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…
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…
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).…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…