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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report
From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report
Howard Nelson is a senior researcher at the American Federation of Teachers
Anyone who is seriously interested in this reform idea should read Phyllis McClure’s history of the Title I comparability provision to understand its rationale and assess its potential as a policy lever. As it stands now, school districts are required to distribute state and local resources equally between Title I and non-Title I schools, but they do not have to ensure that average teacher salaries are the same. This is the “loophole” that allegedly “Hurts Poor Children,” the subtitle of the volume containing the papers present at the CAP conference. The hope is that senior teachers, or their higher salaries, can be shifted to high-poverty schools.
My editorializing is now confined to edbizbuzz and my weekly podcast SIIW Online, but on April 5, 2004 they were still part of School Improvement Industry Week. The examples may require a modest recollection of the industry's history and the last Presidential election, but I think the points made then remain relevant.
Investment, Political Risk, and Political Action
Political risk dominates the future of the school improvement industry. Any organization providing products, services and solutions to public schools could fail because of ineffective management, inappropriate products, low-quality services, poor customer selection, or bad cash management. But these factors are within the control of staff, management, the board and investors.
Every school improvement organization - however well run - operates in a market environment that lives or dies on politics. In most states, there are few legal restrictions on the purchase of school improvement services - up to and including school management. Political resistance at the local, state and national levels, is what makes it difficult. At each echelon, bureaucratic inertia combined with powerful interest groups and public concerns about commerce in the classroom, has slowed industry growth
From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report
From Monday's issue of K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets Report
Alan J Carter is CEO of the tutoring provider University Instructors
There’s an old business adage my grandfather (who lived for 102 years and was always worth listening to) taught me years ago: “When your outflow exceeds your income, your upkeep becomes your downfall.” He wasn’t speaking of income and expenses on a P/L statement but rather about something far more important to the success of any business endeavor - ‘cashflow’. An operation can look great ‘on paper’ and still struggle with trivial little day to day issues like meeting payroll, paying rent, keeping the lights on, and funding expansion.
Yesterday This Week in Education's Alexander Russo observed:
[M]ajor scientific discoveries often occur at nearly the same time by groups of different people, not by solitary inventors working in isolation as we've been led to believe. Not only that, but you can apparently gather supersmart folks together and come up with patentable ideas...
And asked:
Could this be done in education? Could a group of folks come together and invent some new solutions? Or would it end up looking just like any other Aspen Institute conference?
I say it's possible, and offer a market-based approach.
Although it joined the edweek.org blog line-up in September of last year, edbizbuzz celebrated its first anniversary on March 7, 2008.
I started the blog for two reasons.
© 2012 Editorial Projects in Education
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