound like a good deal for the schools - but having followed this for some time there are three big downsides many schools don't think about. First - most of this FWO stuff is not top quality. If publishers could charge for it they would. Second - it can make up to 60%-70% of the materials you receive - it will consume your time to figure out what it all is. Third - as a result it goes into a closet and never sees the light of day again. Storage is costly.

Caveat - there are some wonderful materials provided FWO - I'm speaking on average here (ok Editorial - put down the pitchforks and back away slowly...).

2. Writing to state standards favors three very large adoption states - everyone else lives in their world.

Many of the objections to the CCS are around the centralization of decision making. This ignores the reality of the market and the fact that right now 47 states have limited say in the matter.

California, Texas, and Florida dominate the adoption market. Given the high cost of building a program other states get adaptations of the CA/TX/FL books (and yes - there are plenty of exceptions to this rule).

Any text that doesn't address a state's standards fails on the first sales call. The big states use this as power to shape what gets written and how it is organized. Witness the recent dust up in Texas about pulling Thomas Jefferson out of the history standards. California uses its Legal and Social Compliance Review to shape not just what gets published - but how it is presented.

With both California and Florida on the sidelines because of the economic crisis Texas has the field to itself right now. BUT - since Texas exceptionalism led them to sit out the CCS initiative their relative power may be very limited. A consortium of 5-6 mid-size states would trump Texas' market footprint in the eyes of publishers.

3. Supplemental and intervention materials are already written for national audiences - but accommodating competing standards creates mush.

No state is large enough to sustain a focused development effort for supplemental materials. These resources are written for subsets of the larger student population. Publishers usually pull the standards for the big states (see above) and some of the national associations (NCTM e.g.) and write to this mashup. It isn't efficient, it can lead to odd sequencing, and no one gets exactly what they want.

Publishers also end up absorbing the high cost of correlations to individual state standards after the fact. This ends up in pricing. In many of the smaller states publishers can't afford to do a correlation, leaving educators there to guess on whether they are addressing the standards.

This creates a worst of both worlds scenario. Materials are written to standards but articulating how they are correlated is confusing, time consuming, and expensive.

Moving Forward

Why Would Publishers Support Common Standards? The Upside.

Given this context what is in CCS for publishers? Here are just a few that I can think of. Please add more in comments that I've missed.

A simplified business model. By developing for a national audience costs can be spread over a much larger base. This should both improve profitability at the margin and create pricing pressure saving schools money. A Win-Win.

Technology is changing the game - maintaining links to 50 sets of standards that change on different schedules is daunting and expensive ongoing commitment - particularly when the content itself is becoming more dynamic. Even though databases make this easier there are just too many moving parts to manage.

Playing nice with the major funders - most of the money for materials comes from State and Local budgets. Since CCS comes out of the Governors it makes sense to be at the table.

One of the big publishers will also reap outsized rewards on the testing side. If we move to a common set of standards there will be more standardization of high stakes testing.

Smaller publishers will find it easier to enter the market - niches will grow in size when it becomes easier to break out of regional territories.


The Downside
Don't get out the bubbly just yet. There are some potential downsides that publishers need to be wary of as this change moves through the market.

Self-Publishing by a consortium of states. This is hinted at in the language used to promote the project. Given the major push that open source textbooks have been getting recently there is a high probability that some group of states will begin publishing materials through their university systems. All of the ways that CCS helps publishers would also assist this kind of initiative.

New entrants as barriers to entry get smaller. There is a growing interest in the financial community in education. As we move further into a knowledge based economy education is more important than ever. This can take the form of new products (primarily technology) or in the creation of private schools and on-line academies.

Market disarray leads to a stall in purchasing. Another very real risk is that the confusion that will ensue from all the change will cause local decision makers to just sit on their hands. If the transition takes several years - as I expect it will - then this could be a damper on business already damaged by the recession.

Conclusion

On balance publishers have a lot to gain from Common Core Standards. It makes sense to throw our weight behind this effort in the coming years while making sure we are positioned to compete in an era new entrants and more efficient business models.

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made room in his schedule on short notice to keynote the Council for Exceptional Children’s annual convention in Nashville this week it sent a clear message that students with special needs will be front and center in policy decisions from the Obama Administration.

The biggest message was his presence. It left no doubt about how seriously Obama and he feel about improving the lives of students with disabilities. This was welcome because much of the work they have done in this area so far has not been particularly visible.

He laid out a vision for the Administration’s education legislative priorities and the central role that serving people with disabilities will play in ESEA (aka NCLB). The linkages between ESEA and IDEA that were created during the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will also be strengthened and improved.

What follows is a recap of the talk and some thoughts on what this means for the SPED community.

Special Education Is The Civil Rights Issue of Our Generation

He opened by observing that Obama and he believe every child deserves a world-class education. While almost everyone says this, a gap still exists between our aspirations and reality. Subtle prejudices and roadblocks still get in the way of people with special needs.

Most of the talk teed up the idea that we have a historic opportunity to full this promise for all students with the upcoming ESEA and IDEA reauthorizations.

The argument was initially framed around global competitiveness. America simply does not have expendable students if we are going to prosper in an increasingly globalized world.

But he closed this part of the speech by saying that serving students isn’t just about economics. It is a moral issue. In fact he called it “the civil rights issue of our generation.”

He hammered this point home by talking about how the civil rights battles of the 60’s for racial equality paved the way for IDEA in the mid-seventies for people with disabilities. He made a strong statement about how he and Obama are committed to making this promise a reality.

Personally I really appreciated his stand on the role of education in helping people live more fulfilling lives – regardless of the economics. I’m weary of every education policy discussion devolving into how schools are job readiness factories. Of course they are – but they are so much more than that.

Progress Not Perfection

Next he focused on what is working. We have made great strides in the 35 years since IDEA was enacted in making sure a disability shouldn’t stop any child from attending school and pursuing a career.

Students with special needs are no longer turned away at the door, housed in broom closets, or bused to a distant site. Today the 6 million students served by IDEA spend 80% of their time in inclusion classrooms and 95% are in a neighborhood schools.

He told a couple of heartwarming stories of students with special needs learning alongside their peers, eating lunch with them, making friends with them, and demonstrating real leadership in their schools. That society is willing to make this investment sends the message that disabilities alone do not define our work or our worth as human beings. Disabilities are not destiny.

He labeled all these successes are civil rights victories.

First Stop – Enforcement

Duncan at this point pointed out that will all the progress we still have not fulfilled the full promise of IDEA. The data shows us we are getting better – but we must get better faster.

By just about every measure students with disabilities are better educated than just a generation ago. The graduation rate, post secondary enrollment rate, and employment opportunities are increasing but they are all still too low. Students are leaving schools without the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

The Obama Administration intends to work with schools, districts, and states to enforce existing laws. While this was a relatively passing remark it does mark a change in emphasis from prior administrations. Generally speaking enforcement of existing statutes has gotten short shrift over the past couple of decades (the IRS audit budget was cut dramatically while the economy grew).

For publishers who help districts meet their obligations under IDEA and ADA a renewed emphasis on enforcement means your customers will be open to solutions that help them meet both the spirit and the letter of the law.

ESEA Reauthorization Linked To IDEA

Making ESEA a building block for the subsequent IDEA reauthorization isn’t a new concept. Better integration began with NCLB. But it appears that Obama intends to create a much tighter link between the two, in fact Duncan specifically called it “one seamless approach.”

The administration also isn’t going to scrap NCLB. They want to build on what worked, but fix the things that didn’t. Much of this has been reported elsewhere.

What hasn’t gotten much press is that Special Education will be included in ALL aspects of ESEA. This is great news for the community of educators, professionals, parents, and publishers who serve this population. I believe part of why Duncan was willing to make the time to be in Nashville was simply to drive this point home.

There were three areas that he specifically called out with regard to Special Education – accountability, assessment, and teacher quality.

Accountability

SPED will fully participate in ESEA’s accountability systems. NCLB did this right by requiring the participation of all students. This highlighted achievement gaps and forced districts to address populations that were underserved.

But NCLB’s assessment regime had a central flaw - it failed to measure and reward growth. From Duncan’s perspective we shouldn’t label solid progress towards goals as failure. "It is wrong, inaccurate, and demoralizing." A school that progresses from 2 grade levels behind to 1 level behind has NOT failed – but under NCLB it has been labeled as such. He quipped that “NCLB has 50 ways to fail, very few to succeed.”

The new accountability system will be based mostly on student growth and will recognize schools that show meaningful gains. The law will continue to require teaching students with disabilities and schools will also have to improve the performance of the highest achieving students. The focus on subpopulations isn’t going away.

The vast majority of schools will also have more flexibility to implement locally designed ideas to reach the benchmarks. He believes the best ideas come from the local level.

This does not mean that schools with chronic gaps and poor performance get a pass. The school closure in Central Falls RI in February makes clear that Obama backs strong measures where needed.

In an interesting twist this accountability will also escalate to the district level. District level gaps in progress may not be apparent at the school level.

Assessment Grant Competition

In order for this to happen Duncan recognizes that states will have to significantly improve existing assessments – we must move beyond filling the bubble tests.

In the ESEA blueprint and Race to the Top (RTTT) they are putting investments in building the next generation of assessments. He specifically cited including technology to measure a range of skills that have been difficult to measure.

I think more importantly there will be an emphasis on formative assessments which provide real time feedback to improve teaching and learning.

Assessment reform is especially important for special education. The majority of SPED students take the regular state tests and a few can take alternate assessments. Building assessments that are both accessible and deliver meaningful information requires specialized expertise. The DOE will run a competition to improve special education testing tools.

Students with low incidence disabilities require the same quality of assessments but the development of those tools doesn’t make commercial sense given the size of the sub-groups. It makes enormous educational and civil rights sense – so we were pleased to see the government step in to make this possible. We were also excited to see that it will be run as a competition – allowing multiple approaches which will dramatically increase our odds of finding what works.

Teacher Quality

The last area he talked about is recognizing “the uniquely transformative power of good teachers.” The Obama Administration is investing $4 billion in recruiting, training, and retaining teachers. They are going to have a specific focus on high needs areas - which includes SPED.

This is great news because the turnover in Special Ed is so high. The maturity and classroom judgment that come from experience are at a real premium. Recruiting and rewarding teachers who choose this path is something everyone in the special needs community should celebrate.

Saving Education Jobs – Foundation for Reform

A final point. Secretary Duncan echoed his remarks to Congress last week about the pending catastrophe in teacher employment due to plunging state budgets. He made the point that education reform and saving education jobs go hand in hand. At this time we cannot afford to take a step backwards.

I commented on this last week and strongly encourage publishers to get involved in supporting this effort with whatever influence you have or can create in Washington.

Conclusion

It was really nice to see the Administration make a concerted effort to reach out to the professionals who serve students with special needs. It sent a strong message that the progress we have made in recently will not be lost, and in fact should be accelerated as education policy evolves in the next several years.

Watch the excerpts from the speech below:

Federal ARRA stimulus funding has been keeping schools around the country on life support for the past year. Despite significant layoffs around the country it headed off catastrophe in many states. That era is coming to an end later this year or early next year.

It was heartening to see Secretary Duncan take up the cause in a statement issued today. Unless Congress acts and provides a second round the deteriorating tax climate at the state and local level is going to cause massive disruption to the education system in 2011 and beyond.

“We are gravely concerned that the kind of state and local budget threats our schools face today will put our hard-earned reforms at risk,” he stated. “Every day brings reports of layoffs, program cuts, class time reductions, and class size increases.”

Potentially hundreds of thousands of educators and other personnel could be laid off if action is not taken quickly to help states and districts cover shortfalls...Literally, tens of millions of students will experience budget cuts in one way or another.” Moreover, schools, districts and states that are working so hard to improve—will see their reforms undermined by these budget problems.

The Secretary urged members to consider another round of emergency support for America’s schools, similar to the aid provided to states through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). “If we do not help avert this state and local budget crisis,” he warned, “we could impede reform and fail another generation of children.” (emphasis added)

Richard Sims, Chief Economist at the NEA, has spoken clearly on the connection between property values and state and local tax receipts. It takes three years for the funding impact from a change in home values to affect school budgets. In other words - we are just starting to see the most serious impact from the decline that started in 2007. If prices bottom out this summer - which is iffy given a potential wave of foreclosures ahead due to ARMs resetting - it will be 2014 before budgets START to recover.

States can not engage in deficit spending and will balance their budgets on the back of massive teacher layoffs, school closures, etc. In most states education is the single biggest line item and accounts for 50% of the budget. While it is always the last thing Governors want to cut they simply won't have an option in the years to come.

The only cavalry that can save the day here is the Federal Government stepping in with additional deficit spending to prop up education budgets.

• Is the political will there to step and engage in additional deficit spending?
• Will advocates for privatization use this as a political opportunity to destroy public education? Many of these folks are also strongly anti-deficit.
• Will reform efforts be set back decades by draconian cuts?

These are not idle questions as we head into 2011-2014.

This battle will largely be fought in the next 12 months and those of us who serve schools should get shoulder to shoulder with any educational association we have a stake in supporting. Join in this fight!

While we hash out what ARRA Stimulus funds mean for education there are larger issues at play in how we allocate public spending on children.

The New York Times has a good piece today that links to several good resources on this topic.

In a nutshell - 2.2% of GDP declining to 1.9% by 2019.

The tribe gathered, bad coffee was drunk, stale muffins were eaten, and we shared insights and guesses about where education technology and publishing are headed in era of tight budgets and ARRA munificence. It was a typical first week of December in New York.

Here is the first of my overviews of what happened during the week. Subsequently I'll dig into the AEP CEO Roundtable, the MDR Christmas Party, and the AEP Hall of Fame Breakfast.

SIIA Education Technology Business Forum - Tuesday Dec. 1

International

The panel on International Opportunities discussed the trends outside of the US market - the growth of mobile phones as a platform, the demand for professional development to make sure existing investments are being used, and that no one (not even Pearson) can do go international on your own - partnerships are essential.

One point that was almost a throw away at the end but which is critical for companies just starting down the international path - translation is not localization. The management tools, images, and examples all need to be culturally appropriate.

Funniest moment - when Steve Dowling from Pearson was asked how companies smaller than Pearson can take advantage of international opportunities he deadpanned "We'll make you an offer..."

Investment

A second panel "Where are the Investment Dollars?" struggled to answer this question. Short answer - they are not there - come back next year. George Cigale, the moderator, jested in earnest that given what we heard from the investment professionals on the panel that it would be easier to raise $5 million through revenue tied to ARRA than to try to raise capital.

Investors see Education as the last inefficient media market and want to invest in companies that are going to create disruptive innovation. Incumbents who are trying to accommodate the current system need not apply.

Also - if you have already done all the hard work of building a product and proving that the business model works they would be interested in possibly, maybe, looking at it. Next year.

Part of the reason for this hesitance is that while the Stimulus is creating unprecedented opportunities for education companies, it is making valuations problematic since investors rightly see current performance as unsustainable.

My humble suggestion is that until investor groups demonstrate a willingness to actually take some risks alongside entrepreneurs that we stop inviting them to this event. We are like a battered spouse, always hoping they will love us next year if we just try harder. There are many examples of small education companies who have found alternative paths to capitalization - those are the examples we need to be elevating to the podium.

Fundamentally education can be an extremely profitable market with intense long term loyalty. The problem for most investors is that it is all about a mountain of slow nickels rather than a small pile of quick dollars.

We are the proverbial turtle and most investors have the patience of a gerbil. One good outcome (hopefully) of the current downturn is that it will wring some of the quick-buck-at-any-cost mentality out of the investor community. A return to fundamentals will greatly help education.

Post Stimulus Outlook

This panel tackled the question of what a post stimulus market will look like. Richard Sims, Chief Economist for the NEA, shared a frank and rather brutal analysis of what lies ahead for education budgets. The punch line - while real estate started to tank in 2006 it wasn't until 2009 that actual tax receipts started to suffer at the state and local level. There is a three year lag in the funding flow. This matters because 38.5% of education spending comes from real estate taxes.

If the market bottoms out next summer we have 3-4 years of declining state budgets ahead of us. There are 9 additional states who will find themselves in California's shoes in 2010 including NJ. FL, and IL. He projected that it will be somewhere between 2018 and 2020 that we return to 2006 levels of funding. Get used to it.

He was also not as concerned with the debt we are running up - but only if we spend it on things that generate growth in the long term. Debt financing is a common model for companies - and the US has shown before that it can also work for countries.

Companies have to be focused more than ever on the parts of their solutions that help districts be more efficient and that deliver savings over traditional ways of doing things.

Obama's Education Technology Policy

Karen Cator, the new head of Education Technology at the USDOE, spoke about the plan they are assembling to drive technology usage in schools. I'll write in more detail about this later but the bottom line is that the tech plan will focus on enabling the four assurances included in ARRA. They intend to use the bully pulpit to make sure that our tech dollars are going for useful items rather than flashy products that gather dust.

Summary

I came away from the day inspired by the entrepreneurs that are working hard to build interesting businesses in the education market. I also came away chastened by the pessimism of the investment community and hard realities of our economic situation.

Those of us in the business need to get up every morning willing to make a difference in children's lives and focused on doing it in an efficient and sustainable manner.

Technorati Tags: AEP Hall of Fame, Association of Education Publishers, CEO Roundtable, Ed TEch Business Forum, ETBF

Education jobs fell for the first time since 1959 while enrollments were increasing. There were only three other years in the past 50 years where education employment shrank - and all of them were during periods of declining enrollment as the baby boom petered out.

Business Week has the details.

The decline was -0.9%, or 121,000 jobs lost. It is also the biggest drop by a wide margin in both percentage and actual jobs (the previous record was 1981 where it was down -0.4% or 29,000 jobs).

The data doesn't show the breakout between Higher Education and K12 but my hunch is that the data above is masking a much bigger drop in K12 employment. As people lose jobs they flock back to higher education. This means an increase in employment in that sector. I've heard stories from Professors of enrollments increasing 100% in some departments.

Books Sales Take An Even Bigger Hit

Anecdotally the Higher Ed divisions of the major publishers are busy and doing well - particularly in the area of e-books. K12 Basal publishers are feeling the pinch big time and the supplemental market is hit or miss.

Looking at the textbook sales data from AAP we know that K12 sales through July were down -27.6% from 2008 - with the bulk of the pain being felt on the Basal Textbook side. Higher Education sales were down by -19% - and much of this is due to substitution of e-books which has a significantly higher usage rate at Universities.

As I noted a couple of weeks ago the stimulus dollars are reaching some sectors and I suspect that employment - like instructional materials budgets - is up in these submarkets. IDEA and Title 1 are the most notable areas.

A Ray of Sunshine

The scenario isn't all gloom and doom - although if you are teacher with low seniority or a basal sales rep it isn't cheery. Less than 15% of the first wave of the stimulus dollars for education have been encumbered. With 85% yet to come and signs of life across the market we can expect to see some healthy recovery in the next 12 months.

Hopefully for the students we serve this will mean more teachers and high quality materials that support their learning.

My last post on the difficulty of educational reform got me thinking about that other massive system we are trying to reform - healthcare. One way to understand the healthcare system is to compare it to education - where we have had universal single payer access for over 100 years.

In that vein - what would education look like if if it were run like the healthcare system? By transporting our healthcare practices to another environment we can strip away the patina of familiarity and acceptance and see some of the insanity in our system in a harsher light.

Well meaning people can disagree strongly on the specifics of what is needed (and they do). I found as I wrote this that I had to examine my own pre-conceived notions. For example - state funding for education creates some of the same problems the system of private monopolies in medical insurance forces us to wrestle with. The public option in healthcare is the mirror image of charter schools in education - both aim to open up competition and provide alternatives.
There is more than enough idiocy go around here - in what follows we don't spare Doctors/Teachers, Patients/Students/Parents, Politicians, Insurance Companies, and Lawyers.

THE SYSTEM

• We would spend twice as much as any other industrialized country on education and our results would put us at the bottom of the list in learning outcomes. Despite this, many would go around touting that we have the best education system in the world, providing walking talking evidence that we need a better educational system.
• Most people before the age of 65 would not qualify for public education. It would ALL be private schools funded by insurance largely paid for by employers. Parents out of work? See you at the mall kid.
• 18%, or 9.7 million kids, would not qualify for schooling. Enrollment would require evidence of Education Insurance. The uneducated would be encouraged to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by trust fund pundits in the media. Most would have no clue what a bootstrap is (pundits or illiterates).
• Pre-existing ignorance would bar you from receiving affordable education insurance. Failure on any test, quiz, or paper - ever - would be cause for termination of coverage if not disclosed in advance. Students would routinely be subject to recision for ignorance of their own ignorance. This would make sense to people.
• 60% of all bankruptcies would be due to Learning Disabilities and Special Education needs. 60% of these people would have Education Insurance when they discovered their child needed special attention. In order to qualify for subsidized care you would need to go bankrupt, lose your home, or get divorced.
• For uncovered people any learning needs would be covered by intensive personal tutoring provided at "Emergency Learning Rooms." Services in these facilities would cost 10x what regular classroom instruction costs and would be passed on to the insured population as part of their premiums.
• Hordes of 4 year olds getting socialized government education would show up at congressional town halls and throw tantrums about keeping government out of their socialized education....
• While taxes were cut by $1,500 a family per year over the past 10 years private education costs would have risen by over $5,000 per family - a net increase of $3,500. Public subsidized education, which would be a net savings to the average family, would be popular with over 70% of the people. Despite its popularity politicians would refuse to consider it. The profits of their major donors in the education industry would be a higher priority for them.
• Schools would be overflowing with supplies. No need - however specific - would go unmet. Meanwhile, patients in hospitals would be encouraged to hold bake sales for things like sheets, syringes, and bedpans.

EDUCATION INSURANCE

• Education Insurance would consume 25% of the money spent on education for administrative overhead and profits. Free market zombies would earnestly argue that this is efficient. By comparison, administrative costs for socialized education take an average of 5% [as true for Medicare as it is for Education].
• If you needed access to an expert on a particular subject (economics?) you would need permission from your Education Insurance company. This permission would be routinely and randomly denied by insurance company "Ignorance Panels" even if your Homeroom Teacher thought you really needed the information. The bureaucrats making these decisions would fund fierce lobbying efforts to keep more efficient government bureaucrats out of their turf.
• Education Insurance CEO's would each make enough to fund an entire school district every year. Despite the gross inefficiency of their companies [see above], any attempt to challenge this allocation of resources would be met with resistance.
• Education Insurance Companies would operate as monopolies within large sections of the country. Over 90% of the coverage in many states would come from one "provider." Due to strong lobbying efforts congress would exempt these companies would from anti-trust laws.

STUDENTS

• 70% of the money spent on education would occur in the last year of life. Heroic efforts would be made to teach doddering seniors philosophy and particle physics in their waning days. Family savings would routinely be wiped out by intensive technology based instruction over the last couple of weeks of life.
• Efforts to get families to think about spending money at more appropriate developmental stages would be decried as "Ignorance Panels" and would be stripped from any legislation. Grandparents would beg their heirs to keep them from memorizing the state capitals in their final hours.
• There would be no incentives for people with access to insurance to make good educational choices. If you have education insurance there would be no difference in cost regardless of the lifestyle choices you make. Reality show addicts who avoid anything involving the written word would pay the same as those who watch PBS or do crosswords. Ignorance would be bliss.
• The concept of preventive learning to help people better themselves would be seen as an non-reimburseable personal choice under most Education Insurance plans. Electives would only be available to the economic elite.
• Many of the wealthy would purchase cosmetic learning - fooling no one but themselves.

TEACHERS

• Teachers Unions would be some of the strongest advocates for reform. They would beg for more accountability and a rigorous focus on outcomes.
• Teachers would charge by the learning objective and would make commissions from the testing and textbook companies. The faster they rush through lessons and the more tests and materials they could order during the process the more money they would make.
• It would take 8 years to become a teacher, including a couple of years of 24 hour teaching shifts.
• Teachers would not receive a tenured position after 2-5 years on the job. They would be subject to the labor market fluctuations just like everyone else.
• But - as licensed professionals - teachers would be paid 2-3 times what they make today.
• Society would accept a system of Educational Malpractice suits against teachers. "We'd signed him up for Chemistry but it conflicted with Calculus" complained a typical set of parents. "So they slotted him into English Literature and now he wants to be a Romantic Poet. The lifetime costs of this tragic shift in interest are in the millions of dollars - its only fair that we get some help with this."

IN CLOSING

I hope this attempt to examine this question with a little humor has opened some eyes. It could have gone on much longer - but I hope this makes my point. Universal access to education has on the whole been a huge success in our society. We should have universal access to healthcare as well for many of the same reasons. But the most fundamental reason to reform healthcare is that it is a moral challenge to our culture, in the same way education is.

Analogy is an effective educational strategy - with the ability to speed comprehension in the same way a power drill speeds home repair work. But it also has its limits. This has been a fun post to write - but I have no doubt it offended some people I hold near and dear. If I have - my apologies.

Education has its own share of thorny issues - and the pressure there is in the opposite direction of healthcare - towards more privatization. But given the out of control costs, gross inequality, and life and death impact, healthcare is the higher priority. It is good that we are tackling it first.
The fight over education reform will come up next year when the education act is up for renewal. Perhaps then we'll reverse this lens and see what Healthcare would look like if we ran it like education.

The Superintendent's panel at EdNet this week featured a discussion about education reform that was like a cold bucket of water to the face.

The Supers were teaching us about inertia, the tendency of objects to maintain their current state. As Newton himself put it:

The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.

The panelists were discussing what will change in the next 5-10 years in education. They were looking globally at the overall system (teacher evaluation, bell schedule, technology, instructional materials, funding flows, etc.). In this context the Superintendent of one of the largest districts in the country (LACOE), in a state (CA) that is experiencing a state of extreme financial distress, stated that she didn't think anything significant would change until we had a "major crisis."

If what we are experiencing right now isn't a major crisis I shudder to think what the hell would fit the definition? National bankruptcy? Nuclear Holocaust?

The Superintendents do expect to see change, but it will be small bore. They believe meaningful reforms will happen on a pioneer basis in a few schools and districts. But the larger issue of systemic education reform will require an even greater crisis than we currently have.

The system is so large and has so much inertia that even those with the will and positions to drive change don't hold out much hope for progress.

Think about that.

Student Information Systems (SIS) and Data Warehouses (DWS) are the bedrock enterprise software systems in K12 school districts. The K12 Decision Support Systems Market Report is now available. The 118 page report is based on a survey of over 300 district level IT Directors.

ARRA Accountability Market Intelligence

Given the strong emphasis in ARRA on data-driven decision making (D3M) and accountability auditing, the information in this study will provide valuable insight into a market with an urgent and well funded need. The report is a map of territory that has been uncharted.

The Education Recovery site states the stimulus funds will be carefully audited:

ED will hold ARRA fund recipients accountable through reporting and monitoring...ED will monitor all ARRA programs throughout the life of the grants...This includes annual reporting of participation and performance data and site visits to many States.

How will this happen? We know from the report that 93% of Districts have an SIS and that over 75% use their SIS or DWS as their primary reporting tool for NCLB accountability reporting. Nothing else even comes close. The detailed breakout is in the study.

Report Content

The information is tailored for the needs of SIS and DWS vendors, partners, investors, and policy makers.

The report covers:

• Market share trends
• Intent to purchase by segment in the next 36 months
• Brand awareness and market momentum
• Customer satisfaction levels and causes
• Pricing models and preferences
• Product lifecycle
• Implementation models and timing
• District IT infrastructure (including SIF implementation)
• And much much more.

See here for a complete table of contents.

This study builds on the popular 2003 SIS Trends and Opportunities Report. I have had many requests over the years for a follow up study to show how the SIS market is evolving. The new report leverages the 2003 information to provide a longitudinal view of the SIS market.

As the folks at Educational Systemics and I considered our options we decided that we also needed to cover the emerging market for Data Warehouses. Many districts have installed these systems in the past 7-8 years and we wanted to know what this important new segment of the market looks like. We added a section to the report for this market segment and the insights we gleaned should be useful for decision makers as they evaluate what is next.

Purchase Information

More details about the report are available at K12-Decision-Support.com. You can purchase off the site using any major credit card. Important - SIF, SIIA, and AEP members get at 15% discount.

The 118 page PDF (1.5 mb) will be mailed to you within 24 hours and is for distribution within the buying organization.

You can also contact me with any questions you have about the report by emailing me at info@k12decisionsupport.com.

Many Thanks

Any project of this scope is a collaboration among many people.

• The team at Market Data Retrieval (MDR) were fantastic sponsors who provided a helping hand at many crossroads.
• Our media sponsor Technology & Learning provided the valuable initial lift to get the project going and will be reporting out some of the findings in their magazine and web site.
• Educational Systemics was critical during the survey design phase - making sure we got the questions right. They will be providing follow up consulting services to those who are interested.
• Larry Nelson stepped in at a critical time and wrote the Data Warehousing section.

The patience and persistence of this crew insured that this important information would see the light of day.

We'll be blogging here and over at the report site on some of the high level findings in the next few weeks. Be sure to add both sites to your RSS if you are interested in following this thread.

Doug Stein of Memespark has some commentary to share on ARRA and innovation.

By Guest Blogger Doug Stein

I don’t know if you saw this article. It details how one district is spending the ARRA education stimulus money:

• Most of the 6.5 million will be spent to keep teachers in place
• 1.4 million in Title I will be used to outfit all K-5 classrooms in Title I schools with:

• SMARTboards
• Clickers
• Audio systems
• FASTT Math (Tom Snyder’s LAN-based system)

• SMARTboards in all 9th grade remedial Algebra and English
• $51,700 to hire one technology teacher to train the other teachers…

In other words, nothing much will change in how they educate. SMARTboards are a great *sustaining* innovation that (with the right software) makes the “sage on the stage” more engaging (and hopefully more effective). Unfortunately, in themselves they won’t help drive disruptive innovations such as adaptive or differentiated instruction.

Multiply this by thousands of districts and we’ll have spent a lot of money putting lipstick (and Chanel) on the pig.

To be fair, the one-time nature of the money would mitigate against using it to fund long-term programs; it’s always easiest to spend one-time money on things where you can point-and-grunt to prove you didn’t’ waste it. I’m still hoping some insightful districts will use it instead to “lubricate” the transition to better educational models.

[Lee's note: I'm hoping many companies also use the one time boost in sales to respond to the disruptive changes the industry is facing regardless of the economic climate. This is an opportunity to drive change for our customers and for ourselves.]

Serendipitously the New York Times published a front page article yesterday about "The Story of Stuff", a short movie about man's impact on the environment. It makes the point I was after in Sunday's post about the power of story-line in instructional materials. The movie has gone viral globally (7 million views) because it encapsulates the lesson in a broader narrative that kids (and grown ups) can connect to their own lives.

Some quotes from the article that support the contention that we can use stories more effectively in instruction and that we can trust kids to make up their own minds when given a chance to.

"...many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years."

"Mark Lukach, who teaches global studies at Woodside Priory, a Catholic college-preparatory school in Portola Valley, Calif., acknowledged that the film is edgy, but said the 20-minute length gives students time to challenge it in class after viewing it....Mr. Lukach’s students made a response video and posted it on YouTube, asking Ms. Leonard to scare them less and give them ideas on how to make things better. That in turn inspired high school students in Mendocino, Calif., to post an answer to Woodside, with suggested activities."

Ironically Missoula banned the movie because of something they call "academic freedom" but which is the direct opposite of it. They banned it because it is one sided and biased and isn't kind to Capitalism. Rather than bring in competing narratives and letting the kids decide (academic freedom) they prefer to have watered down he said/she said materials that sacrifice academic freedom to "balance." I'm confident Capitalism can withstand this little movie, too bad the burghers of Missoula think it is shakier than that.

If you don't think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization - for them the fight is over the truth. My goal in this piece is not to take sides in this argument (I do have one) but to talk about the power of story-line in instruction.

"And The Moral of the Story Is..."

Theories, metaphors, legends, myths, etc. are all attempts to impose order on our perception of the world. These stories give us a shared shorthand to help us make decisions about how to think and act. Without the moment of "oh this is like the time when x did y in the story about z" we'd forever be stuck deciding what to do next - stories help us be efficient. It is so wired that our brains even make up stories when we are sleeping - dreams may not make literal sense to our left brain but our pattern seeking right brain has the steering wheel during those hours.

One of the challenges of publishing in a world of standards designed by committees is that it is often hard to detect the broad story-line since those standards represent a series of compromises. This is particularly problematic in arenas where fundamental questions are discussed (like evolution). We end up with the intellectual equivalent of milk toast rather than chewy rye.

This is very similar to the critiques heard frequently in the blogosphere about the "he said she said" nature of TV reporting where every issue has to have two equal sides. As Daniel Moynihan quipped "people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." The credibility of TV reporting suffers because we know at a deep level that the way they present things is not real. Many instructional materials suffer from the same credibility destroying "balance."

If we look outside of education at the arenas where people get their information they are all dominated by story-lines - TV, books, video games, movies, blogs, and arguably twitter (@ingenbio is active again - great use of twitter to tell a story). But - when we publish textbooks we run from story-lines to avoid controversy.

The Problem

As a publisher, the business case for avoiding many story-lines (and the controversy that comes with them) is pretty compelling. We can't afford to alienate factions on the decision making committees. Bland is safe. Publishers are lining up to print something that will cover the bases in Texas.

Many educators are wary of stories because they have frequently been used to impose one perspective. This approach can stray into outright propaganda. Just because something is presented as a story-line does not mean it is true, or good, or useful (the Nazi's had a strong story-line).

But, looking at it from an instructional perspective, avoiding story-line removes one of the most powerful teaching tools we have. Story-line taps a fundamental structure of the mind. We end up with a meandering thread of facts and fictions that don't hang together.

We end up with the modern textbook. Meh.

Fear vs. Trust

It strikes me that the motivating force to avoiding strong story-lines in instructional materials is fear. Fear that learners will accept as truth ideas which we might see as dangerous. Fear that the teacher won't be equipped to get students to probe deeply and develop critical thinking. Fear that a teacher will propagandize students. Fear that we will lose the sale to a safer alternative. Fear that our world view might not be as solid as we want/need it to be.

Actions motivated by fear almost always make the world a smaller place. Bland instructional materials avoid controversy, but they are not as effective as they could be. In the global economy we can't afford to sacrifice effectiveness to fear.

The opposite of this kind of fear is trust. Trust that learners can critically judge information. Trust that teachers will respect different view points. Trust that our worldview can be challenged and that we can grow if needed. Trust that our materials will be effective enough that we can win business against "safer" alternatives. When we trust our world gets larger but we wade into controversy, we embrace debate, and we challenge ourselves to grow. This isn't always fun, but it is more effective in the long run because it makes us stronger.

Most schools expose students to the story-line the Nazi's spun along with the facts of what transpired when people acted on it. There is deep learning in this approach. In this case, presenting them with the story and facts serves as an intellectual inoculation. If we shrink in fear that some students might find that story compelling (sadly some will) we avoid the larger benefit of a shared understanding that we need to fight this kind of thinking when we encounter it again (sadly we will).

Reading the Tea Leaves

I suspect we will see strong story-lines creeping back in via non-traditional media first. Look to formats like video games which are inherently story telling platforms (even if it is as silly as getting the jewels from the lobster people to free the princess). I believe the engagement that comes from a good story is part of the reason games have shown disproportionate impact on struggling learners - the story gives their mind something to adhere to as the learning is going on. This binding thread is missing in the textbooks which have failed these students.

As starting points look to Chris Dede's work on River City or Constance Steinkuhler's work on scientific discourse in World of Warcraft for more on this. Go visit the nutrition area on Whyville where students get their avatars purposely ill to learn what healthy eating looks liike. Heck - look at the enduring success of Oregon Trail.

This isn't an easy problem to solve. Traditional publishers will follow the lead of the market even when there is compelling evidence to support change. Educators operate in a political arena that makes controversial innovation difficult.

What should Texas do regarding the Evolution controversy? If we operate from trust students should be exposed to all the competing story-lines and they should be presented in their strongest contexts (e.g. evolution in the science classroom, creationism in comparative religion). From this robust exchange students should be free to weave their own story together in a way that makes their lives meaningful. If we don't trust them to do this we make their world a smaller place.

-----------

Related Post Developing Reading Fluency = Grinding in Video Games

Relevant Excerpt - "Many (not all) low performing students don't have a story thread in their lives that helps motivate them to grind in school (doing homework). Students who are high achievers generally have a story line that is central to their identity that gives the grind meaning and a purpose. Without that story line much school work is just tedium."

----------- Other Resources

"The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling" (Rives Collins, Pamela J. Cooper)

"The Power of Story: Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny in Business and in Life" (Jim Loehr)

One of the fundamental shifts No Child Left Behind (NCLB) caused in Special Education was accountability for teaching reading, math, science, and social studies.

Traditionally many Special Ed classrooms focused on life skills - the functional skills students with intellectual disabilities need to live as independently as they can. Academics were not the focus. Because students in SPED are now tested and factored into schools' AYP calculations this has changed.

MAINSTREAM MATERIALS MISS THE MARK

Most mainstream publishers responded to this by "dumbing down" their existing textbooks and materials or adding a few accommodation and modification tips. Special Ed publishers had catalogs full of life skills products but were short on academics. The result has been a gap in resources to help educators teach academics and functional skills side by side.

With the exception of a couple of states, there also has not been any clear guidance on an appropriate scope and sequence for teaching academics to students with low incidence disabilities.

From what we understand of the priorities of the new administration, no matter what happens to NCLB in the reauthorization, this challenge will remain.

At root the mainstream publisher approach doesn't work because just taking the reading level down and providing some additional guidance in the Teacher's Guide doesn't solve the specific needs of these students. This may work well for students who are 1-2 grade levels behind - but any more than that and this approach breaks.

WHY?

There are a three primary reasons.

First - these students move at a different pace. Even when the accessibility of the materials is improved, the pacing remains the same as the mainstream materials. In many cases this isn't realistic. These students need to practice a skill 100 times not 10 in order to master it and retain it in long term memory.

Second - the repetition required for SPED isn't accounted for in the mainstream materials - not even close. As one of the speakers at this year's CEC stated "[students with intellectual disabilities] get bored too." This is why many of the life skills products traditionally have been engaging games or hands-on activities that stand up well to repeated use. Doing a worksheet for the 50th time isn't a lot of fun.

Third - even where highly qualified teachers are available, the person working directly with a student is often a paraprofessional. If the student has been mainstreamed, then the regular teacher may not be aware of the recommended differences in instructional approach. In both cases, instructional materials require more teacher scaffolding to be effective than that found in regular education products.

WHAT TO DO?

At PCI we are tackling this on multiple levels to help schools meet this challenge.

1. We are publishing comprehensive curricula that address the academic standards and seamlessly integrate life skills objectives. For example, our Environmental Print series coming out this summer teaches the meanings of common signs found around a community using stories and symbols while also addressing language arts standards. Students learn about main character and what to do when they see a Stop sign at the same time.

The PCI Reading Program is another option for those students who have not had success with Phonics or Whole Language instruction. It is a sight words program tailored specifically for students with developmental disabilities, autism, or significant learning disabilities.

Both programs come with direct instruction support for when the materials are being used by paraprofessionals.

2. Our new Academic Curriculum Framework is a curriculum framework aligned to states standards that provides guidance to educators about what should be covered in every grade for students with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities.

3. For more specific needs, we create turnkey kits of materials aligned to standards that help address Language Arts, Math, Science, and/or Social Studies. Since we distribute over 7,500 products from 200 publishers in the Special Education space we can assemble a complete kit to fit virtually any need. We've even put a Turbo Solutions Builder on our website to allow educators to build these kits on their own.

We are finally starting to close the gap in materials and guidance to help educators meet the twin goals of teaching academic skills and life skills to low incidence populations.

Note: This post is related to my role at PCI Education.

What impact will the economic stimulus have on educational materials and technology? A front page New York Times article yesterday left no doubt that education will be a significant part of the legislation. The Times reports that the total education allocation could be as much as $75-$95* billion a year over current allocations for the next two years. In sector that accounts for about $530 billion in total expenditures, 92% of which has traditionally come from state and local taxes, this represents a seismic shift in the Federal Government's influence on the market.

The questions executives in the industry have to wrestle with are how much of the total will be spent on instructional materials, when will funds flow, and what products will schools buy? The answers to these questions will drive investments, hiring, and M&A for the next couple of years.

I've talked to a few folks around the industry to see what people are thinking and the notes below represent a collective set of insights. It is still early days, the legislation probably won't be in a final format until mid to late February, but many companies are making decisions now about their '09 plans.

How Much Will Be Spent on Instructional Materials?

Historically about 1%-2% of education funding is spent on textbooks and supplemental resources and another 1%-2% is spent on education technology. 70%-80% of education funding goes to salaries. The question is will those ratios hold up with this new funding?

I'm betting that the percentage for materials and tech will be higher than normal - 4%-6% of the total is an educated guess. The bulk of the funds will still go to salaries - but it won't be for hiring, it will used to avert layoffs. Schools really don't like to hire people with transitory funds. Between unions and other requirements if they can't see sustained funding they will use the rest of the funds for infrastructure and other one-time purchases. A good chunk will also go to construction and deferred maintenance which could should boost the technology side of the equation.

Education companies have no compunction about scaling up and down based on market conditions - witness the efforts around any major adoption on the upside or the rolling layoffs at HRH on the downside. If the goal is creating new jobs quickly steering funds to instructional materials will have an immediate impact.

Rather than a contraction it is possible that we could actually see growth in our sector this year. If the annual increase is $80 billion then anywhere from $3 b to $4.7 b could flow to materials and technology. At least half of that would replace funds that have been cut or allocated elsewhere already, so the net impact could be $1b to $2.3 b in increased spending, or about 10% growth in the market. This would create a lot of publishing jobs if it happens.

If I'm wrong and the traditional ratios hold then we'd see flat sales year over year as the infusion replaces funds that the states have cut or will be cutting soon. Either way the stimulus is good news for education companies.

One huge caveat is that it is possible that states that are particularly strapped (e.g. California and Florida) would use the Federal infusion into education to move funds they would have spent there to other parts of their budgets. This could result in no net improvement or still a contraction in education spending depending on how dire their overall budgets are. If you have significant sales in one of these states you should pay particular attention to how the stimulus is implemented locally.

When Will Schools Start Spending?

The consensus is that the impact on publishers will be fairly immediate even if the federal funds don't start flowing for a few months. Most School Districts are sitting on budgets that were allocated and approved last year - in other words the funding is there, they just aren't spending it. Once Administrators are confident that the new money will be available from the Feds they are likely to restart spending from their current budgets. Since the significant portion of the education buying cycle is still ahead of us we may actually see a fairly normal year through August.

Note that any indecision about how to implement the program at the state level could delay schools releasing current funds until those questions are resolved.

The implication for companies is that you should be out working the pipeline for the big deals that could close in May-August. If the bill passes in February by late April or May you should start to have a handle on how schools are going to react and you can adjust at that time.

What Products Will Schools Buy?

The impact will be uneven across the industry. In this economic climate and with these funds there are types of products that will do better and some subject areas that will be favored.

Because the funding is only for a couple of years Districts will be loathe to commit to anything that requires ongoing expenditures. This means that subscription products and products that have big annual support fees or large infrastructure requirements won't do as well as one time purchases. A print reading program will probably beat out a subscription based on-line reading program in this climate because it costs less and it is a one time purchase.

By subject area the goals of NCLB aren't disappearing so expect to see an ongoing focus on Reading and Math. STEM is also a clearly stated priority of the new administration (see Obama's statements) so I would expect to see a heightened priority in this area. Many states are now testing Science which would couple local pressure with Federal priorities.
The legislation is also targeting existing programs that have been historically considered partially funded mandates - notably Title 1 (economically disadvantaged schools) and IDEA (Special Education). These are long term federal priorities in education and do not require extended arguments over program design and implementation. Focusing here is smart politics if the goal is getting funds released quickly.

Companies that provide professional development may also do well since Title 1 has significant set asides for training. One of my contacts also speculated that Districts might be willing to invest more in their current teachers by hiring contractors to be in the buildings doing longitudinal on-site PD for the next couple of years rather than hiring new staff.

Conclusions

This legislation is good news for our industry. At a minimum it may replace funds that have been cut by the states and on the upside it could actually create some growth in the market. Companies that provide products with a one-time purchase that target core subject areas and can be purchased with Title 1 or IDEA funds should do very well indeed.

If you would like to disagree or add something to the conversation please post a comment or send me a guest blog post. Guest posts are very welcome, if you would like to know more please send me a note.

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*A note on the numbers. The total federal education budget under the legislation could be as much as $150 billion a year for the next two years. Since the Feds are already spending about $60 billion we have structured this analysis around the incremental $80-$90 billion.

The ideas presented here are speculative, general, and are not business advice. The implications for any specific company should be analyzed to craft a specific response to the market. Full disclaimer here.

In my post about Barack Obama's focus on early childhood education I noted that the gap between low performers and high performers gets much more difficult to bridge as students get older. Obama's early learning proposals are pragmatic because they aim to close the achievement gap when it is easiest and most effective.

Michelle King, today's guest blogger, makes the important point that it is the relative gap not the absolute gap that presents a challenge to teachers. Michelle is an administrator at a large urban school district and a former 1st Grade bilingual teacher.

Michelle's insights amplify the urgency for intervening in the early grades. She also points towards a Response to Intervention (RTI) program that is addressing this challenge here in Texas.

The original post "Obama and Early Childhood Education" is here.

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Guest Post by Michelle King

As stated in Lee's post, oral language may be “hard wired” but it is still very much in development at the primary grade levels, especially for English Language Learners that are building oral language skills in their native and second language.

Retaining a student is never a decision that is taken lightly. The original post states that “When a student drops out in 10th grade the cause can be traced all the way back to 2nd grade or even Kindergarten”. The fundamental struggle faced by primary grade teachers is how to close the gap for a struggling learner lacking the foundations of literacy while still promoting him to the next grade level? Most educational research today discourages the practice of grade retention.

In Barack Obama’s backyard, a 2004 research study from the University of Chicago indicates students that were retained, regardless of the grade in which retention occurred, have a higher likelihood to drop out in 10th grade when peer pressure is at a particularly heightened level and academics are increasingly rigorous.

The gaps of struggling students at the K-2 level may seem small compared to the widening trend in the upper elementary and middle school levels, however, teachers in Grades 1 and 2 have real challenges in the achievement gap from day one. 

I taught students that didn't know how to spell their own name (or even recognize the letters) sitting next to students that were reading the latest Harry Potter book.  Couple that challenge with the fact that kids don't get naps or extra recess as they did in Kindergarten, they are expected to sit at an assigned desk with their assigned textbooks, and have nightly homework while still trying to learn how to tie shoes and keep track of their favorite pencil. 

Although I agree the primary focus in K-3 is on acquiring basic skills in reading and math, teachers in K-3 are expected to teach Science and Social Studies while promoting literacy and math skills development.  A good teacher knows how to integrate curriculum to get the most bang for their instructional buck (think Johnny Appleseed) but that means less time for rote skill building and core subject instruction.

With the focus on high stakes testing and AYP, the shift in public schools understandably moved towards reading and math intervention at the upper elementary level and middle school levels.  Yet what we are seeing now is the achievement gap is actually growing at the middle school level because the K-2 teachers were left behind to pull up struggling learners with limited outside help (aside from gracious volunteers and the occasional tutoring opportunity for the highest of high-need students).

Enter the state's Response to Intervention program.   Here in my Texas school district, our 2008-09 RTI efforts are in initially in the Language Arts domain with a particular focus on grades 1, 2 and 3 (with other grades and content areas being phased in over time).  This is coming not one day too soon.
 
It all starts with the basics and the amazing teachers in early childhood education.  These teachers may not be the data leaders of the school but they certainly play a major role in setting the stage for student success in the years to come.

The original post "Obama and Early Childhood Education" is here.
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Michele King is the Administrative Coordinator of Instructional Support for a large Texas urban school district. Ms. King oversees the district's instructional management system and serves as the C&I liasion for a variety of technology-driven district initiatives. She taught as a first grade bilingual teacher while earning her Masters in Education from Texas State University. Prior to entering the education profession, Ms. King spent ten years as a manager and consultant for a variety of technology-focused companies.

The views expressed in this column are the personal beliefs of Ms. King based on her teaching experience and do not necessarily reflect those of the district for whom she is employed.

Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important.

Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets so wide that it becomes much harder to bridge it. The chart below illustrates this concept.

[This chart is for illustrative purposes only]

In the early grades - K-3 - the focus is on acquiring basic skills in reading and math. As soon as the shift to applying those skills to learning other subjects occurs in 4th and 5th grade the gap begins to widen. By the time students have reached 7th grade it is often so great that only heroic efforts can help. When a student drops out in 10th grade the cause can be traced all the way back to 2nd grade or even Kindergarten. Obama's experience in the Chicago Public Schools taught him this lesson.

We can see this clearly in the product lines of the supplemental publishers. Their materials for the early grades are mostly targeted interventions, what a friend dubbed "workbookity" stuff. Their materials for secondary schools are comprehensive alternative textbooks. In secondary schools the gap has widened so far that you can't teach all students with the same textbook because the low performers simply can't read it.

Oral language is hard wired into humans but reading and writing are acquired skills - very similar to music in that practice helps enormously. Hence the focus on fluency in the National Reading Panel's report. By the time students reach the 6th grade students who read regularly have often read at least 1 million more words than students who do not. That makes a huge difference.

So targeting the early grades - when the gap can be closed quickly and easily - is an essential part of school reform. Yes - it will take 12 years to see the benefits - but they will be long lasting throughout the lives of the children who benefit. I believe Obama has got this issue right.

Does this mean that there is no hope for kids in the higher grades? Absolutely not. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about video games for learning is that the research out of Harvard and other universities who are studying this topic shows that it disproportionately benefits students in the lower third of performance and that the biggest benefits come in the middle school years. The Tabula Digita study out of Florida is only the latest in a string of studies suggesting that this one way to reach these kids. One other interesting finding - for every 2 hours that kids play game they spend an hour reading about them.

Information is expanding exponentially. Applying database concepts to your information diet can mean the difference between overload and sanity, chaos and productivity. Database fluency is mandatory in a digital world. Students and teachers should be practicing and refining this skill so that today's learners can make the most of the sea of data they swim in.

Almost anything you encounter in digital format can be managed using database techniques. At their root Facebook (relationships), iTunes (music, movies, tv, books, etc.), del.icio.us (bookmarks), flickr (photos), Moodle (lesson plans, learning management), and We Are Teachers (referrals) share a common database DNA. Even blogs through their categories and tag clouds are databases.

Email is an example. Treat the sender's address as a data point. Then set up rules (database queries) to have all your boss's emails sent to a high priority folder and Aunt Mabel's political ravings sent straight to the trash. This approach allows you to target the urgent items amidst a sea of dross.

The Education Need

Educators and educational publishers have a vital role to play in our move to a database driven world. Why?

• Students need to develop database fluency if they are going to get the most out of their digital lives. Learning Management Systems (LMS), social networks, and on-line research are all core tools for 21st Century education. Database fluency should become part of the curriculum along with textual, numerical, and visual fluencies.
• Teachers need access to networks of peers, experts, and content to be able to deliver on the promise of individualized instruction.
• Administrators and Policy Makers need to measure results across groups and efficiently allocate resources.

Every one of these needs is best met by a database and fluent users.

The Goal

The end result should be personal growth, valued relationships, and effective organizations. But in the first flush of widespread adoption we are losing sight of this. Consider the statement "I "friended" 1,000 people on Facebook therefor I have 1,000 friends." Wrong. Many people are confusing the database with their relationships.

A teacher could take the Facebook example above and build an interesting set of discussions around the meaning of friendship, how to find a small network of people who are interested in the same things you are, what you can do to contribute, and how to manage the relationships that emerge. It isn't creating huge numbers of meaningless connections that matters - it is finding the needles in the haystack of humanity that you want to build bonds of friendship with.

Database Fluency

What is database fluency - what are the core skills proficient users need to master?

• Ubiquity - See every digital file you touch as a potential data point. Emails, MP3 files, Word documents, student records, and your photos are all potential data points.
• Searching - Understanding how to craft logical questions that return useful information takes ongoing practice ("and", "or", "greater than", "before", etc.). Learning to to harness the advanced search features almost all applications have is another part of this skill.
• Homing - The ability to find what is meaningful and valuable in large data sets by asking the right questions at the right time. Is this a reliable source? How recent is the data? Does this address the question I set out to answer? Is it usable or a tangled mess? How does it compare with other results?
• Tagging - Users tag data elements to personalize them. This can be through formal taxonomies provided by the database author ("Male, Female") or informal folksonomies created on the fly by users (flickr tag clouds). Since tagging is so open-ended having some basic rules in place can help insure you are able to use the tag cloud later to search the data.
• Cleaning - Any collection of data gets messy after a while - knowing how to clean your data just like you clean your room is an essential part of working with large data sets. Without maintenance your searching and tagging get bogged down.
• Reporting - Creating clear usable reports that make the point you are after is an important part of turning data into information and eventually into wisdom. When is a table better than a bar chart? Should I focus on 5 or 500 names?

None of this involves database programming. That is a skill more akin to auto mechanics - I don't need to know how to tune my engine to drive a car. I also don't need to know SQL to use a social networking site. However, for driving and networking I do need to know the rules of the road and how navigate where I want to go.

How these elements appear in different applications varies widely - understanding the underlying dynamics helps harness their power across many environments.

RSS readers click through to see the full article - 3 detailed examples that bring these concepts to life and some suggestions on where to start.

Continue reading "Database Fluency - Core Skill for the 21st Century" »

The Obama and McCain campaigns squared off at the Great American Education Forum sponsored by the Association of Education Publishers (AEP)* in Washington DC today. Educational policy experts from the campaigns addressed a wide range of positions the candidates are staking out from vouchers to the federal role in education.

Jeanne Century, Director of Science Education, University of Chicago represented the Obama campaign and Lisa Keegan, former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction represented Senator McCain. A panel of publishing industry experts** posed questions followed by a press conference. This is the first head to head discussion of education priorities between the two campaigns.

Given that Education is consistently rated as one of the top 2-3 issues (Pew May 29th) it is surprising that it hasn't been more visible in the campaign trail so far. The forum was valuable because differences in approach, philosophy, and policy emerged during the discussion.

On most of the issues the differences between the candidates positions are more matters of emphasis. Generally speaking the McCain position is that we already know what works, we just need to let the states sort that out and help them do more of it. Obama wants to take a more pro-active and comprehensive approach to addressing not just K12 but lifelong learning. Both camps support helping teachers be more professional and helping them follow best practices that help kids prepare for the 21st Century.

Follow below the fold for a detailed look at the positions of the campaigns. RSS readers click through for the full article.

Continue reading "The Great Education Debate - Obama vs. McCain at AEP" »

What do large school districts need from ed-tech providers? Michael Casserly Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools spoke at the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference this week in San Francisco. The speech was direct, honest, and well balanced in tackling some difficult issues like NCLB.

Towards the close of the speech he made the following 10 requests of the Ed-Tech community. I've added my perspective from the industry's side of the conversation.

1. Provide tools that build academic vocabulary and develop high order thinking skills. I found this an interesting request given that all the major publishers and several mid and small sized publishers have materials that do all of these things. Either we are not meeting the real need with our products or we are not getting the word out effectively. This should give all of these providers cause to reflect on their offerings and their go-to-market strategies.

2. Provide targeted intervention materials for Special Education (SPED) and English Language Learners (ELL) - specifically age appropriate materials targeting different ability levels. This is a similar problem to issue #1, there are a fair number of existing resources in the market already, but most of them are print based. One area where technology could make a huge difference is flexibly scaling basal textbook content to the student's ability level. Doing this with print presents two intractable problems - the sheer number of variations needed is prohibitively expensive and the stigma associated with the lower level books causes kids to resist using them. On-line everyone is in the same application and the number of variations is limited only by the sophistication of the software engine.

3. Develop virtual environments to stimulate inquiry based learning when the real materials would be too expensive or dangerous. This is an exciting area with a lot of activity. My article in Cable in the Classroom covered this very ground. Virtual worlds do present a challenge in districts with high poverty around equity of access to technology. The path of least resistance here may be cell phone based interfaces similar to what is happening in Japan and Europe.

4. More group learning resources using technology. Honestly - I was writing like crazy and missed the substance of this request. If you were there and recall please explain in the comments. [Update: see Charlene Blohm's take on this in comments.]

5. Clarity from publishers on what our materials do and don't do. There is a feeling that technology vendors have either over-promised or omitted important product shortcomings. Fair enough. The temptation is always there for vendors to do this - but in the conversation economy it can be deadly. Trust is the coin of the realm. Sales Management has a responsibility to set the right tone of integrity and honesty.

6. Provide clear alignments to standards in a deep and meaningful way. They would also like to know where we don't meet the standards - don't force them to figure it out on their own. Vendors might be more inclined to do this if we feel that it is more than a check-off item. The cost of doing correlations and maintaining them is significant and yet from what we can tell once they are submitted they are never used again. We do this little Morris Dance around the standards and then districts buy the book with the prettiest cover.

7. Stick by them - they are in it for the long haul and they need business partners to trudge that road with them. This is a legitimate request but a hard one to implement due to the management turmoil many large districts suffer from on an ongoing basis. It can take years to position a sale in a large district only to see it derailed by a reorganization or funding re-allocation. Only the largest publishers can make this kind of sustained commitment which limits the range of innovative solutions that the large districts see.

8. Longitudinal follow up with effective professional development. He also requested that we bundle PD into the cost of the products - if PD is an add-on option there is the temptation to skimp in this area. This request is consistent with the thesis that we are going to see a Negroponte switch to districts paying for PD and getting the materials for free. Of course, the easiest way for districts to insure that this happens is to issue their RFPs with PD bundled in. Until that happens vendors who are competing on price are going to leave it out. Amplifying this temptation is the fact that PD is frequently the item with the lowest contribution margin at publishers and ed-tech vendors.

9. We should resist customizing our products for one district - too many districts have had been left behind on legacy code as a result of this. I'm really not sure that the vendors are at fault on this one. This usually happens when a large district flexes their market power by demanding special attention. I've known vendors who have walked on these deals because they see the problems down the road, but there is almost always someone willing to bid it exactly the way the district requested it. See my comment below on how the Council itself could play a positive role in these situations.

10. Provide software tools that help them use data more effectively. This includes longitudinal tracking systems, dashboards, and benchmarks. This is an area where lots of companies are doing important work. Student Information Systems, Data Warehouses, Assessment Reporting Systems, and Learning Management Systems are complex software systems that are evolving rapidly. This is also one of the areas where technology, used effectively, can provide real tools for change.***

On top of all this he added a bonus request. He asked that vendors resist selling products when the district wants to use them in an inappropriate way (wrong age level, insufficient infrastructure, etc.). This is related to item 9 above. If a vendor feels they are being pressured to do something like this it is hard to push back, particularly in a competitive situation. Responsible vendors will walk away - but there will always be someone who will make the promise to win the business. I think there is an opportunity for the Council to be of service in this area. If the responsible vendors felt they had place they could go before these deals were sealed it might make a difference. The Council could put a word in with the district that they were headed in a risky direction.

Large Districts (and States) need to resist the temptation to use their market power in ways that ultimately hurt their own interests. There are perfectly legitimate uses for that market power so I'm not advocating unilateral disarmament - just suggesting that some restraint is needed on both sides. Districts shouldn't make unreasonable demands and vendors shouldn't make unrealistic commitments.

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***I'm working on the Data Driven Decision Making Report that will be released in the next few weeks. It is an in-depth look at the SIS and Data Warehouse market and is a follow on to the 2003 report. If you would like more information please use the contact us link and reference the report.

An instructional monoculture is a world where all children are expected to learn the same things, the same way, at the same time.

Are we building instructional monocultures in our schools? By we I mean publishers, policy makers, and district level decision makers. The forces of conformity are driving hard against the need for instructional diversity.

More importantly in the Web 2.0 world is it even possible to assert this level of control? Is it an effort doomed to failure as Citizen Marketers invade traditional publishing and turn it on it's ear.

What may save us all from ourselves is the emerging Web 2.0 culture of mashups, collaboration, open source, and people empowered as digital publishers. As publishers this directly threatens our current business model and the short term temptation is to dig in and try to protect it. But as many other industries have already learned the forces at play here are inexorable.

Agricultural monocultures are an efficient way to drive up yields in the short term. In computer science monocultures are universally used platforms (like Microsoft). In both cases the by standardizing (recognize that word?) you gain significant efficiencies. But you also create fragility and susceptibility to catastrophe. The Irish Potato Famine is an agricultural example. In computing almost all viruses are on Windows.

Just as genetic diversity in a population decreases the chance of a single disease wiping out a population, the diversity of software systems on a network similarly limits the destructive potential of viruses. - Wikipedia

Textbook publishers have assumed that their materials were complete systems used by teachers. In reality teachers have adapted and blended the materials with other resources. But each year the package of materials around a textbook becomes more complex and larger (and more expensive) as the product tries to be all things to all people.

Policy makers, in a vain attempt to assert control and drive standards, have become increasingly strident in their push to have every moment of every school year scripted and directed by a committee of designated experts. To abet this some have deliberately bred a mistrust of teachers - "we can't have them making decisions..." In an unholy alliance with adoption committees we have seen attempts to drive a single direct instruction product across an entire state (CA) and by design drive all other approaches out of the classroom.

District decision makers, under the gun to deliver on the promises of NCLB have seized more and more control from school sites in selecting supplemental materials. Even when they know teachers need some latitude their fear of failing AYP drives them to assert more control.

But what students really need are individual instruction plans - and plenty of people are working on making that a possibility. But until we change how we create materials, how they are adopted, and the decision making process that select resources we won't make much progress on this promise. Also - if we are going to individualize instruction we are need to empower teachers to make decisions.

In a world that is changing rapidly having a monoculture is a recipe for disaster. We need to be able to adapt to quickly shifting priorities and needs. Biological systems do this by promoting diversity - the more options you have to respond the more adaptable and resilient you are.

Does this mean that standards don't have a place? Absolutely not. There are clear taxonomies of knowledge and logical ladders of learning that are efficient. But - how we move through those should be open to variations in learning style, timing, context, culture, and sometimes just whimsy.

There - I feel better. Rant complete (for now).

Here are a few suggestions for publishers on how to build products that fit into the Web 2.0 culture rather than fight it.

Homing is the foundation skill for the 21st Century. Homing is the ability to circle in on key information, untangle it, filter it, order it, and ultimately make sense of it.

A middle schooler writing a report on Madame Curie in the mid ‘80’s typically went to an encyclopedia and one or two books. Today's middle schooler is likely to start with Google which returns 2.9 million links. Even the Wikipedia article has over 200 links to other resources about her. Yikes!

There have been several good reports on 21st Century Skills. However, in an age of infinite input students can only develop those skills if they have a strong homing skill. Without it they will be lost in a sea of data (which is increasing at 66% per year).

My thinking on this topc was spurred by a very cool mind map that shows the forces that are affecting education. Will Richardson's comments on Weblogg-Ed led to the question "where do teachers start?" The map captures the complexity beautifully, but it will overwhelm all but the most stalwart digital warriors.

All skills are not equal - in the 19th and 20th Centuries reading was the foundational skill. Other skills were important - basic math, scientific literacy, civic awareness - but without reading it was extremely difficult to develop the others. You always start with reading.

For 21st Century Skills I believe homing is the foundation and the place to start.

What are 21st Century Skills?

For those who are not familiar there have been several groups that have defined the skills, talents, and mindset that education can cultivate for this century. A good example are the enGauge 21st Century Skills which are sorted into

* Digital Age Literacy (e.g. scientive, visual, multicultural)
* Inventive Thinking (e.g. adaptability, risk taking, creativity)
* Effective Communication (e.g. collaboration, responsibility, teamwork)
* High Productivity (e.g. prioritizing, tool use, results focus)

ETS and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills use similar categories in their schema. These reports represent some great thinking about the full range of skills required for success in the coming decades. If you would like to learn more about them I strongly encourage you to follow the links.

The Problem

But - assuming that kids can read and compute and do some independent thinking we still have a problem with the 21 Century Skills. Developing skills is contingent on access to the content to use the skills. If I want to be a lawyer but I have no access to law books or courtrooms I can’t develop the skills. If algebra is important to me but I haven’t mastered basic math I’ll be lost.

With the end of scarcity (at least for information) homing is going to serve the same role as reading did for earlier generations. It is the skill that will help them find the most relevant information at the same time that the information available is expanding dramatically.

The Solution

Homing: To move or lead toward a goal: The investigators were homing in on the truth

The question for publishers and teachers is how are you teaching homing skills? 21st Century Skills are not based on the ability to spit back a set of facts on demand, hence the textbook isn't the answer. We need to rethink products and curricula so that we are teaching kids how to develop their homing skills so that they can find the right information at the exact time they need it.

These solutions will have to be web based because that is where the information is. They will probably involve a mix of a formally recognized discipline of search and navigation growing out of Library Science, new search technologies, walled gardens, and open tools for exploration (see this very cool example).

It isn't enough to know how to push a mouse around, homing in the the right information is the critical foundation skill.

For More:

SREB EvaluTech for an overview of several schema

Metiri Group and enGauge

ETS ICT Literacy

Partnership for 21st Century Skills Report