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…
At PCI we are putting the finishing touches on our 2010 budget. The Stimulus funds are creating a particular challenge as we look out over the next 12-24 months. On the one hand there should be plenty of new money in the market next year. On the other, despite ARRA…
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…
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.…
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.…
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…
Special Education appears to be the first K12 market segment seeing the education stimulus dollars flow in volume. At PCI Education we saw our numbers start to move up towards the end of May. By August we were roaring on all cylinders. As a private company we don’t report out…
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…
Moodys* has completely withdrawn credit ratings for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) after downgrading it to high risk just last month. This action means Moodys believes there is a high probability of default. From a practical standpoint this means that it will be harder and more expensive to service the company’s…
At 35,000 feet, with a steaming Starbucks and a purring iPod I read my Grandfather’s memoirs last Wednesday. I’d already put in several hours of work when I decided to crack the sheaf of Xeroxed reflections written three years before he passed in 1964. Ninety eight years ago in the…