Articles Posted in Policy

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NFImageImportLast 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.

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NFImageImportOn-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.

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500px-Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895Yesterday 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%).

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NFImageImportCommon 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.

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arne_duncan_speech 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.

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1185310_us_cavalryFederal 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.”

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Fight Apathy or don'tWhile 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.

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fail-owned-out-of-business-hiring-employment-failThe 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

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IMG_6382.jpgEducation 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).

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fail-owned-my-first-failMy 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.

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