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My top five press releases from June's School Improvement Industry Announcements – State Education Policy Organizations

More often than not, school reform initiatives have started in state legislatures and worked their way across the nation. Problems are felt at the state-level first, and the pressure to act is strongest in state capitals. Federal policy generally reflects consensus among the states more than leadership from inside the Beltway.

How to keep track of education policy’s beading edge? School Improvement Industry Announcements – State Education Policy Organizations monitors some 100 state-level policy organizations. Starting today, I’ll be offering my top five announcements from each monthly issue.

My criteria for selection will be information and insights useful for those interested in school improvement, and especially school improvement providers seeking inexpensive market research.

• The Public Policy Institute of California surveys computer and internet use cross the state. Among other things while over 80 percent of parents with household incomes of over $80,000 use the internet to access their children’s schools, that’s true of just 30 percent of parents making under 40,000.

• The Utah Foundation released a 20-year assessment of the state budget, comparing it with national trends.

• The Nevada Policy Research Institute describes school boards a “century-old scheme to disempower parents” in the Nevada Business Journal.

• Public Opinion Survey on K-12 published by Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

• Georgia Public Policy Foundation releases 2008 Report Cards for Parent.

Marc Dean Millot is the editor of School Improvement Industry Week and K-12 Leads and Youth Service Markets Report. His firm provides independent information and advisory services to business, government and research organizations in public education.

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Dorothy Mikuska founded ePen&inc, developer of PaperToolsPro and PaperToolsPro Online.

Imagine my shock when I read the newspaper headlines that a principal of a nearby high school had plagiarized his entire graduation speech and its valedictorian’s speech had eleven instances of plagiarism. Though extensive evidence of students plagiarizing may be startling, professional writers and educational leaders are also found plagiarizing. The integrity of the word is the basis of education and communication; steal or abuse words and learning is compromised. Schools have three choices to stem the growing prevalence of plagiarism.

First, and most popular, is directly teaching students what plagiarism is, why it is unethical, and its consequences, as stated in each school’s honesty policy. Increasing incidents of toxic text shows that students’ behavior for the most part has not changed. (Incidentally, the online honesty policy of the University of Texas at San Antonio was plagiarized word for word from another school’s policy without attribution.)

Believing that many students are both unethical and lazy and that teachers are too overworked to authenticate plagiarism, many schools employ Internet detection services, such as Turnitin, to police students by comparing papers to the contents of the software’s databases. Although these databases are extensive, they cannot compare student writing to text from websites requiring passwords, paper mill sites which email purchased papers, non-electronic sources such as books, or papers written by friends, classmates or Mom.

Preaching the school’s ethical code has proven ineffective and policing student work has taught students not to get caught by tinkering with challenged passages.
To address plagiarism effectively, its causes must first be identified. Plagiarism is an educational problem for which schools need an educational solution that provides appropriate instruction and support to overcome the four main causes: disengaged learning; poor reading skills; lack of organizational and metacognitive skills; and careless documentation.

I have watched students easily distracted while doing research, leading them to read only for main ideas, a skill they mastered in middle school. Mies van der Rohe said God is in the detail; my attorney tells me the devil is in the detail. Either interpretation tells me that details have got to be interesting—where real learning occurs, where motivation to be engaged occurs. But students skim too quickly because they value speed over reflection, simplification over synthesis, and brevity over complexity. In-depth long-term learning occurs when students analyze and synthesize information, when they organize it and reflect on their own learning, and when they evaluate and document their sources.

In the days before computers and copy machines, students recorded information on note cards with the source and page identified. Our millennial students no longer communicate with pen and paper but on a keyboard. They no longer take notes, but merely copy/paste from online sources without reflecting, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating their information. Research has become as mechanical as the computer. If students genuinely understood their information, plagiarism would be eliminated.

Since students do most of their research online, educators need to provide software to assist proper learning. Citation management programs like Endnote and RefWorks create bibliography entries and citations as well as the opportunity to annotate a source. PaperToolsPro, a research management tool, has created an integrated package for note taking, citations, bibliography, organization, and synthesizing information.

Schools need to rethink the causes and solutions to the growing plagiarism epidemic, beyond simple solutions, beyond just writing an honesty policy for a school, even if it is not plagiarized.

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The Bottom Line

If you are a school improvement provider…. School Year (SY) 2009 will probably be more like SY 2008 than SY 2010. States and districts will behave much as last year, holding off on difficult decisions with market changing potential until after No Child Left Behind is reauthorized some many months following the Presidential election. This is not a time for management to make bold moves with much material risk for the company. It is time to consider: the 80/20 rule – and dropping the costliest customers, growing intensively with or near the best customers, creating low-cost growth options, and looking for federal grants and other forms of funding to maintain and build human and intellectual capital, rather than laying off staff.

If you are an investor…. Other things being equal, SY 2009 will not be the time to put funds into the typical school improvement provider. Over the long haul the market for products and services to improve teaching and learning based on student and program evaluation will grow. But today, the balkanization of demand for school improvement by state and district, the disproportionate impact of political risk on the school improvement marketplace (start here), and the extreme fragmentation of school improvement providers (start here), make betting on any one firm extremely risky.

It may be a good time to start investigating investments to be made in SY 2010, and it is probably a good time for major publishers to create acquisition options on the cheap. Ironically, the best bet on a growing school improvement market to lay today is with the major publishers. If demand for school improvement turns up, publishers will buy surviving providers or otherwise capitalize on the positive trend. If not, the publishers current business model will remain an attractive cash cow.

Looking Back

The market for school improvement products services and programs is a market for doing things differently from the last century. It is based first on the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provisions. These place schools and districts in a state of fear intended to motivates changes in practice towards meeting the needs of actual, factual poor performing students, and away from the mythical average student. The result has been some shift in the instructional budgets away from generic textbooks and training to products, services and programs that at least claim to improve student performance on state standardized tests.

Three related factors have slowed the transition.

First, public education's traditional institutions lack the political capacity to change much faster than they have. Change will alter the distribution of power and rewards in ways that favor those on the front lines of education rather than headquarters: principals become more important than school bards or superintendents; individual teachers become more important than their union leaders; program developers become more important than program marketers. Whether the institution is a school district, a teachers union, or a publisher, those in power will not simply hand it over. And so from the day NCLB passed, these institutions have resisted implementation by all available means.

Second, money. There is little reason to doubt that existing instructional budgets, augmented by efficiencies in school district support operations, are adequate to support school improvement. But this implies the capacity to change quickly. In the real world, additional funding was necessary, and after the Republicans gained control of the Congress, President Bush backed off his promise of higher levels of support to Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller.

Third, NCLB’s scientifically based research (SBR) provisions should have protected truly effective providers from the marketing power of K-12’s dominant players. Few investors put money into the new school improvement providers betting on only marginal changes in curriculum and instructional purchasing following NCLB. Yes, they believed in AYP’s power to improve the nature of demand, but they counted on the law’s SBR provisions to protect their new firms from the competitive advantage of major publisher’s control of k-12 marketing channels.

This assessment proved to be based on the false assumption that the federal Department of Education had the capacity to define and regulate program quality fairly quickly. In fact, SBR has been irrelevant to school improvement providers, except to the extent that it was misused by one Department of Education staff member to support the dominant players in Reading First, and picked up by state education agencies for its potential to kill off Supplementary Educational Service providers.

Looking Forward

As SY 2009 approaches, those who have resisted change must be heartened. NCLB I is bound to remain law until SY 2010, but the school improvement industry’s SY 2009 experience will almost certainly be affected by the Presidential decision.

The Democrats seem bound to tighten their control over the House and Senate. Overall, an Obama Administration implies a somewhat higher level of Title I funding than we see today. Any NCLB II signed by President Obama, will make it much easier for schools and districts to make AYP and avoid the sanctions of NCLB I. That will reduce the fear motivating school improvement purchases, but so many schools are heading into school improvement or restructuring status that unless NCLB is stripped of any semblance of accountability, the school improvement industry will survive. What may be more important is the expectation that the Department of Education will be far more favorably disposed to state and district education agency waiver requests thanit was under Secretaries Paige or Spellings.

If Senator McCain is elected, it is more likely that his Administration will try to maintain something closer to today’s AYP provisions. This price of Congressional acceptance is bound to be higher Title I funding than a President McCain might otherwise prefer. This Department of Education’s approach to AYP regulation and waivers will be closer to that under President Bush. The overall outcome is uncertain, but the addressable school improvement market is likely to be marginally larger than under Obama.

That’s the good news on the federal front. The bad news is that whoever becomes President, expect no significant movement to make SBR a meaningful barrier to market entry. My sense is that it is beyond the candidates' interest today, and unless education advisors in one or another campaign takes an interest in it soon, a new Administration will not be competent to deal with the matter during or after the transition. This dooms most school improvement providers to marginal profitability, and kills any real hope of substantial private sector investment in truly effective educational programming. And absent such investment, I have a hard time seeing how the nation can raise student achievement dramatically on any time frame.

If politics is the art of the possible, economics bounds the definition. Looking to state and local budgets, we see nothing but trouble for the next several years. Overall, tax revenues are heading down. K-12 education already consumes the plurality of funding. It will not obtain much more as a percentage of total budgets, in absolute dollars, or adjusted for inflation. In many cases public education it is likely to receive less.

Nevertheless, absent something like NCLB I, the pressure on the system is not likely to force political leaders to make the difficult decisions that reshape institutions. Expect instead the kinds of marginal changes that leave the current distribution of power and rewards in place – across the board cuts, preying on the least powerful actors in the system, further concentrations of power at the center of these institutions, etc, etc.

Prognosis

For any firm currently in operation, the best advice about any coming business year is usually that it will be only marginally different from the last and the next. That’s more or less true of the school improvement industry today. The important questions are the direction of trends and the prospects for change. Here the answers must be negative and dim. And about the only people who care about this are school improvement providers.

Marc Dean Millot is the editor of School Improvement Industry Week and K-12 Leads and Youth Service Markets Report. His firm provides independent information and advisory services to business, government and research organizations in public education.

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From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report

Announcement: Procurement Operational Review & Analysis Due July 15 (Jun 16) Los Angeles Unified School District, California

Their Description: The Procurement Services Group (PSG) is made up of three primary functions; Purchasing, Contracts and Materiel Management. A fourth unit Policies, Procedures and Compliance, was recently added but is not as yet fully staffed. Annual expenditures for goods and services District wide with the exception of the building program are approximately $750 million. A total of 27,000 transactions are submitted centrally and are processed by a staff of approximately 80. Historically, the purchasing operation has... not (taken) advantage of the District buying power.... Contract reform was initiated in 2003 with an approved budget to fund 8 positions. This unit has focused on increasing competition through the use of... Request for Proposal....

• Review the current policies, processes, and outcome measures for competing
Professional Service contracts....

My Thoughts: The location is not Podunk, but our second largest school district. Three quarters of a billion dollars in annual procurement is managed by a small undertrained staff of short-timers. The clear implication of this RFP is that too much is being paid for products and services. It's not too much to infer that many of the products and services that are purchased are not the right ones. These are also the conditions that encourage outright abuse and fraud.

A ten percent savings in LAUSD purchasing from improved practices would yield roughly $100 per student. How much would you bet that every other American school district’s purchasing function is materially superior? If the LA savings could be scaled nationally, we are talking $5.5 billion, a long way towards the shortfall on Title I funding claimed by Democrats under NCLB.

Today, the nation is focused on the conservation of hydrocarbons to ameliorate the energy crisis. We might consider improving the efficiency of k-12's basic support functions like purchasing before throwing more money at that problem.

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From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report

Announcement: Reading First Center for Technical Assistance Due July 21 (Jun 20), US Department of Education

Their Description: Under the Reading First Center for Technical Assistance the contractor shall provide technical support services, research, and capacity building activities for State and local Reading First Programs. The purpose of the Center is to deepen and update State understanding of scientifically based reading research (SBRR) and to facilitate, through multi-faceted technical assistance, the implementation and evaluation of Reading First efforts at all levels. The contractor shall be able to: 1) serve as a high-quality resource on scientifically based reading research; 2) provide technical assistance to build Local Educational Agency (LEA) and State Educational Agency (SEA) internal capacity to administer the program; 3) provide consultative assistance to individual states and districts; 4) propose expert speakers for conferences and meetings; and 5) identify and disseminate resource materials.

“Impaired objectivity” includes... : financial interests or reasonably foreseeable financial interests in or in connection with products, property, or services that may be purchased by an educational agency, a person, organization, or institution in the course of implementing any program administered by the Department; significant connections to teaching methodologies that might require or encourage the use of specific products, property or services; or significant identification with pedagogical or philosophical viewpoints that might require or encourage the use of a specific curriculum, specific products, property or services.

My Thoughts: The history of Reading First is one of actual and perceived conflicts of interest - personal, institutional, business, political, ideological and pedagogical. One way to begin repairing the damage done in the implementation of a laudable set of NCLB provisions would be for this center to wind up in the hands of what I’ve analogized to the construction industry’s “consulting architect.”

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My top five press releases from June's School Improvement Industry Announcements – Federal Politics and Policy

Many readers do not have the time to identify and read announcements documenting the relationship between federal education policymaking and the business of school improvement.

edbizbuzz can help.

School Improvement Industry Announcements – Policy and Politics monitors over 100 government and interest groups inside the Washington Beltway.

Starting today, I’ll be offering my top five announcements from each monthly issue.

My criteria for selection will be information and events that help edbizbuzz readers understand how what happens in Washington shapes our emerging market for school improvement products, services and programs.

• U.S. Department of Education Inspector General report makes you wonder if nonprofits are not held to a lower standard of accountability: Teach for America, Inc., Review of the U.S. Department of Education Discretionary Grant Awards (Jun 5)

• To influence market-shaping federal policy, start by reading the Federal Register: Comment Request; Feasibility and Conduct of an Impact Evaluation of Title I Supplemental Education Services (May 29)

• The biggest for-profits can afford to secure k-12 marketing channels by starting at the top (I): AASA and Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies Launch National School Safety Study (Jun 6)

• The biggest for-profits can afford to secure k-12 marketing channels by starting at the top (II): American Book Company Joins NSTA SciLinks® Program (May 27)

• The biggest for-profits can afford to secure k-12 marketing channels by starting at the top (III): Learning to Change/Changing to Learn - Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and the Pearson Foundation public service announcement (Jun 5)

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What remains relevant from this letter in the March 1, 2004 issue of School Improvement Industry Week (SIIW)?

Policymakers, analysts and advocates have spent the last two months debating whether NCLB constitutes an “unfunded mandate” – imposing new federal requirements on states without providing commensurate federal resources.

The term has political utility for those who oppose NCLB, for reasons that have less to do with their fears of insufficient funding than their discomfort with being held accountable for failing to achieve basic levels of student performance. If people can be made to believe that the law is too expensive, they will dilute its performance requirements, and protect opponents from real education reform.

Like any good diversionary tactic, this one leverages real substantive disputes state Republicans have with the federal government – the under-funding of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and intrusion into policy areas reserved to states by the 10th Amendment.

Opponents of NCLB hope that by tapping into emotions surrounding these issues, they can split Republicans in state government from the Administration. After it becomes clear that more money will not be forthcoming, these groups will pressure their Republican Congressional delegations to join with Democratic opponents to weaken NCLB, and destroy the force behind our emerging industry.

As important as the cost of NCLB is to us, and the nation, it has become a game of “insider baseball” as analysts from left, right and center enter the fray.

The first wave of analyses - from the states, districts and unions, exemplified by the study for the state of Ohio - adopted a “brute force” approach to meeting NCLB requirements. These studies assume that if school districts will allocate resources in the same patterns used for a hundred years, it will cost countless hundreds of millions of dollars more to meet standards, on top of funds spent over the next decade on supplemental services for students from schools in need of improvement.

The second wave, a response to the first, assumes rapid radical changes in district operations. Perhaps the best example is the study done by AccountabilityWorks for the Education Leadership Council. Costs are determined by comparing NCLB with the costs of meeting earlier federal law. This wave agrees with the Administration that NCLB may be funded below levels authorized by Congress, but not less than needed to meet the law.

Respected education finance experts in the middle have mostly picked around the technical edges of the debate. The most sensible response was Vanderbilt Professor Jim Guthrie's call in Education Week on February 11 for "a national, nonpartisan, technically proficient effort to construct a cost model for NCLB implementation." This makes sense.

SIIW is certain the second wave studies are directionally correct. A nation that spends over $8,000 annually per student should be able to bring each to basic standards in reading and math; it is not likely to spend much more. But current cost studies lack balance or the appearance of balance. The sponsors of first and second wave studies have too much at stake to be credible beyond their followers; even if factually correct. We need studies that moderate policymakers and the informed public will believe.

A sound analysis of NCLB finance is not a mission to Mars. There are two kinds of costs: 1) compliance with NCLB performance requirements, such as those related to AYP or highly qualified teachers; and 2) the consequences of failure, including supplemental services and public school choice.

Some “consequences costs” are capped. A district need pay no more than 20% of Title I funds on choice transportation and supplemental services combined. If needs outpace funds, districts may favor low-income, low-performing students.

Other consequences costs are not certain. For example, students from schools identified for improvement must be offered a choice of schools. This may involve new costs. Moving a student to an existing public school with available space involves little cost. Enrolling that student in a charter or virtual school may cost more. Building a new school or sending the child to private school will cost a great deal more.

We have some sense of “compliance costs” - of achieving AYP requirements, for example. However, it seems obvious that the "brute force" approach to compliance of first wave studies is not only far too expensive, but unlikely to work. The definition of insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result" applies here.

Doing things differently to meet NCLB requirements will impose real “transition costs.” Districts must be reorganized, school staff must be retrained, and a new culture must be nurtured. If districts could do this on their own, they would have. School systems need outside assistance.

In essence, they require Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) and its district equivalent. Change processes impose new expenses. In this regard, the Administration's consistent defunding of CSR is a real mystery, unless vouchers are its preferred option when public schools fail to meet NCLB (unlikely) or it has not focused on schools that want to change but need real help (plausible).

Here we have more than six years of experience with literally thousand of schools, indicating a per school cost of $60-250,000 annually for each of three years, and a lesser fee for continuing services to maintain quality, training and access to CSR models' networks. These costs are on top of operating costs, although it is possible to defray much of this burden by eliminating activities, programs and positions that are inconsistent with a school's model.

More radical reorganizations of districts are conceivable, but a credible cost study must look to scaling up changes in practice today - like CSR, chartering, school contracting, and virtual schooling. Particularly after the transition costs of compliance are taken into account, it is conceivable that an expert study of NCLB will find short run costs will run higher than reformers or the Administration would like to hear. It is even more likely that the study will establish long run costs far below the shocking sums opponents now hope will lead policymakers to weaken NCLB, or repeal it altogether.

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My top five press releases from June's School Improvement Industry Announcements – Research and Evaluation

Every edbizbuzz reader is not an eduwonk. From correspondence, I know that many are working educators, administrators and school board members. Some are parents. Although the internet has given everyone ready access, none have the time to sift through the avalanche of reports and events produced by federal government agencies, policy analysis groups and program evaluation organizations every month. No doubt each item is of importance to someone in the field, but few are important to everyone.

Here's where edbizbuzz can help.

My firm’s monthly web-enabled report School Improvement Industry Announcements – Research and Evaluation monitors over 130 government, for- profit and nonprofit organizations involved in school improvement policy research and program evaluation nationally. Starting today, I’ll be offering my top five announcements from each monthly issue. My criteria for selection will be useful reference data, knowledge of lasting value, and important facts or insights.

• Must have data: Institute for Education Science: Condition of Education 2008 (May 29)

• The budget is policy: Center on Reinventing Public Education: Allocation Anatomy: How District Policies That Deploy Resources Can Support (or Undermine) District Reform Strategies (May)

• What Are Your State Standards Worth? Education Next: New Report Card on State Proficiency Standards under NCLB Reveals Which States Have World-Class Standards and Which Do Not (May 12)

• What Pipeline? ChildTrends: One Quarter of Science/Math Students Have “Out-of-Field” Teachers (May 15)

• DIY Evaluation is Not Far Off: Empirical Education: Development Grant Awarded to Empirical Education (May 22)

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My top five press releases from this month’s School Improvement Industry Announcements – Providers

I have no doubt that edbizbuzz readers know more about Fordham, Ed Trust and the Center for Education Policy than they do about Scientific Learning, JES and Co. and Sopris West. But for all the talking and writing on public education policy and politics, unrecorded decisions to procure curriculum, professional development, information systems and the like have a more immediate impact, and more important influence, on teaching and learning.

One way to learn more about this part of public education is to read the announcements of the for and nonprofit organizations supplying products services and programs aimed at teaching ad learning. No doubt they are intended to place their issuers in a favorable light, but they still offer a ready starting point for consciousness-raising about the supply-side of school improvement.

My firm’s monthly web-enabled report School Improvement Industry Announcements – Providers monitors over 600 for and nonprofit organizations “selling into” k-12 education. Starting today, I’ll be offering my top five announcements from each issue. My criteria for selection will be announcements that tell readers something about the industry as a whole, rather than just the organization in particular.

National Tutoring Firm Moves into Professional Development: The Princeton Review and National Teacher Offer Online Video Training to Help Educators Certify for Federal and State-mandated Training Requirements (Jun 3)

School Improvement Provider Hosts A Presidential Candidate: Senator Barack Obama Visits Vernier!

What Texas Instruments is to Classroom Calculators, SMART Will Be to Interactive Whiteboards: SMART achieves 56.8 percent product category share in Q1 2008 (June 4)

NonProfit Partners With Google: CAST, Google Introduce New Literacy Tools UDL Editions and Strategy Tutor
(Apr 23)

The Evaluation-Driven For Profit: Quantum Celebrates Ten Years of Innovation in Education Technology (May 5)

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From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report

Announcement: School Improvement Grant Due June 30 (Jun 11) California Department of Education

Their Description: Section 1003(g) of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as the School Improvement Fund (SIF), authorizes funds to help LEAs address the needs of schools in improvement, corrective action, and restructuring in order to improve student achievement. In conjunction with funds reserved under section 1003(a), SIFs are to be used to leverage change and improve technical assistance under sections 1116 and 1117 of Title I, Part A through LEAs targeting activities towards measurable outcomes as described in this document....

The CDE requires that at least ten percent of the SIF grant funds to schools be allocated to contract for technical assistance by a COE/RSDSS or a CDE-approved external provider to provide these services.... Programs may not use SIF funds to pay for existing levels of service funded from any other source.

My Thoughts: This is an alphabet soup of agencies and organizations. I’m still not completely sure of the extent to which the private sector can take advantage of this RFP, and the proposal makes no effort to help the reader.

Moreover, the Chinese-dinner style menu of this RFP is an interesting approach to diagnosis and prescription for California’s most challenged schools and districts.

K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report is a comprehensive weekly web-enabled report delivered by email on Monday. It covers grant and contract RFPs issued by every federal and state education and social services agency and every school district over the internet. K-12Leads is for school improvement providers who understand that their offerings are not commodities, rarely displayed as such, and so easily missed by traditional computer-based “word search” systems.