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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.)

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Searching for the End to Plagiarism" »

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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.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Don’t Rob “Poor” Peter to Pay “Poor” Paul" »

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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.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Agreeing to Duck the Discussion about Profit" »

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May 29, 2008

Dear Chairman Gray,

We are deeply disturbed at the Mayor's choice of Frederick Hess and Kenneth Wong as unbiased, independent judges of the city's public school reform.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Local DC Activists Protest Chancellor's Choice of Independent Evaluators To City Council" »

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Jason Cascarino is Manager of Program Investments at The Chicago Public Education Fund

On April 24, 2008, heteroskcedasticity became my all-time favorite word. Somehow, I managed to navigate through four years of college never having taken statistics (the Jesuits let me down). So, it took a keynote lecture by Jeffrey Wooldridge, a preeminent econometrician from Michigan State University, to expose me to this magnificent term.

The venue was the first National Conference on Value Added Modeling, somewhat of the latest craze in education research and evaluation, although the method has been used in certain places for some time. My colleague and I from the policy and funding community were decidedly out of place amid the econometricians, psychometricians, research scientists and other over-achieving right-brained folk constituting the balance of participants. Not the least of otherworldliness we encountered was the labyrinth of complex mathematical equations peppered with characters from the Greek alphabet I struggled to remember, to say nothing of the alien language of “random and fixed effects,” “data shrinkage,” and, my new all-time favorite, “heteroskedasticity.” It was a bit scary. And the scariness is what I want to touch upon here.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Mission Smarts on Value Added Models and the Fear of Data" »

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Jim Kohlmoos is President and CEO of Knowledge Alliance

Back in March of 2002 Knowledge Alliance (then known as NEKIA) co-convened a day long policy forum - “Research in Education: On the Leading Edge of School Improvement?” - in Washington DC to explore stronger connections between education research and school improvement efforts nationwide. At the time some folks believed that this topic would not generate more than a passing interest among a few policy wonks. But it was indeed a hot issue.

Just a few months after the passage of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) there were all sorts of questions surrounding the term “scientifically based research” which had been planted in the statute in over 100 places. And there was a big interest in how the federally supported R&D infrastructure in education could be restructured through the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA - which was up for reauthorization at the time). The forum was "standing room only" (SRO) and the conversations were hot and heavy about quality and relevance and utilization. We produced a summary document of the gathering and eventually an Education Week commentary calling for a “new education knowledge infrastructure”. (Find here.) In the burgeoning era of education reform under NCLB and ESRA, education research seemed to be on the verge of forging a new central function in school improvement.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Is Education Research on the Leading Edge of School Improvement?" »

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Jim Snyder is Director of the Northwest Education Cluster, a regional trade group based in Portland, Oregon.

Since my first report on the happenings of the NW Education Cluster we have been busy - with some success. But we still have quite a journey to go as we work towards building a collection of organizations, both public and private, that strive to foster change and progress within the northwest education environment.

Our last meeting offers a case study.

Continue reading "The Northwest Education Cluster: A Continuing Saga" »

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John Thompson is a Teacher in Centennial High School, Oklahoma City Public Schools

I have a friend who wrote for the Heritage Foundation who argues, "In education there is no Left or Right, just ‘clued in’ and ‘clueless.’" Set to the tune of a Charles Wesley hymn, his words could be the rallying cry for true collaborative reform. During a bipartisan effort to raise taxes and reform our urban school system, our union leadership worked closely with some of the most conservative businessmen in one of America’s most conservative states, but we were not even sidetracked by a bitter election over the so-called "Right to Work." Given a choice between the practical judgments of teachers, as opposed to the theories of policy analysts, the businessmen invariably trusted the professional judgments of veterans of the urban classroom.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Not Left v. Right, But "Clued in" v. "Clueless"" »

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Trace A. Urdan is a Managing Director of the investment banking firm Signal Hill.

1. Buyouts alive and well in Pre-K

The private buyout market is moribund at the moment, not because asset prices are high, or because the private equity firms lack capital, but primarily because the basic business model of using debt to finance purchases (and then pay that debt down through cash generated by the business) is hamstrung by the frozen credit markets.
Yet notably, even in this environment, two large (by sector standards) deals have emerged in the Pre-K market: Bain Capital’s $1.3 billion buyout of Bright Horizons (NASDAQ: BFAM; Hold), and more recently, Morgan Stanley’s purchase of a controlling interest (60%) in ABC Learning’s U.S. business for $775 million. In our view, both of these transactions are examples of situations in which the short-term horizon of the public equity market is being exploited to advantage by the longer-term horizons of private equity firms.

Continue reading "One K-12 Investment Banker's Prognosis: Five Reasons to Prepare for Generation Z!" »

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Heather Johnson is a regular contributor to Online Education Database (OEDb).

Recently, CollegeWeekLive hosted the largest virtual college fair in history. Its success and the success of virtual college fairs in the past indicate that traditional colleges have started to embrace students' digital world.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: The Rise of Virtual College Fairs" »

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Edward Fields is the CEO of online teacher community HotChalk, offered free to public schools through corporate sponsorships and advertising.

The American education system is in crisis. Teachers are scrambling to stay on top of their workload and drive the best possible learning outcomes. Meanwhile, administrators, parents, legislators and Corporate America are on the sidelines calling plays that don’t stand a chance of changing the outcome of the game.

Education is the only path to ensuring America will continue to lead the global economy. Educators need our support in every way. A new game plan based on three fundamental changes is the way to approach teaching; a strategy that helps teachers overcome obstacles they face in their day-to-day practice.

Continue reading "A Belated Friday Guest Column - Redefining Tech Support" »

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Nancy Van Meter is Deputy Director, Office of the President, American Federation of Teachers.

Without knowing Alan Carter, Vice President of the Education Industry Association and CEO of the tutoring provider, University Instructors, Inc., I can’t tell if he is sincere or “shocked, shocked” when he laments that Republican Congressional leader Buck McKeon recently warned SES providers that their business survival hinges on “election results” rather than evaluations proving that SES contributes to raising “academic achievement.”

Continue reading "A Belated Friday Guest Column - Is SES Exec Carter Sincere or "Shocked, Shocked"?" »

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Alan J Carter is CEO of University Instructors, Inc. The views are his own and neither the position of his firm, nor the Education Industry Association, where he serves as Vice President.

At the EIA Education Industry Days in Washington, DC, Buck McKeon, the ranking minority member of the House Education Committee told the assembled group that if a Democrat is elected President, Supplemental Education Service (SES) providers should expect to start laying people off.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: SBR and RB – Measures of Efficacy or Red Herring?" »

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Sandy Fash is an Account Executive with C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.

Ask any editor how many news releases they receive daily, and you can count on the answer being “too many.” So what can you do to stand out in their inbox?

As the number of emails editors receive each day increases, pitching a specific story about your company and its services/products instead of multiple news releases can be an effective way to catch their attention. Here are some tips to consider when using this public relations tactic:

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Pitching a Story" »

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Jim Kohlmoos is President and CEO of the Knowledge Alliance.

In the Washington world of overworked hyperbole, just about every year is a “watershed” for something. But in looking at the political and policy terrain in front of us in 2009, I think we are destined for one in education policy. The year ahead has the converging dynamics of “a perfect storm.”

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: A Real "Year of Transformation?"" »

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Jim Snyder is the Director of the NW Education Cluster

In August 2003 about 25 people gathered at a local university to share ideas about forming an Education Cluster in the Pacific Northwest to discuss issues surrounding education. In the room were CEO’s of over 10 education companies that created products and services for the education industry from pre-kindergarten to adult learners. Fast forward to 2008 and the NW Education Cluster is now over 260 people strong and represents over 40 education companies. The cluster is still a fledging organization but it is attempting to coalesce around a few key priorities.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Consider the Northwest Education Cluster" »

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John Thompson, is a Teacher in Centennial High School, Oklahoma City Public Schools

In much of life, when we want something done right, we build redundancy into the budget and options into the plan. In education, we buy "silver bullets" that will work for every school, every teacher, every student - as long as everyone does their job flawlessly. In sports, we deride "one man teams." In education, we celebrate heroes who defied the odds of systemic uniformity - and then try to replicate their unique accomplishments.

The school improvement industry has provided a vast toolbox of educational technologies, along with expertise regarding their proper mix and appropriate mix. Society has invested enough in public education to allow teachers to pick and choose from the array of tools. In other words, redundancy. Yet, No Child Left Behind and the technological imperative of American business have combined to increase school districts’ intraprenuerial energy, while reinforcing their top-down tendency to settle on one "quick fix."

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Making Redundancy a Value of Planning in Public Education" »

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Trace A. Urdan is a Managing Director of Signal Hill.

In May of 2001 in the fading flush of the dot-com boom, my then firm, WR Hambrecht + Co., with my enthusiastic support, helped PLATO Learning sell 2.4 million secondary shares at a $21.00 share price. The basis for the enthusiasm expressed by myself and others had to do with the perceived inevitability of digital content – personalized, interactive, up-to-date, engaging (you get the idea) – to ultimately dominate the education landscape, even at the expense of the printed word. I knew, of course, about the distribution power of the entrenched publishers; but in my view, their need to jump on the Ed-tech bandwagon would make PLATO an asset over which they would all (there were still four back then) compete auction-style. Based in some small measure on my purple prose, (I wasn’t the only one!) the stock reach an all-time high of $26.19 in July of that same year… Last Friday PLATO shares closed at $3.50.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Notes From The K12 Supplemental Market" »

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Dr. John Stuppy, President, TutorVista.com.

At the Arizona School Administrators’ fall conference, Dr. Jeff Van Handel, Superintendent of Camp Verde, Arizona, described how his district had lost students to charter and private schools, and was forced to deal with a dwindling budget, more high-need students, and a shortage of qualified teachers.

Compounding these challenges, Camp Verde’s teachers were faced with a wider disparity between the best and worst performing students, and the challenge of teaching to a wide range of skills. For example, some students were Limited English Proficient, while others were repeat discipline students who performed on average two grade levels behind their fellow students.

Dr. Van Handel needed qualified teachers in secondary math, science and English but had limited availability of teachers and an inadequate budget. Previous attempts to hire a single teacher with a Master’s degree in mathematics had been unsuccessful for over two years. Facing mounting pressure from parents and the community, Dr. Van Handel thought “outside the box” to come up with a cost-effective solution to the district’s education crisis.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Hey Buddy…Can You Spare A Teacher with a Master’s Degree?" »

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Nancy Van Meter is Deputy Director, Office of the President, American Federation of Teachers

This week’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) by K12, the Herndon, VA-based operator of virtual charter schools, generated much less attention than the buzz surrounding Edison Schools’ much-heralded IPO nearly ten years ago. Edison’s pioneering IPO was greeted with predictions that innovative reforms, improved student achievement and economies of scale would follow the private sector expansion into operating public schools. By contrast, K12’s IPO received scant notice beyond newspaper business sections. AP reported that investors “embraced” K12’s offering while The Washington Post reported that K12’s shares rose 36%.

However, the offering raised only about 63% of the $172.5 million sought by the company, according to their prospectus filed this summer.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Virtual EMO K-12's IPO - Shades of Investors' Experience with 'Real" EMO Edison?" »

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Alan J. Carter is Vice President of the Education Industry Association and Chief Executive Officer of University Instructors, Inc.

Many years ago, when I was but a young lad and could claim I didn’t know any better (even though I probably did); we had a pool table. Known only to my family (and those we had duped), this table was slightly warped on the playing surface and had a distinctive ‘break’ in front of the right side pocket. Those unaware of this feature would regularly miss shots, which we chalked up to offense against the Billiard Gods. My brother and I employed this to our economic advantage until the defect became commonly known and our friends stopped betting with us.

I have since reformed my ways, but this story is a classic example the ‘unlevel playing field’. In like manner, participants in the Supplementary Educational Services (SES) arena are often confronted with the odds sliding in favor of either a competitor or a district because the rules of the game are routinely ignored or not enforced. Most participants play by the rules and assume that others will do likewise.

Sadly, this is not the case when it comes to the marketing phase of SES.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Ethics in Supplementary Educational Services Marketing" »

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Emily Murphy, C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.

An online newsroom is a separate page located on a company’s website. The newsroom is designed to communicate information to reporters and journalists, and serves as a valuable resource for anyone seeking company information. In this Web 2.0 age, an online newsroom facilitates two-way communication by providing a business with the means to exchange information with journalists, customers and other key stakeholders.

Having the right information on your website can make or break your media coverage. A recent survey found that three of five journalists said information found on a website influences their decision to include a company in a story. A well-run online newsroom provides the media with exactly what they need when they need it, producing better coverage for the business at a lower cost.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Building Your Online Newsroom" »

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Emily Murphy, C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.

Every year media representatives attend a select number of education trade shows. Companies can capitalize on this opportunity by arranging “show floor meetings” with attendees. These offer company representatives an opportunity to engage in meaningful, one-on-one conversations about their products, company and customer stories with key publishers, editors and reporters.

Successful show floor meetings depend on preparation, implementation and follow-up.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Successful Show Floor Meetings" »

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Kristen Plemon, C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.

The main rule of communication is: know your audience. This rule applies whether you are speaking with potential customers or with the media. When you take the time to learn the interests and needs of your audience members, you can craft a message with the right information and capture their attention.

Journalists are a key audience for most organizations because they are “gatekeepers” of information, charged with deciding what news is worthy of dissemination. They provide a third-party viewpoint, which can influence people’s buying decisions, and enhance or tarnish a company’s reputation. To communicate effectively with journalists, you need to understand their language, the method they prefer to receive information, their work environment, and their readers.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Reaching the Media" »

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Sandy Fash, C. Blohm & Associates

Barely a decade ago, communication tactics were executed primarily via postal mail or the fax machine. Pitching to an editor meant picking up the telephone, and a successful campaign resulted in two or three stories embedded in the pages of a few glossy magazines. Today, the Internet has altered the communications landscape for most information industries, including Public Relations, and the press release has evolved along with the industry.

Continue reading "Friday Guest Column: Writing the New Press Release" »

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