edbizbuzz

A brief intense research effort before purchasing a for-profit firm’s offerings, entering into some kind partnering arrangement, or investing in it, is basic due diligence. While it’s very hard to develop a coherent picture of the school improvement industry and then follow it on your own, it’s quite a bit easier to track individual firms. With a little bit of work up front, the monitoring process becomes almost automatic.

All but the smallest school improvement providers have a website with a news page. In many cases you can subscribe to an RSS feed, assuring that you will get updated news items. Publicly traded firms are under some obligation to disclose finances and projections and other information material to investors decisions about the stock, so they tend to have more detailed business data and analysis than privately owned firms. There is often quite a bit of useful information in reports that relate to the issuance of new stock or future projections in general. Reading these press releases and corporate documents for their deeper meaning involves a certain logic anyone can learn.

My firm publishes a monthly report of news announcements from roughly 1000 school improvement providers. Based on that experience, I argue you can learn three things from any firm’s news page: 1) If the firm is doing well, signing up new clients, increasing revenues, generating profits, getting good product reviews, making acquisitions,etc., etc., you will be told about it. 2) If there is no news on the site, nothing good is happening, which at least means stagnation. 3) A publicly traded company has to say something about bad news with a material impact on profitability. A privately held firm is far more likely to remain silent about bad news or controversy rather than help to spread the story by responding.

General business information on individual public and private firms can often be found for free on sites like www.hoovers.com. Program reviews may be available on sites like the What Works Clearinghouse. (For more on becoming a good consumer of education programs, listen here.) Any study, report or announcement with the name of the firm, its products or staff that makes its way to the internet will be revealed by Googling the same. To the extent the company, its products or people make the press, you can find the stories by searching on Google News, where you can also request future news alerts.

Where you are planning to invest serious time, money or other resources in a for-profit provider, there’s no excuse for neglecting the above actions. But they take up too much time to use as a strategy for following the industry as a whole, or even a segment, as a matter of general interest unrelated to a specific decision.

On the other hand, if you are engaged in education policy research, you ought to be as conversant in the for-profit aspect of supply as you are with the various strands of philanthropic and nonprofit work in school reform. The time invested to comprehend the for-profit firms in the school improvement industry ought to be considered the price of any claim to expertise in the supply side of public education.

In my view, the knowledge required lies at the level of the admittedly overlapping industry segments; e.g., school management, Supplemental Educational Services, Comprehensive School Reform, Reading, Math, Information Services, charter Online Infrastructure, Online Course Content, etc. etc, When the school improvement market is broken down by segment, it becomes possible to see how education policy researchers can build a collective understanding of supply.

Next: Following a school improvement industry segment.

Posted by Dean Millot at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After almost four years of publishing School Improvement Industry’s information services, I feel confident asserting that readers who want to follow the school improvement industry on their own face a significant investment of time. Still, it’s not impossible, and here are some suggestions, starting with the big picture.

In any field of study, researchers, analysts and policy makers seek a view of the forest. Without it, it’s very hard to make sense of any tree. Products, services, programs and their providers are as they are because of the forces exerted by other providers, school districts, etc, etc. Information about school improvement providers as a class is simply fundamental to the appreciation of any provider and its offerings.

In almost every other area of school improvement the informed citizen can depend on both more or less disinterested information from government, typically the Department of Education - but also nonprofits funded by philanthropy, and data and analysis supplied by partisans in the many education policy conflicts. The base data and the debate over facts help any questioning observer form their own opinions.

Following for-profit providers is an entirely different matter. Government does not collect data on the supply side of school improvement. I remember when I served briefly as the President of the National Charter School Alliance attending a 2003 meeting at the U.S. Department of Education to provide input on federal charter school programs. I pushed for a national charter school database. Then and now the only such data is collected by Center for Education Reform, a group with a small staff and a pro-voucher mission. Their work is a service to all, but I’d rather rely on data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. The Department official didn’t want to touch the question. Perhaps it was a matter of federalism, although that was not on the tip of his tongue.

Nonprofits may collect data on charter schools, but there is no equivalent for the school improvement industry as a whole. One cannot find a study of industry size and scope, a division of firms by product type or revenue level, growth statistics etc., etc. by traditional education policy research organizations, think tanks or advocacy groups. Given that most are financed by philanthropy, I conclude that foundations just aren’t interested in the role of private providers in public education. That strikes me as a pretty big blind spot. Three recent partial exceptions come to mind. One is the annual review of Education Management Organizations collected by the “anti-privatization” Education Policy Research Unit at the Arizona State University. The second is the large scale study of SES providers performed by the Chicago Public Schools. The third is the work on testing firms by Education Sector. They are partial in that they cover one aspect of one segment of the school improvement industry. They aren’t entirely free of bias or methodological shortcomings. But as they say, something beats nothing.

In my estimate, school improvement industry trade groups have the greatest incentive to provide this kind of information to the public. Members of the Education Industry Association, Software and Information Industry Association Education Division, National Council of Education Providers, Knowledge Alliance, and Council for Comprehensive School Improvement serve close to every school in the country, employ tens of thousands of people in the kind of high-paying knowledge intensive jobs this country needs, are located in every Congressional district, pay million of dollars in payroll and other taxes, range from very large companies to very small, are growing fast and have great potential to grow more. One big problem is that nobody knows this to be the case! And the only way to solve that problem is to get the research done, brief it and make the information available. Why the trade groups don't do this, and why their leaders don't see it as necessary, is simply beyond me. (For more on trade groups listen here.)

Industry-wide data is available for a very high price. In the mid-1990s, the Parthenon Group did extensive pro-bono market research on and around the emerging Comprehensive School Reform Market for New American Schools. I estimated that the staff time donated was in the region of $100,000 and as Chief Operating Officer I recall that we set aside an additional $25,000 for expenses. In my view, those several annual studies are an important reason why all but one of the original NAS Design Teams are still in business as fee-based for and nonprofit service providers - they shaped the context of collective and individual decisions on business strategy. Still, $125,000 per year, puts the best market esearch beyond the range of all but the multinational publishers.

Although it is no longer advertised, Eduventures has has a subscription research program available to k-12 providers for several tens of thousands of dollars per year. It’s a point to remember when Eduventures' staff are quoted in various news media. This is not to say the research itself is suspect, only that it is rarely released for public review in whole, and is generally disclosed in the context of a reporter’s story on a firm or market segment the covered by Eduventures. Because the firm is not an entirely disinterested third party, and readers need to apply a “spin discount.”

Perhaps the best source of top-level information is the investment firms. Berkery Noyes presents weekly and semi-annual information on transactions in the education industry. Robert W. Baird publishes the monthly Class Notes. Signal Hill publishes the monthly Education Signals.

Readers need to remember that investment firms "sell" mergers and acquisitions, and have an incentive to be upbeat about the industry and the firms they represent. A more significant shortcoming of these sources is that investment bankers' take on the big picture is too big for those focused on school improvement. Their reports tend to combine pre-k, higher education and corporate training, as well as k-12 (which itself covers far more than school improvement) into one "education industry" category. In fact, each of these sectors has very different dynamics and players. Still, with time and the use of other sources important information can be teased out of these reports.

In short, edbizbuzz readers are not the only ones navigating the school improvement industry without good maps, most providers are in the same boat.

Next: Following school improvement industry segments and individual firms.

Posted by Dean Millot at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Miller-McKeon NCLB II Discussion Draft would bar for-profit firms from nine school improvement programs in Title I, and many more throughout the law. I now understand why the Business, Foundation and Innovation panel of the House Education and Labor Committee's Gang of Forty Four Hearings on September 10 was dominated by nonprofits. Somehow, some many someones on that committee have come to see philanthropy and nonprofits as the “supply side” of school improvement.

That Washington’s edwonkdom is at least reinforcing this view is suggested by the American Enterprise Institute’s October 25th conference "The Supply Side of School Reform and the Future of Educational Entrepreneurship" organized by Fred Hess. It is something of a “who’s who” in the new education philanthropy and follows a similar conference with the same folks last year. Yes, a handful of presenters make a living in organizations that pay taxes, but a correct representation of the subject would have almost no nonprofit representation. I applaud the idea of the nonprofit school improvement community meeting in Washington, but the title is wildly disproportionate to their role. The closest analogy I can think of would be "Major League Baseball Sluggers and the Future of Intramural College Softball." The latter title would be seen for what it is; that the former will be treated seriously by the education press, eduwonks and policymakers, says too much about the world inside the Beltway.

As a participant in, and an observer of, both for- and nonprofit sectors in school improvement, I find the willingness of Congress to rely on nonprofits utterly amazing. Philanthropy and nonprofits are at best proving grounds. With rare exceptions (like Success for All and, to a much lesser extent, KIPP, that tend to prove the rule) scale is simply beyond their capital and managerial capacity. It’s obvious that the committee staff hasn’t done its due diligence on the question of supply and its members are woefully ignorant.

On the other hand, for-profit school improvement providers have done very little to educate Congress about their collective size, scope and capacity. There’s been plenty of special pleading on behalf of firms (Edison, Kaplan, Sylvan) and segments (especially Supplemental Educational Services), but precious little consciousness-raising. In this respect, the Education Industry Association (EIA), Software and Information Industry Association Education Division and the National Council of Education Providers have neglected public education in the largest sense - and let their members down.

Indeed, one could argue that EIA's March 2007 "Education Industry Days" meeting in Washington, typically focused on policy, actually reinforced the idea of supply as a nonprofit prerogative. How? By choosing the topic of entrepreneurship and nonprofits, rather than the more important matter of for-profit prospects under NCLB II, and inviting Hess to give the keynote address. The opportunity cost? Not discussing the role of the for-profit industry in the achievement of NCLB's goals.

Even if for-profits have dropped the ball, there is no excuse for serious education policy analysts and legislative staffs to neglect research on the role of for-profits in school reform. And believe me, I have heard that its not done because it's just "too difficult." As a former researcher, I find that a challenge rather than a turn off. Nevertheless, it is hard to follow the industry, and for the next few days, I’ll share some research strategies.

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The subject of market freedom was brought to my attention by a mass email from the Education Industry Association. In it, Executive Director Steve Pines provided information on provisions in the Miller/McKeon Discussion Draft that would directly or indirectly exclude for-profits from nine Title I school improvement programs. Are students or taxpayers disadvantaged or put at risk by products, services and programs offered by organizations that pay taxes? Listen here.

Posted by Dean Millot at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Opportunity Lies in a Substantial Federal Health in/and Education Project

From the September 24 issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report

Announcement: Improving Health and Educational Outcomes of Young People Due October 23 (Sep 21), Center for Disease Control, Department of Health and Human Services

Their Description: Approximately $32,025,000 will be available in fiscal year 2008 to fund approximately 85 awards. The purpose of the program is to improve the health and well-being of youth and prepare them to be healthy adults.... Funding is made available to fund the following five Priority areas:

Eligible Applicants... include... State Education Agencies (SEA)... State Health Agencies (SHA)... Albuquerque Public School District, Baltimore City Public School System, Boston Public Schools, Broward County Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, City of Chicago School District, Clark County School District, Dallas Independent School District, DeKalb County School System, Detroit Public Schools, Duval County Public Schools, East Baton Rouge Parish School System, Fort Worth Independent School District, Fresno Unified School District, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Houston Independent School District), Jefferson Parish Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District, Memphis City Schools, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Milwaukee Public Schools, New York City Department of Education, Newark Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, Orange County Public Schools, The School District of Palm Beach County, The School District of Philadelphia, San Bernardino City Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Seattle Public Schools....

Our Thoughts: Health - be it weight control, drug and violence, sexual activity, self-abuse, athletics, or the recognition of psychological damage from violence and natural disaster - is becoming an important part of public education. Here’s a rare chance to get in on the ground floor.

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Review State System of K-12 Education Finance

From the September 24 issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report

Announcement: Analysis of North Dakota Public Elementary & Secondary Education & Funding Due October 22, Office of Management and Budget

Their Description: Senate Bill 2200 implements the new public education funding plan recommended by the North Dakota Commission on Education Improvement. Section 51 of this Bill provides the Commission with the authority to commission this study:

The commission has set aside up to $150,000 for this contract to include all work to accomplish the study and perform all related follow-up activities.

Our Thoughts: A high level, state-wide analysis in a small jurisdiction and a clear rural-urban bifurcation, on a topic of great policy relevance. A state that encompasses most national problems in a microcosm.

A tight budget, but nice work for a small project team with experience in state education finance.

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, most k-12 program evaluation is, at best. a single snapshot of what worked - or not - where and when. At worst it's a political weapon employed in the charter, voucher, privatization, math or reading wars. Typically it's a less than completely informative marketing tool. Rarely is it employed for the kind practical evaluation described earlier in this series of blog posts.

As it happens, post-NAS, RAND's high profile k-12 evaluation work, much of which has been led by Brian Gill (whose move to Mathematica prompted my thinking about practical evaluation), has offered examples of each. In only one case have I seen any real evidence of the programmatic course corrections "en route" that typified the RAND experience with NAS .

That case is the Pittsburgh study noted last week.

• Edison's decision to hire RAND in 2000 was surely in part an effort to bolster the firms business credibility and educational legitimacy at a time when both were in doubt. The study itself showed Edison offered school districts roughly the same odds of turning around failing schools as the district itself, at a marginally higher cost. I have seen nothing to suggest how or if Edison used the RAND study to improve its school management services. In the absence of any serious explanation by the firm, I succumb to the temptation of reminding readers of Korean automotive manufacturer Hyndai's new ad: "Are car companies committed to quality, or to the phrase 'committed to quality.'"

• RAND's work on Philadelphia school turn around efforts - also showing no huge difference between schools managed by outsider and those reorganized by the districts. That report became fodder for a methodology debate between RAND and Paul Peterson that simply obscured the bottom line - school management is no silver bullet, it's just another tool we're still honing. Whatever role the study may have played in the City of Brotherly Love's decisions on school management contract, it surely was not the centerpiece of a dispassionate discussion among stakeholders on how to improve their joint enterprise.

Evaluation is a scorecard. Buyers need some means of sorting through their choices, and imperfect means are better than none. But it's not merely a scorecard, and it's not just the program that's being scored - it's also all the other stakeholders whose efforts make for success or failure. The "scorecard function is not even the most important. Practical evaluation is a means of continuous improvement for the entire system where the school improvement program is introduced. It's basic purpose is to provide the fact base for ongoing conversations between buyers and sellers and every other group engaged in implementation.

I'm not singling out RAND or Gill for special treatment. They are just examples of a widespread unhelpful social phenomena in the use of evaluation - one the (not so) new (but slow to get started) Society for Research on Education Effectiveness should address as its first priority (but doesn't).

For more on the related subject of adaptive management.

Posted by Dean Millot at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RAND served as an “independent third-party evaluator” throughout the history of New American Schools' efforts to support the development and dissemination of Comprehensive School Reform models or “designs.” RAND’s evaluation activities were not confined to whether a design “worked” and should continue to be funded - although that was one objective of the work. The nonprofit think tank took a disinterested view of how NAS managed the effort. RAND briefings were also a cornerstone of the several meetings NAS staff and Design Team managers held each year. While the discussion almost always involved whether RAND had its facts right, most of the discussion concerned why the facts were as they were (with caveats), what had happened since RAND collected those facts, and what more needed to be done by teams and NAS to make things better or keep them heading in a positive direction.

As NAS and the Teams shifted from design development to what I called the challenge of “quality at scale” in my first presentation to the NAS board as Director of Design Team Development in 1997, RAND's evaluation engaged the school districts spawning a new marketplace for school improvement.

Up to this point, Designs were certainly not in some end state categorized as “developed”; like all professional services, they were in continuous development. But they were more or less understood as a coherent set of interventions to be implemented in some sequence against a more or less defined criteria. The real challenge was that to date they were in place in a relatively small number of sites, free of charge, with the focused assistance of the designs developers. Now the designs would be implemented in a large number of schools, all over the nation, for a price, with newer staff as well as experienced developers.

The meetings of NAS and Teams were now opened up to the district managers with direct responsibility for implementing the MOUs described yesterday. Once again, RAND’s work not only helped NAS determine which jurisdictions and which teams would continue in the dissemination effort, it gave NAS, districts and teams an unusual opportunity to improve the quality of implementation “in process.” Yes, there was a certain amount of debate over RAND’s facts when NAS, the teams and now district leaders met,; and there was some finger pointing, and examples of “the blame game.” Still, the players recognized their joint responsibility for the effort’s outcomes, their shared interest in its success, and the relationship between their individual work the broader context of district reform.

Whether and where the NAS dissemination efforts led to success is the subject of some debate. My view is that they worked where the school district wanted them to work, and actively supported their implementation. But regardless of this debate, I am quite sure that the model of "practical evaluation" developed in that strategy was essential to whatever level of success was attained, and something any school district attempting systemic reform avoids at its peril.

Next: Practical Evaluation Today.

Posted by Dean Millot at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Practical evaluation” involves more than grading the efficacy of a school improvement program, it informs operating decisions. Yesterday’s posting on the subject reminded me of some relevant experience.

In the mid-1990’s New American Schools and its eight Comprehensive School Reform Designs decided on a dissemination strategy based on sales rather than grants. In pursuit of this revolutionary approach to nonprofit school reform activities NAS sought to seed a national market by negotiating Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with a jurisdictions across the nation - states and local education agencies, and collections of school districts. (While at RAND, I helped devise the strategy, and wrote the MOU negotating draft. Later, I joined NAS to help implement the plan.)

What these partners brought to the table were potential clients and revenues. What NAS offered was the designs and Design Teams; a process for matching schools and designs, including any those of other organizations districts chose to add; a liason officer; $250,000 to prime the pump (note that three-year costs for design implementation ranged from $75-300,000 per school), and access to RAND’s ongoing evaluation of the NAS effort, then moving into its dissemination phase.

This last part of the package may have been the most important.

Tomorrow: Why.

Posted by Dean Millot at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pittsburgh's decision to hire for-profit research firm Mathematica Policy Research Inc. to evaluate the efficacy of Harcourt's Everyday Math in the city’s public schools is happening for one reason. Program results matter. The reason they matter is the present No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that schools make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) towards 100% student proficiency in key subjects by 2014 or their students will be offered a range of help – and, more important, the adults in those schools will face a series of unpleasant consequences.

NCLB I established a quantifiable “duty of care” for educators. Those educators, reinforced by NCLB’s requirement that federal funds be used only to purchase education programs grounded in Scientifically Based Research (SBR) (programs with positive evidence based on rigorous evaluation) are pushing an increasing amount of responsibility on providers to support that duty.

The Pittsburgh study shows districts are willing to do some of this evaluation themselves. The less than stellar outcomes of most of the growing number of efficacy studies from the What Work’s Clearinghouse suggests that providers will need to start doing or sponsoring some themselves.

Brian Gill, who will manage the Everyday Math study, is the RAND Pittsburgh office researcher who led important evaluations on Edison – sponsored by that firm, the role of EMOs in Philadelphia – sponsored by outsiders for the school system, and on the state of Pittsburgh’s reform plans, including the effect of contractors America’s Choice and Kaplan.

Gill’s move from nonprofit RAND to for-profit Mathematica may be a sign that the private sector sees a growing market for education evaluations tied directly to the operational decisions of school districts. Something similar is occurring as the Parthenon Group’s public education team turns management consulting to school districts from a localized, ad hoc, pro-bono, "social-sciency" kind of activity into a line of business nationally.

I don’t think these markets will disappear under NCLB II, but at the reauthorization’s current course and speed, their growth will be arrested. Make it easy to make AYP - the direction Congress is surely heading, make SBR implementation even less important than it has been under Education Secretary's Paige and Spellings, and both schools and providers will not be so pressed to prove what works, or to organize in ways that maximize the prospects for success and drive more resources to the classroom.

As an aside: The fact is that AYP and SBR as currently defined in the law constitute "stretch goals." There is no way every school or provider will ever meet them. So what? Every firm won't avoid losses that drive it out of business. Every kid won't get into Harvard. Everyone won't end up happy in their life. None the less, profitability, competitive admissions,
and the pursuit of happiness are understood to be important benchmarks for society as a whole - as hard as individual failure may be, society benefits from the overall advance they compel. And as was pointed out at the start of this posting the consequences of school failure are not hard on students - they get help when schools cant meet the duty of care; its the adults that feel the pain. I just have a hard time feeling terrible about this, although I sure understand why the affected adults want to gut NCLB I.

Posted by Dean Millot at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson said... President Bush’s signature education program isn’t working and that he would provide federal education money with fewer strings attached. Associated Press

Whatever you think of the substance of Thompson’s comments, what he said is much closer to the historical locus of Republican Party policy than George Bush’s No Child Left Behind. This fact has significant implications for a school improvement industry that placed most of its political eggs in baskets now held by a lame duck President and a Republican party well in retreat on Capitol Hill. Listen here.

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Online Public Education is a Highway, Not a Turnkey Factory

From the September 17 issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report.

Announcement: New Mexico Statewide eLearning System (NMSELS) Of The IDEAL-NM Project Due September 25 (Sep 14) New Mexico Higher Education Department

Their Description: The New Mexico Department of Higher Education (NMHED) or “Agency” seeks proposals from prospective offerors for the acquisition of software and services for a New Mexico Statewide eLearning System (NMSELS) to support the goals of the IDEAL-NM eLearning project. The NMSELS learning management system must be a Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) solution that can be procured as either a vendor-hosted or agency-hosted solution. It must support a range of applications that can supplement traditional classroom instruction, integrate online and face-to-face instruction, and deliver totally online courses and programs....

Hosting Services.... The NMSELS project may be implemented in a vendor-hosted and agency-hosted environment. Since hosted services may be required in some instances, the Agency seeks a vendor capable of providing hosted services. Vendor’s hosted service shall provide all required robust hardware, bandwidth, and interface tools necessary to provide quality services as requested.

Our Thoughts: This RFP is for the transportation infrastructure required to support a marketplace for online learning providers.

New Mexico’s vision of elearning consists of a technological trunk on which state education agencies can attach the education systems they need, rather than a turnkey factory with every activity laid out on the shop floor. To put it directly, the state wants only part of a firm like K-12 Inc’s offering, not “the whole enchilada.”

Interoperability is a requirement facing those who would build NMSELS - and those who would travel its information superhighway for public education. ••••

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Associated Press caught the following remarks on No Child Left Behind from politician/actor Fred Thompson, who most pundits say is working hard to be cast in a role made famous by actor/politician Ronald Reagan.

“We’ve been spending increasing amounts of federal money for decades, with increasing rules, increasing mandates, increasing regulations.... It’s not working.... No Child Left Behind - good concept, I’m all for testing - but it seems like now some of these states are teaching to the test and kind of making it so that everybody does well on the test - you can’t really tell that everybody’s doing that well. And it’s not objective...”

He said his message to states would be, “We expect you to get objective testing done and publicize those tests for the local parents and for the local citizens and suffer the political ramifications locally if things don’t work out right.... If you don’t like what’s going on, don’t get in your car and drive by your school board and maybe drive by the capitol and get on an airplane and fly to Washington and say, ‘I don’t like the way the school down the street is being run.’”

Whatever you think of the substance of Thompson’s comments (and as a defender of today's NCLB, I don't think much of them), what he said is much closer to the historical locus of Republican Party policy on the federal role in public education than George Bush’s highly intrusive No Child Left Behind.

There are many things about George W. Bush worthy of criticism, but I believe he was the only prominent Republican who, as a matter of conscience, understood school accountability as a matter of civil rights. So far he is the only GOP leader who could turn that idea into the political leverage required to move (shame?) Democrats who matter in federal education policy to accept a law with accountability measures as strong as those in NCLB I.

Right or wrong, the President spent every bit of his political capital on war. Fred Thompson is one of many ready to step into Reagan’s shoes, and no one wants W’s. Other things being equal, and I hope they are not, my guess is that he's expressed the direction the Republican Party will take on federal education policy as George W. Bush exits the stage.

What it means is that opponents to NCLB I are likely to get a better NCLB II if they wait until after the 2008 election, no matter which party is in the White House. I'm no opponent, but that's what I'd do.

Posted by Dean Millot at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I received a notice from the Society for Research on Education Effectiveness (SREE). The Society was founded at the instigation of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences in 2005. Like many academic activities, his one has taken a long time to get organized. SREE’s first conference was held in 2006. The first issue of its Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (JREE) has yet to be published. According to the notice explained that the second conference will be held in March of 2008.

The mission of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) is to advance and disseminate research on the causal effects of education interventions, practices, programs, and policies. As support for researchers who are focused on questions related to educational effectiveness, the Society aims to: 1) increase the capacity to design and conduct investigations that have a strong base for causal inference, 2) bring together people investigating cause-and-effect relations in education, and 3) promote the understanding and use of scientific evidence to improve education decisions and outcomes.

SREE’s development may follow a path typical of any academic confab, but it was not formed to be just another group of academics. It was formed to meet an urgent and practical need of national importance. Like the What Works Clearinghouse, SREE’s purpose is directly related to the challenges of defining and operationalizing the concept of “scientifically based research” in No Child Left Behind.

As explained in the text of NCLB, SBR is not an abstract concept, but a regulatory standard for determining what state and local education agencies will be permitted to buy with federal funds. In the case of the Reading First fiasco, the Department of Education’s mismanagement of SBR’s interpretation affected $1 billion in the sale of elementary reading products, services and materials, favoring the major publishers and doing material damage to the revenues of several school improvement providers with a strong grounding in research..

As the school improvement market has developed, WWC is the de facto “decider” on the question of which products, services and programs pass the SBR test. Education Week reporter Deb Viadero’s lengthy February 1, 2006 article on SREE implies it is supposed to be the informal forum where experts advance the state of the art in evaluation for the purpose of informing practical SBR standards. To do this, it is not only important to advance evaluation methodology and discuss actual evaluations, but to consider the practical matter of value. The school improvement market is not an abstraction, it is about educators looking to purchase “results at a price” from school improvement providers, and about the costs of evaluation techniques relative to their statistical and educational significance.

What does this mean?

First and foremost, SREE’s board should consist not only of university professors, but senior federal, state and local agency staff responsible for program evaluation for the purpose of regulation, and program developers from the for- and nonprofit providers of what’s actually being offered in the market. After all, most educators don't construct their own interventions, they buy them.

Second, the work of the Society and especially its conference should be based around questions, the resolution of which requires a three-way dialogue between academia, government and developers. This serves academia as much as anyone else, because after all, it would like to have a practical effect on society.

Third, in every effort, including its conference, SREE should be able to point out specific efforts and activities that draw the intelligent layperson, and especially educators to understand and use scientific evidence to improve education decisions and outcomes. If the layman can't understand evaluation at some level, an advancing state of art will mean little to public education.

When I read the March conference materials, and while I understand SREE was formed to permit a greater professional focus on evaluation, I see a menu of sessions that could just as easily fit into the annual conference of the American Education Research Association.

But my critique goes more to a mismatch of what education needs and SREE’s proclaimed mission versus the Society’s actions. I see a board that’s made up entirely of academics. I see nothing that would encourage the participation of experts from government or the school improvement industry. And I see nothing designed to help a layman like me understand or use scientific evidence in education decision making.

I have no doubt the group will advance human knowledge, but I think it’s lost a sense of the broader policy reasons why it was formed, and why inclusion of buyers, developers and lay people is required for SREE to perform its mission.

Posted by Dean Millot at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Blogs offer a gestalt. To appreciate it, readers must be able to place postings in the context of their broader understanding of the writer.

What’s being presented in edbizbuzz will be new to many readers – especially outside of education policy wonkdom. But this blog and I have a documented history: a daily edbizbuzz archive going back a few months (see the top of this blog's home page), an archive of weekly podcasts and “Letters from the Editor” of School Improvement Industry Week going back a few years, and a record of reports, guides, and articles in various fora that starts when I switched from national security to education at RAND in the 1990’s (see the "About this Author" link).

Postings in edbizbuzz have been and will continue to be linked to my related postings and material, as well as sources of the item or issue under discussion. Still, my views tend to fall outside the comfortable right vs. left, Democrat vs. Republican, constructivism vs. back to basics, blob vs. anti-blob dichotomy. To help readers up the learning curve of my gestalt – and to offer readers a different way of understanding public education, over the next weeks edbizbuzz will include postings that cover my take on public education’s stakeholder groups, with links to relevant materials I’ve produced over the years.

Teachers are the right place to start.

1. The teaching force is the single most important ingredient of public education. The private sector may provide the core content on public schooling, but the core activity is classroom teaching. To use an automotive metaphor, teaching is “where the rubber meets the road.” To use two military metaphors, teachers are the “pointy end of the spear”, the “business end of the gun.” The lack of working facilities, general safety, computers, desks, books, and even paper and pencils can’t stop teaching. But without teachers, those assets count for little.

If we take this discussion a little closer to the working arrangements of most public schools, this point is still evident. Administrators may think they are in charge of public schooling, and they do have all kinds of authority to choose curriculum and instructional strategies, but it’s illusory. If teachers don’t “buy into” the content and pedagogy, it doesn’t get implemented, and if it doesn’t get implemented, whatever results the providers promised the administrators and the administrators promised the public doesn’t happen. Teachers, not managers, determine the quality of public education.

2. Teachers have a choice between professionalism and unionism. Because teaching depends on the good judgment of teachers, rather than the application of standard operating procedures, they need to be treated more like doctors and lawyers and less like workers on the assembly line. They need to be given both broad autonomy in meeting public expectations of student performance and the accountability for outcomes that comes with professional responsibility. Because students are educated by schools of teachers rather than personal tutors, it's not only important that students be able to choose schools that fit their needs, its also important that teachers be able to work with colleagues who share their views.

But the reality public schooling is one in which district's control the public education function essentially as a monopoly, and direct individual schools according to the one best system conceived at a central office. In this respect it really doesn’t matter much if the central office is run by a for-profit or nonprofit employees or civil servants. The problem isn’t central’s tax status, it’s central control. Teachers really have no choice but to unionize to protect their basic common interest in wages and working conditions. The unfortunate byproducts of this arrangement are an institution that undermines professionalism, by accepting the one size fits all as the starting point for negotiations, conceding that teachers are interchangeable parts, and protecting its least competent members as vigorously as the best. Moreover, a half-century of teacher unionization has created a power structure based on those shortcomings, and power holders who could not survive the transition to a world where teachers ran their own schools as lawyers and doctors run their own practice groups. Finally, it’s awfully hard to jump from the dock to the boat, and because there’s always a chance of falling into the water, the average person is always reluctant to make the try.

3. For teachers what’s in the school improvement industry is empowerment, not “privatization.” Business is already heavily engaged in public education. Indeed, a handful of huge publishers are really the third leg of an oligarchy. They offer districts the content of the one best system, and have had about as much incentive to move decision authority down to teachers in a school as district administrators and union heads. Moreover, they’ve had about the same level of interest in the efficacy of those programs. With their range of theories about what education is all about, and a commitment “what works” as their only conceivable basis for competition with the publishers, what upstart school improvement providers, over teachers is the choice of education products services and programs required to realize teacher choice, teacher professionalism, and teacher-run schools.

If there’s a role for unions in a system where teachers run the system, it lies literally in buying into the school improvement industry, and making the shift to an institution more like laywers’ bar and doctors' medical associations - providing professional development and support, setting entry standards and assuring professional discipline. In a world where schooling can be conducted by independent practice groups, employment issues can remain between individual teachers and their schools.

Posted by Dean Millot at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the most part public schools do not develop their own curriculum or pedagogy - they buy them, primarily from private enterprise, and mostly from for-profits. I find it ironic that: 1) outsourcing the most central of public education’s core teaching and learning functions is never part of the “privatization” debate; and 2) the quality of those products services and programs didn’t become a subject of serious interest until No Child Left Behind. Yet “god forbid” we allow private enterprise to operate public schools under charter or contract, or manage teachers’ professional development. Given the discrepancy, it’s hard to believe that debate has much to do with what kids need rather than what adults want.

Speaking of quality, and the Reading First fiasco notwithstanding, program efficacy is supposed to matter today. Educators, indeed taxpayers, have a desperate need for independent reviews of program efficacy. In their absence, marketing dominates the sales race.

After a very slow start, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), a Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences’ activity (contracted out to a consortium of evaluation organizations) to examine the evidence providers use to claim their programs are grounded in “Scientifically Based Research” (SBR), is starting to pump out reviews across a range of subjects, grades and providers.

The sixteen reviews covered below happens to coincide with September’s two-month catch-up issue of School Improvement Industry Research and Evaluation Announcements http://www.k-12network.com(we vacation in August). There’s something to be learned from the list:

August 13, 2007:

Early Childhood Education: Literacy Express…. positive effects on print knowledge and phonological processing, potentially positive effects on oral language and math, and no discernible effects on cognition.

Observations

1. If we take this list and divide it into a crude buyers guide figure according to programs that have some positive evidence and those that don’t, and providers who are nonprofit or for profit, here’s what we get:

Some Positive Finding

For-Profit
• Earobics
• Voyager Literacy
• Pre-K Mathematics
• Waterford Early Reading Program™

Nonprofit
• Success for All
• Ladders to Literacy
• PALS
• Literacy Express

No Positive Finding

For-Profit
• Doors to Discovery
• Let’s Begin with the Letter People
• SRA Real Math
• Read Naturally
• Waterford Early Reading Level One

Nonprofit
• Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition
• Project GRAD
• Talent Development High Schools

There’s no great quality advantage tied to the label “nonprofit” or any great black mark to “for profit.” Both groups have programs with and without evidence of efficacy. The same for-profit provider can have programs with and without evidence – take Waterford, So can the same nonproit - Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition is offered by the Success for All Foundation..

2. Our measures of program efficacy are crude and imperfect, but they are still a far better guide than nothing - or marketing brochures. The question now is whether Congress should allow states to use federal funds to buy programs that can’t jump this bar, when there does seem to be a reasonable range of choice. In short, if you can’t pass WWC review with at least some positive finding, can your program really be said to rest on scientifically based research, and should taxpayers be subsidizing a school’s data-free decision to buy it?

3. There’s some kind of cost-benefit analysis that needs to be done by educators before any for any purchase. Still, at any given price what matters to kids is outcomes, not whether the provider has a cash surplus after paying out expenses to deliver the program, or whether that surplus is retained by a nonprofit or passed along to a company’s owners.

4. Jim Ketelsen of Project GRAD and Jim McPartland of Talent Development were no less celebrated a few years ago than John Schnur of New Leaders for New Schools is today, and given the unfairness of scheduling could just as easily taken his place at the recent Gang of Forty-Four hearings on NCLB. And, as capable a manager as John is (and I admire him greatly), he is even less able to muster enough evidence of the efficacy of New Leaders for New Schools to meet WWC’s low bar. If Congress is really serious about the “supply side” of school reform, it has to turn its focus away from philanthropy and its never-ending array of grant-driven pilots unsullied by evaluation. It has to get serious about SBR and about the fee-driven for- and nonprofit providers offering the vast bulk of products and services aimed school improvement who are in this business for the long haul – and the vast amount of potential private sector capital that isn’t flowing to them. Congress has got to start thinking about how to stimulate this industry around "what works", and only what works..

Posted by Dean Millot at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In the course of preparing the “catch up” issue of School Improvement Industry Provider Announcements (the monthly publication takes a vacation in August), I was surprised at the number of investments that took place in July and August. Going back to July revealed even more transactions. Investment bankers did a lot more business in the sector than they have for a while.

Here’s my quick scorecard:

Acquisitions
• Children’s Internet by private investors
• Harcourt by Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group
• Freerain by eSchoolMall
• Educate by management
• Thomson Prometric by ETS

Equity Investment
• Achieve 3000
• SMART Technologies
• Tutor.com
• Princeton Review

Public Offering Announced
• Scientific Learning Inc.
• K12 Inc.

Recapitalization
• Haights Cross Communications

Observations

1. The school improvement industry has come a long way from the dark days’ after the internet bust. Recall that the internet boom only reached the “new education economy” at the end of its expansion – as all that free money created by irrational exuberance ran out of pure internet plays but still needed to be placed by venture capital firms.

I remember observing a board meeting of Co-nect as the President of the Education Entrepreneurs Fund after the bust. Then-board chair Lamar Alexander compared the environment to “nuclear winter,” and reminded the group that “after nuclear winter, there is no spring.” The image resonated with this former nuclear strategist. At one point thereafter Co-nect owed the Fund $3 million. My successor, Keith Collar was undoubtably satisfied that it weathered the storm and was purchased by Pearson in 2005.

2. Looking at the deals on their own merits, they fall into three categories.

The Harcourt and Prometric acquisitions are rearrangements of the parts, or “same monkeys different trees.” Education conglomerates units are just moving around. I see no huge impact of the market for years. If these are smart moves by the buyers, the proof wont be clear for perhaps a decade. Why”? Because the plays are strategic, Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group is trying for the end-to-end solution, just like its big rivals. ETS is consolidating its testing presence.

Most of the equity investments are bets that the company in question possesses unrealized value. SMART is a bet on smart whiteboards, Princeton on a brand that’s been sub-optimally managed, Tutor.com on CEO George Cigale, Achieve on edtech. The management buy out of Educate on the Sylvan name. These bets depend on the prospect of a sale to the publishers, and the value of that depends at least in part on whether the investors have the option of an IPO,

Scientific Learning’s and K-12’s offerings are to some extent a bet on the markets interest in public education. The first strikes me as a company with less risk, because it has a high quality product and proprietary technology. K12 is weak on the merits. But in the end, whether these transaction take place, and the funds they raise, depends a lot on perceptions of public education as a safe place to put your money.

3. I can’t help but wonder if we are not seeing a repeat of the internet boom-bust experience. I fear that the school improvement industry is the last place to benefit from an investment boom, and the first to affected by a “liquidity crisis.” We've just been through a huge amount of hype about private equity, a sure sign the best deals are behind investors, and a reason to worry about the more recent. And now we are in the midst of the mortgage markets implosion. If the K-12 IPO doesn’t go forward, one reason will be that the markets just aren’t prepared to place whatever money they have left in the risky school improvement sector.

Posted by Dean Millot at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The heart of charter schooling is not technical innovation in management or pedagogy, but a social movement – driven by the idea that public schools should be of, by and for the communities they serve. Centralized management contradicts that idea, which is why I’ve been against Charter Management Organizations as philanthropy’s primary investment strategy for scale. Still, some CMOs will work. T