PILOTed

Jack Chorowsky on Education Publishers and Education

Schools need to increase student learning. Publishers need to sell products. This interview with industry veteran Jack Chorowsky explores the disconnect, and talks about what publishers can do about it.

Jack, what do you do?

I work for a New York investment management firm; we invest largely in public equities across industries. My particular focus is on media, education, and technology. Previously, I worked at Pearson and Kaplan, in general management and product management roles, helping them build out digital products and platforms.

We first met at the IIR Education Industry Investment Forum in March. You were exhibiting some amount of frustration with the presentations of some of the companies.

Yes, people were describing how this product or that product was supposed to drive K12 student performance. But K12 publishers go to market in silos, lacking product integration and a solution oriented view, which should matter if you are focused on results.

For example?

Consider formative assessment. Publishers are focused on their testing content, because it’s what they do. They produce items that have great reliability and validity and are correlated nicely to standards. But ultimately, formative assessment is designed to deliver differentiated instruction. The test makers don’t behave like they understand the problems involved in delivering differentiated instruction.

The test generates a result -- then what? The teacher must figure out how to take those results and actually deliver the right instruction to the right students. That is a very different way of teaching than what they have done before. If we are asking teachers to make this big shift, how are we supporting them? The industry could be doing a lot more.

And how should it be done differently?

I would ask where is their pain, what can you do to alleviate that pain, and then how do you implement most effectively. Publishers are acting like content developers—they are asking what content do we develop, what can we sell—rather than what does the customer need?

I’m not sure that publishers appreciate the importance of integrating formative assessment with robust just-in-time support: the right prescriptive feedback, the right materials for students and teachers, appropriate professional development, all at the moment in time when it’s most needed.

The company that understands this will start breaking down silos to produce a more integrated solution. Professional Development, for example, won’t be treated as a separate product.

Don’t some of the publishers offer that?

They may have the different pieces of the puzzle, but I don’t think they put them together very well in a customer-focused package that helps drive performance in the classroom. One might take the view that differentiated instruction requires a culture change, and that to execute a culture change you need not just the right materials but someone on the ground to help make things happen. For example, in some of the schools that have been most successful in this area you find teachers getting together, comparing notes and brainstorming what to do in their classes. Publishers could ask: how can we promote and support these instructional team activities.  That’s just one idea, but it’s not the way companies are talking about the problem or their solutions.

This sounds more like services rather than products.

Yes, we’re talking about a service component to delivering formative assessment. Maybe you need a services organization. Maybe curriculum, instruction and testing companies offer to put people on the ground if districts buy into their solution at a certain level.

Here’s the problem: the publisher sells a product to the district. Then the district dumps it on their teachers. What resources and assistance do the teachers and the principals have to make it successful? Unless there is a solution to that problem, unless teachers have a way to buy into the differentiated instruction approach, you’re not going to get widespread implementation, and you’re not going to get results.

But, what is the likelihood of having money for those resources?

Districts have money for Professional Development; they pay for PD now. I know this is a finite funding stream, but there must be a way.

How can you do it in a way they can afford?

The services commitment doesn’t have to be so substantial that it breaks the bank. You could imagine a publisher-sponsored master teacher coaching an instructional team once a month. That could be affordable.

Or, maybe they could partner with PD or services firms who do that well already.

One way to phrase this to publishers is to make them see that a services component could facilitate the sale of formative assessment?

Right – we’re talking about a solution sale here.

My world view has been shaped by a consulting project in which I participated years ago; the project looked at schools that were achieving success with differentiated instruction. The study found that the big publishers were not the ones whose formative assessment products generated the best results. Successful implementations tended to be home grown; schools were developing their own tests in-house or were working closely with vendors on custom projects. Why? Because the link between tests and curriculum was tight and right, there was much more buy-in from all concerned, and they were more focused on implementation: on changing the teaching culture, on giving teachers the time, resources, and support to take assessment results and make them actionable.

Publishers need to understand, it is their job to deliver results; they have to know what moves the needle in the classroom. If there is a strong belief that differentiated instruction makes a difference, publishers need to figure out how to make that strategy a success. The data says that where it is well implemented it can be.

You’re saying that curriculum, assessment, PD, and support should all be linked.

Absolutely. Teachers don’t care about product categories. They just have needs and objectives.

It all comes back to customer focus. If you sat down with a product manager for paper towels for P&G, you could ask her a question about how people use paper towels, and she knows everything about what they wipe up, how they are used, how they are bought, etc. If you asked a publisher what they know about how their formative assessment products are used in the classroom, I bet their knowledge of teachers is not nearly as good as P&G’s knowledge of the Bounty customer. Why? It’s not that the data and understandings are not available; it’s because of the mindset.

I don’t know how much P&G spends on market research and related R&D for Bounty, but I’m sure that it’s a sizeable number. Now what happens in educational publishing? In a publisher with thousands of employees, how many are dedicated full-time to understanding how their products are used in the classroom? I bet that number is very small – in the single digits.

The level of investment in this function is simply not commensurate with its importance. You can only help teachers if you really understand them and what’s happening on the ground.

What is going to drive improvement?

If the question is how can the industry drive improvement, I’d say a renewed, more expansive, more creative focus on what works and how education companies can partner with schools to generate results. For example, I’d be looking at successful school reform organizations. KIPP is moving the needle, as are Achievement First and Uncommon Schools. If I were a publisher or a services provider, I’d be wondering whether I could learn something valuable from the experience of these organizations in challenging districts. What are they doing on the ground? Are there take-aways for my publishing program, or my approach to service delivery? Isn’t this worth exploring?

Kaplan is also nipping at the heels of the publishers in a handful of districts. And we are beginning to see an increasing focus on open source content models. Education doesn’t move fast, but anyone who believes they can sit back and continue collecting their checks is going to be surprised over the next 5-10 years.

Lou Gerstner changed IBM from a computer manufacturer into a solution provide. It was a painful process, but now IBM is thriving. If IBM can do it, maybe we'll see similar changes from the educational publishing industry.

Thanks, Jack.

Mindgames

This issue of PILOTed is about how the mind works in mysterious ways.

The first example comes from a 6 minute video on subliminal messages. It is well worth spending the time to look at the video, before reading on. In fact, the other Derren Brown videos are fascinating as well, for example, How to take someone's wallet, just by asking.

As a summary of the subliminal messages video, two advertising executives, on their way to a meeting, were exposed to the entrance to a zoo, various images of angel’s wings and harps, and a picture of a bear. They were then asked to develop an ad campaign, and lo and behold, the campaign incorporated all of the images that they’d seen on the way to the meeting.

It is tremendously powerful. If you can scaffold the right images into a student’s experience, can you better prepare the student to learn? How could this be incorporated into learning materials?

This link came from Stephen Downes’s OLDaily.

The second example is around Amy Sutherland, who originally published a column in the NY Times about how she learned how to train her husband by watching animal trainers. This also came from Stephen Downes’s OLDaily. Successful animal trainers respond to and reward behaviors that they want, and ignore behaviors that they do not want. The theory is that behavior that elicits a response is behavior that gets repeated; even negative feedback can serve to reinforce a behavior. When a subject does something wrong, you apply least reinforcing syndrome (LRS), or show no response. She has expanded these topics in a book, What Shamu Taught me About Life, Love, and Marriage.

Of course, first she had to understand what her husband liked. She also had to understand that she needed something for him to do; you don’t train animals not to do something, you train them to do something else instead. And, she had to understand that you cannot build a new behavior in just one step, she had to figure out what actions meant progress.

Sutherland used to nag her husband. Now she ignores him when he is performing in ways that she disagrees with, and rewards him when he acts in ways that agree with her.

I wonder about the application of this in schools. Obviously, when you are dealing with a classroom of students, there are a whole raft of negative behaviors that a teacher cannot just ignore. But, what about in eLearning? Is there a way that we can better motivate students and provide more positive feedback? Are there ways that eLearning can find positives even in wrong answers?

Could someone mention to my wife that positive feedback is even possible? I’m sorry, what I meant to say is, “thank you dear for all your attempts to communicate with me, even when I’ve been distracted.”

The third example comes from a WNYC Radiolab podcast on deception. This podcast takes about an hour, and there are four parts. The first deals with a snake capable of lying. The second is a story about a person who has defrauded dozens of people, and the experiences of those who know her. The third explains how the brains of pathological liars—those who seem compelled to tell lies—are different from those of the rest of us; they have more highly developed connections or white matter in the pre-frontal cortex regions of their brains.

It’s the fourth segment that is more applicable to education. This segment focuses on the times we deceive ourselves. It seems that people who are better at deceiving themselves are more productive and effective and are happier than those who have a more accurate view of reality. Some swimmers, for example, are able to believe that they are unbeatable every time they race. Even when they start out a season doing the same times as others, the ones who have deceived themselves into the belief that they cannot be beaten end up with faster times.

Can we help student learn to think about themselves and the world in a way that helps them succeed? Perhaps they don’t need to really deceive themselves in order to reach peak performance, perhaps they just have to choose a point of view that spurs them toward success.

One current rage is the book and video, The Secret. The secret to The Secret is the law of attraction: that which we think about, happens. A more scientifically based exposition of this general philosophy can be found in Carol Dweck’s book, The New Psychology of Success. If we can inculcate students with the growth mindset as Dweck terms it, can we help them achieve more?

Can this be embedded in our teaching materials? Can schools deploy it?

Derren Brown creates an entertaining video and shows how one can employ subtle messaging, messaging that isn’t even consciously seen, in order to influence behavior. Amy Sutherland uses animal training techniques, specifically positive reinforcement and least reinforcing syndrome to pattern desired behaviors in her family. Two psychologists are out at a bar one night and come up with a way to test whether people are prone to deceiving themselves, and then other psychologists apply that test to determine that those who are capable of deceiving themselves are also capable of higher levels of achievement and happiness.

Here are three techniques with the capability to change student performance that were not designed with education in mind.

Learning to Speak English in Second Life with SRI

Innovation seems to be the hot topic of the moment. Countries have to innovate, or their populations are doomed to a lower economic status. Companies have to innovate or die. Education has to innovate to propagate educated workers and citizens that can compete in a flat world.

SRI has been innovating for 60 years. Curt Carlson, President and CEO, has written a book (well worth reading) on innovation (Innovation, The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want) and he will be the keynote speaker at the SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit on May 18 in San Francisco.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Valerie Crawford and John Brecht of SRI’s Center for Technology in Learning. They provided me with a preview of a really cool new technology, and also with great background information on what SRI does and how it works.

The technology was built around voice recognition software developed at SRI and is designed to support building fluency in English, through either formal or informal learning approaches. What was most cool was that the software worked with Second Life (SL). Second Life is a three dimensional world where visitors can travel, interact with each other, learn, build stuff, take classes, buy things, conduct meetings, etc. Once logged into SL, using SRI’s technology, students interact in social situations through speaking. The SRI software not only conveys the meaning into the Second Life world, it responds and also provides feedback about how well their speech compares with native speakers’. In SRI’s SL-based environment, users can engage in game-like activities, talking through a microphone and listening to responses. This allows them to practice and assess their English-language fluency, comprehension, and pronunciation, all with speech recognition technology. 

The core software for the speech recognition technology was originally designed for the exact opposite function. The software was originally written so that the computer would allow for errors in speaking, but would still recognize what the person was saying, a forgiving speech recognition system. In order for this to work, the developers had to understand the differences between how a native speaker would speak and how a non-native speaker would speak. The software has to select meaning from different possible interpretations.

The education application uses those same capabilities, but with the opposite purpose. It compares the user’s speech to an optimal voice pattern, scores the results, and provides feedback and possibly remediation to the speaker. For example, take the pronunciation of the letter “t,” which has different sounds depending on the context (wrestle, put, better, vacation, these, thing). One type of error would be to use a wrong but valid “t” sound in a word. A different error is to pronounce a “t” like a “d” or “z”. (My mother-in-law is Hungarian, so I always know when “ze dinner is on ze table.”) For each context, there must be trapping sequences for common speech errors.

A second hurdle involves interfacing the technology with SL.

Second Life has an API for developers wanting to create new applications. You would think it would be a quick leap to interface the speech engine with Second Life. But, the licensing agreement calls for Linden Labs to have unrestricted use of all intellectual property in SL. In order not to lose the IP, SRI had to put the speech recognition and all software architecture for the system outside of Second Life, without diminishing the user’s SL experience.

They were able to accomplish this through a combination of client software (on the user’s machine) and server software at SRI. Oversimplifying a little, the client software captures what the user is saying and communicates data over the Internet with the SRI server. SRI has also integrated into the SL environment to capture information about avatars’ actions in SL, and then communicate actions back to SL.

One vision is to develop this into a SL resort island. Visitors would have the ability to practice and self assess their language skills in a risk-free setting, and learning experts acknowledge that language use in context is the best way to build language skills, and a lot more fun than memorizing conjugations and verb tenses.

For example, visitors might go to a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender avatar might respond, “I think you asked for a drink, but your pronunciation needs a little practice.” They may be given a language improvement mission to complete before they get the drink. When they come back to ask again, if they still need practice, the bartender might respond, “Yes, I understood you, you want a drink. You still need some practice on pronunciation. If you want a glass of water I can give you some now, but if you want something more upscale, first go to the language gym to work on your letter ‘R.’”

As Valerie made clear, the speech recognition technology that interfaces with SL is not a stand-alone product. The CTL group of SRI does not create products but rather focuses on innovating new learning technologies, designs, and resources. They perform five different types of services, generally in the disciplines of math, sciences, and language.

1. They develop assessments of student learning (devising and deploying instruments to assess different cognitive skills)

2. They evaluate methods or products to determine their effectiveness in cognitive, information, or skill transfer

3. They research and study different methods that try to improve teacher effectiveness, specifically looking at how teachers learn complex forms of pedagogy. In fact, they host one of the longest running online social networks: Tapped-In (tappedin.org)

4. They develop technologies that can become the basis of products (creating feasibility demonstrations, and then partnering with others who will produce and sell the product). Once a technology is developed, they may also help specify an infrastructure that will allow the technology or products to scale.

5. They      provide consulting to commercial firms to leverage existing and new      research to inform product design and product strategy, to lower      innovation risk and enhance product effectiveness and traction.

The SL/Speech Recognition technology falls into the first part of the fourth service, technology development. To actually take this technology and turn in into a product that people can buy may still take $1–2 million and 9–18 months. That is where SRI looks for partners.

A partner can be a joint development effort, technology can be purchased, it can be licensed, or there can be royalty arrangement.

So what can we learn from SRI?

First, SRI may have a technology that you can use to create a business. SRI has a lot of different IP that can be applied to education, and they are looking for partners to commercialize the technology into products.

Second, successful innovation requires overcoming a number of different hurdles. CTL started with an existing voice recognition software, developed years ago at SRI’s Speech Technology Lab. There are a slew of complexities in figuring out how to best leverage this technology for learning in the current and near-future learning technology market, through integrating it with learning environments, such as Second Life and mobile devices. Creating successful products almost always takes substantially more resources than expected; plan to have the people and resources to continue moving forward even when obstacles slow you down.

Third, interesting ideas often come from where you least expect them. When developing a forgiving voice recognition application, who could have predicted that the product might also be used to grade the quality of speech of English language learners?

A Vision for Professional Development in Education

The Professional Development – Teaching Connection

At FETC this past week, I had a great discussion about education with Don Hall, CIO of the Muskogee County School District in Columbus Georgia, and Cory Linton, Executive Vice President of School Improvement Network.

We had just attended a focus group on School Improvement Network that was put together by the BLE group. School Improvement Network is a client of ours. Their fastest growing service is PD360, on demand online professional development based on The Video Journal of Education’s 17 years of publishing 8–12 PD videos a year. Don had been a member of the focus group, and the three of us just got into a discussion on our vision of how PD should fit within comprehensive education framework.

Don led our talk, and most of these ideas come from his vision. Don started out describing the following diagram of how good instructional material works with teachers, students, and classrooms.

A teacher looks at a student, and can start at any of three different places. She can look at what he needs to learn, or learning standards. She can start by using specific resources or methods to teach him what she believes he should learn next. Or, she can employ an assessment to find out what he knows, and what he has yet to learn. As an industry, we’re starting to do a good job of integrating those three, assessments are starting to point out what learning standards have and have not been achieved, while also pointing to learning resources that will help the student achieve the next step. Learning resources are being linked to specific learning objectives, with the goal of then fitting in with the way the students will be assessed.

The other side of the issue is to ensure that the teacher has the knowledge and skills to be able to use the standards, resources, and assessments to achieve superior results. Existing development plans and support resources include district wide professional development, coaching, and learning communities.

But the idea of integrating the specific information a teacher needs, at the time she needs it, in the way that she is most receptive to learning, is the next step and is illustrated by the diagram below.

How might this work?

Let’s say a new teacher, who has been schooled in the ideal world of classroom teaching, confronts her first real life hurdle. Wouldn’t it be great if she could pull up a resource that would tell her about different ways to handle the hurdle? And then, what if she could watch an exceptional teacher actually employ one of those solutions in a classroom? And then, if she wanted, learn why that method works?

Historically, the teacher would go ask the teacher next door for advice. But, as Don pointed out, couldn’t this be the continual perpetuation of bad teaching practices?

The ideal situation would be, for all teachers, to have experts available to describe what to do, show how to do it, and explain how to do it, right when they need it most, and tied to the learning standards, instructional resources, and assessments that they use every day. This diagram might look like this:

A teacher would thus be able to obtain the information about the standards each student needed to achieve, what he needed to learn, and would be able to skillfully use the available resources to fashion an appropriate intervention in an effective manner at the right time.

Wouldn’t that be great?

If you want to continue the discussion, Don Hall is at the Muscogee County School district, http://www.mcsdga.net. Cory Linton can talk more about how School Improvement Network is working with publishers, education experts, and school districts, and can be reached via http://www.schoolimprovement.com, or we welcome comments to these articles at http://academicbiz.typepad.com.

8 Questions for Stan Collender

Early this month, at the AESA conference in Tampa, Florida, I heard Stan Collender speak. Stan made the US budget seem interesting and relevant to all of us in education. It was scary.

Stan has been called “the one-stop shopping center for budget-process analysis,” and amazingly, he follows the federal budget as a hobby. While he writes for The National Journal, and is often used as an expert by practically every large news organization, Stan is Managing Director at the DC office of Qorvis, one of the leading PR firms in the nation, www.qorvis.com.

My conclusions from listening to Stan’s presentation and talking with him on the phone:

• Don’t look for any new education initiatives to be funded in this coming election year.

• Expect that there will be no agreement on any education bills that need reauthorization this year.

• Look for moderate decreases in federal funding for education over the following year or two, no matter who wins the election or how much they say that education matters.

• Find ways to motivate parents to talk to and visit the local offices of their senators and representatives; it’s the best hope for education funding to improve our education system.

Stan, you gave a great talk at the AESA conference, why educators should care about the federal budget, and how it is likely that funding is going to be reduced. Can we start out by you giving us 4 reasons why the federal government is likely to decrease the amount they spend for education over the next three years?

Deficit: the deficit is rising, there aren’t too many places to look for saving; education is always an area that gets looked at for savings.

Other needs being perceived as higher priority: military, Iraq, Afghanistan, veteran’s health, energy. When you have troops being fired at, that takes about the highest priority.

Inertia: it is possible that in the 2008 elections that there will be a big enough Democratic win that Republicans can’t filibuster, but it is likely not enough to be big enough to stop filibusters. It is more likely that Republicans will have enough to filibuster, which will continue the lack of movement we are seeing today.

Economic slowdown: related to the deficit. If there is an economic slowdown, and congress needs a stimulus package, money for education does not provide immediate stimulus, like a tax cut, or a job bill.

Are there any countervailing arguments that the federal government might increase funding?

The big one is a Democratic takeover in 2008. There may be push from a Democratic White House for more dollars. But, Democrats can push back on an increase for education because they can get away with it more than Republicans can.

Currently the federal government is spending about 9% of total K12 education expenditures, a total of about $38 billion. Historically, it’s been somewhat between 4 and 6 percent. What do you think this 9% will be reduced to?

A flat percentage doesn’t relate to the need, and it doesn’t say where the money is going.

Why is education such a political football? Everyone has been educated. No one wants to see the US fall down on education. Business is a big proponent of education. But relative to everything else it is easiest to cut; education is 1/5 of everything in the budget after entitlements and military.

I’ve heard the president say that the budget deficit will be eliminated by 2011, why can’t we just continue doing what we are doing until then?

The deficit will not be eliminated by 2012 and President Bush won’t care because he won’t be in office anyhow. He won’t be around to see it. Even if he is right, the national debt is the real problem, it reached $9 trillion for the first time; interest payments are hitting records, and that puts pressure on all other spending, particularly education.

That statement about the budget being eliminated is just wrong. It is already going up. The statement is based on assumptions that are not true; none of the assumptions are based on us having a presence in Iraq. That’s about $250 billion a year to fight the war. And the president is saying there is likely to be a permanent presence in Iraq, that’s going to be around $10 billion a year.

One more example, this assumes that there is no fix to the AMT tax (Alternative Minimum Tax). After this year, it will be fixed, because 30 million Americans will be affected and they are going to demand that it be fixed. That’s another $50-60 billion a year.

Those are just two of many examples.

All politicians say they value education, but you’ve made the case that, despite all trends pointing to US education lagging other nations, they will be reducing, not increasing spending. Are they lying?

Value education relative to what? In a perfect world with unlimited resources they would be spending a whole lot more than they are now. But this is an imperfect world and always will be.

Educators and companies in education are not making the type of money that financial, pharmaceutical, defense, and telecom companies are, so they don’t have the resources to influence politicians the same way. What can they do, and how effective can they be in advocating for education?

It’s not the educators; it’s the parents. Parents are the best grass roots in the world; every district has kids in school. Get the parents out. They cannot match the lobbying dollars, they need to use their votes. The problem is that they do not take advantage of what they’ve got. Organize at PTA meetings. No one has to come to DC, they just can go to town meetings, or the local offices of their representatives.

They don’t even need to organize, if tomorrow 10 parents show up at congressional local office that would have a substantial impact. If a congressman knows constituents are watching how he votes on education, he will be watching ed too.

What organizations do you see making the greatest impact on increasing, or at least holding the line on decreases, for federal support of education?

The ed community in DC is a strong lobbying presence; ASEA, SIIA, to whatever, they have the ability to get to members of congress, they have to get to the congress people.

Are there particular areas, either geographically or by type of aid, that you think will be likely less hit than others, or even likely to increase?

One group that tends to suffer are career colleges. They are not as appreciated. Also, there will be changes in student loans. 

US education compared to other developed nations

Education at a Glance 2007

This newsletter summarizes the US briefing paper for the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) Education 2007 at a Glance report.

The briefing paper for the US is available at the OECD website.

Quick summary

The data shows that the US education system substantially favors those who can afford the best schools and who can afford to go to college. Then, the US economy holds the largest rewards for those who have graduated from college, and the biggest penalties for those who do not complete high school, providing few outlets or second chances to cross that gap upon leaving school. Other developed countries appear to be rapidly expanding their university-educated, but without the education spending and income disparities of the US.

Data from the briefing paper

37% of the US population ages 55-64 have some higher education, which is substantially over the average of other developed countries, and is first out of the 30 countries surveyed. This figure is pretty stable in the US; the number of college graduates as a percentage of the population is basically flat, while most of the rest of the world is rapidly increasing their supply of college grads. Thus, if you look at 25-34 year-olds, the US is 10th.

In the US, people with college degrees earned 75% more than those with high school degrees. Ten years ago, this differential was 68%. There are only three countries with disparities that wide. The rate of return on a college degree is about 13.5%, slightly more for males and slightly lower for females. College graduates also have lower unemployment rates.

In 2005, the probability that a young person will enter higher ed at some point in his or her life was 64%, as opposed to 57% in 2000; it is 71% for women and 56% for men. This compares with 54% as an average in other developed countries. On the other hand, only 54% of entrants to higher education in the US obtain degrees, which is last.

While US universities are the most popular for international students, with 22% of all international students coming to the US in 2005 (the UK is second with 12%), this is 4.5 percentage points lower than it was in 2000. 63% of the foreign students in the US come from Asia.

The US has stabilized at about 87% of the population with high school degrees over the last 30 years. While this was first 30 years ago, it is now 10th. Only 76% of the US population graduate high school with their class, 20th among the developed countries, with 5 countries above 90%.

The US has the 3rd greatest income disparity between those without high school degrees and those without, a person without a high school degree earns 2/3 what someone with a degree earns. 42% of those without high school degrees have incomes at less than half of the US median, 31% of those men and 56% of those women are unemployed ( as compared with 27% and 51% in other countries).

Increasingly, then, the US has lower HS graduation rates than other developed nations along with a greater penalty for not graduating; and lower university completion rates, along with a greater financial incentive to graduate college.

Furthermore, 56% of those with higher education degrees also receive training at their jobs, as opposed to 32% of those with high school degrees and only 12% of those with no high school degrees.

Total educational spending in the US was at 7.4% of GDP in 2004, second highest among OECD countries. Spending is growing between 6% and 7% a year, while 1/3 of OECD countries are seeing declining dollars. 36.4% of US spending is going toward higher education, as opposed to 23.9% on average in other countries.

In primary and secondary schools, 55% of the spending in on compensation to teachers, while the average in other countries is 63.5%. 25.7% is devoted to compensation of other staff, while the average was 15.5%.

On the surface, this seems that the US is wasting money on non-teaching personnel. Does anyone have any data on where the US's other 10% more paid to “other staff” than other nations goes?

US teachers earn the 12th highest salaries. However, teachers earn just under the average salary in the US, while in the average OECD country they earn 28% more than the average.

Spending on primary and secondary education increase by 40% between 1995 and 2004, while enrollments increased by 7%. This resulted in a net increase per student of 30%, which is lower than the OECD average of 38% per student.

The US pays $8,800 per primary student  (2nd highest) and $9,900 per secondary student (4th highest) against averages of $5,800 and $7,300. In terms of percentage of GDP, the US is right in the middle.

Class sizes in the US are 23.1 in primary and 24.3 in secondary, which compare with OECD averages of 21.5 and 24.1.

Interview with Bobbi Kurshan of Curriki

This issue of PILOTed is an interview with Bobbi Kursham, Executive Director of Curriki. Curriki’s goal is to make great educational content available to everyone, free. Bobbi is also the keynote speaker at the SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco on April 15 to 17.

BK: Let me first give a little background on Curriki before you start with your questions. Curriki is a nonprofit and was originally created by the founders of Sun Microsystems in 2004. Our goal is to provide the best curriculum, free, just a click away. We have over 20,000 members and had 1 million page views in January.

MW: If you’re providing the best content free, what is the role of for profit educational publishers versus the role of Curriki?

BK: That’s getting right to a main issue. We are looking for a win/win. Publishers can provide services that wrap around our content. They will have access. They can make modifications. They can distribute it. They can be like Red Hat is to Linux or Sun is to java. We are in conversations with several publishers, and some of them really get it.

MW: What are the five year goals for Curriki, in terms of numbers of students using it, reputation, size of organization?

BK: We want to be like Wikipedia, but in curriculum: the first place people go to find curriculum. Whether it is top up or bottom down, if someone wants to teach something, we want them to look for it here first. They can make derivatives of it, teachers can make lesson plans from it, and they can post it back to the community for others to use. We are also in conversation with a number of countries, states, and ministries of education to set up local instances of Curriki.

A lot of material gets funded by ministries, foundations, or the US Department of Education. But when the funding runs out, what happens to that great material? Curriki is looking to be a home for that orphaned content.

MW: If I am a teacher, and I’ve created a great lesson plan for teaching, say, simple multiplication, what do I have to do to make it available to the world?

BK: Just go and upload it. We don’t require some homogenized version. To make it easier though, we are creating a series of templates that will be available in March. When you upload it, you create tags, so people can find it. Then when others create derivatives based on it, the derivatives will inherit your tags and those authors can add their own.

We’ve created a list of educational key words for tagging, to make it easier.

Also, you can take content that is already there and modify it for your own use. There are two types of modifications. You can assemble multiple resources and put them together; this would be then called a collection. It’s like a play list. Or you can take something and create your own version of it; this would be called a derivative.

When you post something, by default we use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows for sharing, modifying, and distribution with attribution. If you want a different set of rights, you can opt out, and we flag the work and limit what others can do with it.

A lot of teacher created great content is not digital; it’s on paper. We’re having a conversation with a large copying company, for them to offer free scanning and uploading of paper-based educational materials that will appear on Curriki.

MW: If I were a teacher and wanted to use something in my class, how could I know if it’s good without having to go through every item on my own?

BK: We have a review process, and when you look at an object, you can see what level of review it has received. Our initial review is to make sure it does not have anything inciteful or pornographic, before anyone can see it. We wouldn’t want a recipe for making a bomb, for example.

At the next level, we have subject matter experts review it, a teacher or one of our internal curriculum people. We are in partnership discussions with the National Association for Retired Teachers for them to become reviewers. As people retire, they still want to remain active. If you have subject matter expertise, becoming a Curriki reviewer will be an option on the AARP web site.

Moving forward, some materials will be research reviewed by a department of education or university. These will be labeled as premium content.

MW: How are you working with other open educational resources?

BK: No one knows what’s going to happen with open source in education. Will there be multiple sources? Will one be dominant, like a Google in Search or a Microsoft in desktop operating systems? It will take a lot of money and a lot of persistance for someone to become the Google of open source education.

Most funding is short term. What is MIT going to do when their Hewlett Foundation grant expires? How are they going to make OpenCoursWare sustainable? The organizations that can figure out the sustainability question will be successful.

Maybe the open source publishers will join together in an umbrella organization. Instead of each one raising $4 million, the central organization will raise the funds. Just like Pearson has many divisions.

I come from Venture Capital. I’m used to working with and collaborating with different publishers. We are going to work with the other providers. We are talking to many of the projects funded by the Hewlett foundation, although they are really in higher education. We are working with eduCommons in Utah. We are doing joint research with four different projects in Africa.

We are going to work with different people.

MW: So, what happens if a teacher wants to pull something from Curriki, something from some other source, and, maybe something from a for-profit publisher into a lesson?

BK: We don’t know yet. That’s one of the areas we are trying to find common ground and standards. We’re working on that. At this point, you can publish your content on Curriki, and then you can also publish it on X. A teacher could have multiple points to access it. That’s not the long term solution, though.

MW: Do you have capabilities for collaboration, on building content or for students?

BK: We know teachers want to share information. This is not just school curriculum, this is social networking.

For development, you can take materials that someone created and you can build derivatives or you can build collections. You can create a work group to work on your content. You can mark sections closed once they are approved.

We’re adding tools to help people build content. We have templates for lesson plans, textbooks, activities, assessments, and courses.

We will eventually add tools for students to collaborate, but we first need a critical mass of content.

MW: Do you have anything you want to close with?

BK: As Scott McNealy points out; there are 100 million kids that do not have access to primary educational materials. We want to change that. We want to help kids learn as much as they can as fast as they can. This is a transformative idea and it will happen quickly.

Where we’ll be

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be busy at a few conferences. Please let us know if you are going to be there also. We hope to see you.

March 26 to 28: IIR’s Education Industry Investment Forum. This conference is designed for those who want to invest in K12 or Higher Ed companies, and for education companies interested in meeting investors. We are giving a pre-conference workshop on the 26^th on Developing Outside Investments to Help Drive Growth. We understand that if you use the code XU2253MW you will receive a 15% discount.

March 28 to 30: CoSN’s K12 School Networking Conference, in San Francisco. This conference is for K12 Tech coordinators at the district, state, and federal levels. You’ll hear how different school system use tech to solve problems and overcome the problems that tech creates.

April 15 to 17: SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit, in San Francisco. This show offers how-to sessions and great networking for Ed Tech publishers.

On a personal note

Since this blog is on learning, here are three things I learned recently.

1. When your wife asks you how you like something she bought for the house (like drapes, or sheets, or whatever) the correct response is, “I really like them, they’re great.” This first one I actually knew; what I messed up on is part 2.

2. When you answer the question, you first need to look at whatever it was that was bought. Without looking at the item, even the correct answer is wrong.

3. This is just peripherally related to the first two. If you have a guest bedroom, it’s a good idea to make sure that the bed is comfortable.

Interview with Iwan Streichenberger

This issue of PILOTed features the first interview of and unfettered Iwan Strechenberger.

Iwan was president of Edusoft and a corporate vice president of Houghton Mifflin. Iwan joined Houghton Mifflin in 2001 as vice president of corporate development and technology initiatives. He has also served as corporate vice president of strategy and business development and as president of Houghton Mifflin Learning Technology. Prior to joining Houghton Mifflin, Iwan was COO at Flipside Europe, a division of Vivendi Universal Publishing, where he was responsible for the company’s operations in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Hungary.

We debated splitting this interview into two newsletters, because it covers so many topics. But, on the other hand, they are all related. So instead of breaking it up, we decided to list the questions, and, if you have a particular interest, you can just click on the question to view Iwan’s answers.

Or, you can read the entire interview and get some great insights from someone who is a leader in educational publishing.

What do you think were the biggest challenges in education and in education publishing over the last 5 years?

Don't you think publishers share the blame for failures in the educational system?

Are there any parts of K12 education that should be attractive to investors?

Is being acquired the only viable strategy for a small education company?

Is $20 million in sales the ceiling for independent publishers?

How are Open Source and Open Content likely to shake out?

What's next for you?

One thing before starting the interview. If you are in the Education Technology Industry, I'd encourage you to attend the SIIA's Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco, April 15 to 17. We are very active in the SIIA, and have found the ETIS a great opportunity to network and find out what is happening in the industry.

What do you think were the biggest challenges in education and in education publishing over the last 5 years? How did we meet the challenges? What should we learn from that?

The first challenge to me was the incredible inertia the prevailed in the education sector. When I came to the US 6 years ago, I saw a lot of great opportunities connecting instruction, assessment, and intervention. It was difficult to see how slow things move in education. Obviously, it was not something new but it was new to me :-)

The second challenge came from technology. While technology offers a great opportunity, it presents the challenge of having to create products and services that use it to its full potential as well as getting those products used. I have learnt that in education, simplicity matters more than the richness of the features.

The third challenge was the NCLB movement. Seeing the education world embrace accountability was very encouraging. Applying business standards to this world sounded great to me. Unfortunately, the implementation of NCLB has made educators focus only on emergencies; it has sometimes diverted them from their broader mission of teaching better by using technology. Instead, they have focused on meeting NCLB requirements and hitting numbers. I am worried that this could end up being a missed opportunity to change education deeply through the combination of accountability and technology tools

A larger question is whether we teach the right things to kids in schools. There is only so much time that kids spend in class. There is a general agreement that school is the place to teach basic skills. But, kids may never actually use a lot of the things that we teach; for example, some of the information we teach in science will not by used by the vast majority of students in the real world. But, there is also general agreement that it is important general culture for them to learn these things. Should we be teaching 21 st century skills? How important is test prep?

Is there a middle road? These challenges make the education industry so interesting and also so complex.

Nader Darehshori asked a great question at this year's Ednet, and I'd like to paraphrase it. There is a lot of evidence pointing to failures of the US educational system. The publishers are making a lot of money providing goods and services into that system. Don't you think the publishers share blame for the failures? How? What should they do about it?

I worked for Nader; and that was indeed a very interesting question he asked. The one thing I don’t agree with is that there is a not so hidden bias that there is something wrong with making money. In the commercial sector, to attract investors and the best talents and have them work hard, your company has to make money.

For me, the question should be: are we delivering the value that schools should expect when they spend this money?

There is no doubt that education vendors could be more innovative. However, education is a very tight ecosystem with the typical “chicken and egg situation”. Everyone is dependent on each other; no one wants to be the first one to change.

Publishers are not sure that they will be able to convince schools that they should adopt innovative solutions. It is safer to go with the solutions that the educators have always purchased. When you talk to clients, they complain that publishers do not innovate, and make their life tougher.

Publishers can be more valuable to the districts, but will they be rewarded if they lead the way? I’ve seen a lot of innovation that didn’t get rewarded. Sometimes the money just was not available for that type of intervention. Sometimes the money was earmarked for those innovative applications, but was actually spent on others. The funding structure makes things very complex.

You could argue that there is a lack of vision and ambitious thinking on the part of the largest (textbook) publishers. There is so much at stake in the textbook business, and they have so much to lose in the short term with change.

It is interesting to look at the music industry and see what happened there: the traditional players tried to slow down the emergence of digital music, MP3, Napster… Who ended up winning: a new entrant, Apple! Can we learn something from this?

Even though I decided to leave Houghton Mifflin a couple of weeks ago to explore new challenges, I will keep an intrigued eye on its merger with Riverdeep. This is an exciting time and a courageous decision: this merger will force an established textbook publisher to rethink the value it delivers to its clients.

Structurally, the education market does not encourage innovation and value creation. The adoption model is a one time decision based on a lot of factors including many political ones… What is there to reward those that deliver value? What penalizes those that don’t? I strongly believe that the adoption business model hurts both the vendors and the districts.

Edusoft successfully used the subscription model. Is there anything healthier than allowing districts to stop paying if they don’t get value? Not after 9 years but every year! As a vendor, not only does it keep you on your toes but the financial benefit is very significant as long as you never stop increasing the value you deliver.

The subscription model is likely to be the future… I hope it will be! But it will be critical to train districts on this new model, help them realize the power they have in their hands and how best to use it. Districts’ administrators are under tremendous pressure and extremely busy. They don’t always have the time, nor the skills to analyze what is a good product. Now, they are buying more than a book: they are buying a solution with content, platform, and services. This is a lot to evaluate!

Are there any parts of K12 that should be attractive to investors?

My take on this, having done so much M&A, is that K12 education is an attractive segment for investors.

There is a general sense and societal consensus that education is doing the right thing. People have kids, and education is helping kids. No question here!

However, investors are struggling to understand education. It is not transparent and too often irrational. Education is the only place where 1+1 is 1.9999, not 2 like everywhere else: more art than science! Investors do not understand the adoptions or the decision making process. And to make things worse, they are sometimes nervous about investing in the govermental sector.

Adoption makes education very seasonal: another bad thing for Wall Street which loves steady growth and no surprises.

On the positive side, there is a lot of money out there to be made and to invest in innovative education activities. Companies can make money and individuals can make a difference, but you have to be aware that this is not a typical industry.

If the subscription model becomes more widespread, I am convinced that it will be great for the industry and will help attract investors. The subscription model is more transparent: You can track new subscribers; you can track churn.

One reason that Edusoft grew so fast is that we could measure and focus on retaining our users. Between 2004 and 2006 we had over 90% renewal rate. Frederic Reichheld, a Bain and Company partner, wrote a book in 1996 called The Loyalty Effect where he analyzed that it costs approximately 10 times less to retain a client than to attract a new one. And this was true across a wide variety of industries, including credit cards, cable television, and telephone… and now education!!! In his more recent book, "Loyalty Rules", he even claims that "a 5% improvement in customer retention rates will yield between a 25 to 100% increase in profits across a wide range of industries." Quite impressive and a great opportunity!

There are currently a lot of investors looking for opportunities in K12. They want to know where to invest, where to find both explosive growth and predictable revenue streams.

For those investors, my bet is that the next couple of years will be the ideal years for strong growth in intervention programs, both for students and for teachers. For the first time, we have data that shows how students are performing, and that analyzes precisely where they are doing well or poorly. This is already generating a huge demand for intervention platforms. This should be a very exciting time for intervention companies and Professional Development providers.

In the past, trying to help a child learn faster was as if a doctor tried to treat you without doing a diagnostic first. Like shooting in the dark. It sounds obvious now but the healthcare industry exploded because of the huge progress made in diagnostic tools. The same is happening in education.

"Treatments" become much more sophisticated: districts need solutions, not just tools… Companies providing basic tools will be penalized and won’t last. They will create more problems for the districts than they will resolve. The buyers know their problems: they now want the vendors to fix them, not to create new ones. This is the end of the era of the CD-Rom that you drop or the pallets of books you ship: you are expected to walk in, diagnose problems, propose solutions, implement them, support them for a while and be ready to be penalized if they don’t work.

As a result, investors will be much more aggressive in their due diligences: they will check the scalability of the platforms, the quality of the content, the performance and commitment of the support staff…

My guess is that Professional Development and intervention companies who score well on these dimensions will attract a lot of investors, whether they are financial investors or strategic ones.

Finally, the recent M&A activity (Houghton Mifflin – Riverdeep, Thomson Learning, and a lot of other rumors…) could be the perfect opportunity for new entrants to start playing a role. Are we finally going to see Microsoft, Google, Apple or Yahoo be active in this segment? It will be interesting and could bring some much needed fresh blood into the education market.

Is the only viable strategy for a small company to grow to a point where it is attractive to be acquired by a big publisher?

Maybe. Will these new (potential) entrants change things deeply? That’s a difficult question, and it probably depends on the time horizon. Is that the only viable exit strategy? The answer is probably yes in the short term. There are not many recent success stories of large IPOs in K12. It is very tough to get big enough to have an IPO.

If so, the underlying issue becomes how do you get big enough to attract large investments, go public, or get acquired?

For some reason, education companies struggle with the “20-40” bar ($20 million to $40 million of revenue). A lot of companies are very successful regional players with leading (local) positions in intervention, PD, or assessment. Few of them are or become national leaders.

Maybe I am more sensitive to this, coming from Europe, but, while the US is a big country, a lot of companies forget that you can’t sell the same way in Texas as you do in California. If you are trying to sell to a district in Texas, and you point out that you do “X” in California, they are not going to like this. When you move to a new region, it is starting from scratch and you need local representation; not easy to do in this industry.

When a company tries to become a national player, this is a make or break time for that company. A lot of them do not succeed with this step because they try to move too fast. They do not realize that they need to approach this new step as if they were building a new business in each state.

When I worked for Vivendi, we had all these great ideas for synergies between Europe and US, France, Spain, Italy and California… It was very interesting conceptually but much tougher in practice than we expected. We very quickly concluded that the education market is very much local.

A second barrier to fast growth is that companies think that if they can just partner with a big publisher, they have it made. Big publishers really like to do things internally. They feel that if they are putting their brand on a product, they need to be responsible for everything. Sometimes they probably push that too far.

Other industries believe in partnerships. They focus on what they do well and partner for the other things. The education industry has not completely embraced this concept.

Small companies looking for partnerships face a tough time with the discussions, terms, and integration, because they are not talking the same language as large publishers. For large publishers, the name of the game is to secure textbook adoption. If they have to give away everything else for free, they will. Quality is often less important than immediately perceived value: it is a checklist mentality with little premium for quality.

This model does not work for the smaller innovative companies who believe in their product and don’t want to discount its value by giving it for free.

This sales model has received negative response in the most progressive districts. Some of them have started to complain that there are too many products that they don’t need or use; there is so much stuff that doesn’t “talk” to one another other. If you give too many free products to districts without thinking of how they work together, it can become counterproductive for the districts.

A better solution would be switching from how much you can provide to:

• How can you make my life easier?
• How do you save time for educators?
• How do you help districts become more efficient?

The focus of the big publishers on adoptions and give-away products makes it difficult for them to partner with smaller companies. In my business development roles, I have often been the person brokering both sides. It is difficult to get the parties to agree on both the financial and the non-financial terms.

Large publishers want to pay a low price and then be allowed to do whatever they want with the technology. Technology companies want to maximize their dollars and continue to develop their product with their vision. It’s hard to find a common ground between different these business models.

The success of a deal comes down to communications, respect, and knowledge. You have to understand the mindset of the people on other side of the table and what they are looking for. Unfortunately, the education industry is not very good at this, maybe because it is vastly dominated by a handful of large textbook publishers. Lack of knowledge of the culture and thoughts of the other side kills far more deals than it should.

This leads to a lot of missed opportunities to do great things that would add real value to the education industry.

So, in the short term, yes, the most likely viable exit strategy for a small company is to be acquired by a large one. But, this may change; and as subscription models become more prevalent, the industry will become more attractive to investors.

One other point. I think that there could be a slowdown in acquisitions. The big education publishers have bought a lot of companies in the last year or so. In addition, some of them are for sale or going through significant restructuring and valuations have increased in these last few years. It will be harder to get their attention for the next couple of years. That doesn’t mean that if a publisher sees something exciting, that fits in their portfolio, they won’t pull the trigger. However, they will be more picky.

You have mentioned the $20 million barrier a few times. How would a small company grow beyond $20 million dollars?

Content remains king. Even if you have a great platform, if you don’t have content, you won’t sell. You need content to solve problems and bring value to clients; technology is not an answer in itself. This is one way that the big publishers control the market; they own a lot of content. This has been the largest barrier to entry that has stopped, until now, large software publishers that have successfully entered a lot of other industries.

Edusoft founders anticipated the emergence of testing, and realized that classrooms would not have a computer for every kid. They came up with the idea of generating paper tests, and then scanning them, and relying on technology to analyze the results. The company did extremely well because its product solved a big problem with a simple solution.

In order to succeed like this, a company needs to solve a real problem with a solution that is simple for schools to implement. Plus, they must position it in a way that the school or district can fund it. Plus, they need to solve the localized national distribution dilemma. Finally, they need the financial resources to carry out these strategies over the timeframes required.

How are open source and open content likely to shake out?

Open source has penetrated the K-12 market more slowly than the Post- Secondary. Things are changing faster in Higher-Education because professors have the skills to create content and put it together. Also, there is a lot of excitement from Post-Secondary professors for open source and open content, and more interest in peer-to-peer innovations.

K-12 is more difficult. Teachers are really busy, they are more closely monitored, and they are less sophisticated with technology.

Over the years, every time we have sold a tech product, and tried to add more flexibility and local control to it, we found that the teachers didn’t use the added features. If teachers have to choose between simplicity or spending time to assemble content, they will go with something simple and prepackaged. Teachers do not have the time, the skills, or the appetite to create things themselves. They want the program to give them their tests, provide them with reports and the right content so they can spend more time with the students.

Perhaps open source is a more visionary term, while in K12, a more interesting trend is open systems; the goal being to let users combine and connect multiple systems together seamlessly.

Is it reasonable to expect districts to use one system for PD, another for assessments, another for their social studies curriculum, and yet another for math? The challenge for publishers is to accept systems that allow content from different sources. Systems will need APIs that allow them to string together content and features from different sources.

One of the values of Salesforce.com is that it leverages off of other companies that have come up with solutions for specific segments. In education, we are starting to see more focus on open flexible platforms that talk to each other. SIF is one initiative that helps meet this need. There is an opportunity for innovative companies to help to make the process of using content from different sources easier. Maybe, a company could do for education what Apple did with the Ipod and Itunes. Apple made it elegant and simple. You put your content in a technology that makes it easy to find and easy to use.

Open source is very attractive, and it is cheaper. But education customers, more than ever, need support. They still need to be held by the hand. One of the reasons Edusoft was successful, with high usage and low churn rates, is that a lot of money was spent on training and supporting users. That was more important than pricing. Open source providers could still provide this support but this is costly.

Moving forward, people are less likely to buy content or services. They will want solutions to their problems. They will be less concerned if it is a PD solution, or a technology solution, or a content solution. Of course, in education, the solution still has to find a way to match up with a funding source.

Education customers are increasingly more interested in solutions. They want a consultative approach to diagnose where the problem is. They want the flexibility to use things differently, and to use different things. This is true for high performing districts and low performing ones, it is true for wealthy districts and for poorer ones. But, you can’t approach the market with a cookie cutter solution; there is not just one solution. Districts are saying: “Solve my own individual problems. Thanks for the content and the freebies, but that’s not what I want. Solve my problem in a way I can fund it and I’ll give you a lot of money.”

The funding sources are not fully geared to this yet, but it is a trend I can see coming.

So is open source or open content a threat to publishers? The customer is looking for a way to solve a particular problem. Publishers need the vision to combine different assets, use systems and content from other sources, provide the support and possibly take a short term hit to achieve long term success. These “smartest” publishers will not be threatened by open source or open content if they put themselves in their customers’ shoes.

You’re currently a free agent. You're a person that everybody in the industry wants to have on their team. So, you've got your choice of virtually any job title, job function, or company in K12 education. What is the thing you'd most like to do now?

Well, thank you, but I think you may be going a little too far.

Last spring, I left Edusoft but remained at Houghton Mifflin until its merger with Riverdeep because I was excited to work on some exciting strategic challenges. The time has come for me to move on. The last 10 years were great but there couldn’t be a better transition than the birth of my daughter, four months ago!

I have not decided what I will do next but there is one thing I know. It will be an exciting challenge! That’s all I know :-)

I love challenges. I love to combine thinking and action to make a difference. I’d like to find a challenge that is very complex, a company with problems, but where there is a lot of potential and upside.

The issue in education is that it really has to come from the top. The governors, the large districts, they have to develop a vision and stick with it. If I can help to make this happen, I could work with either a small company or a large publisher, in my company or for someone else, a traditional player or an new entrant. I get energized by a challenge.

I have not been fully employed for roughly 2 weeks but am already working on various exciting projects, consulting for an exciting education company and advising and helping several smaller innovative companies in other industries! I realize now I much I was really looking forward to these new and exciting challenges, combining big picture thinking and practical execution challenges. It is very refreshing!

I recall a funny experience when I was working at Vivendi Universal. I was meeting with senior executives of the music and movies divisions and they were looking at our offerings and the question arose, “why can’t a kid learn a math formula, but can learn a rap song after hearing it just once?” There was a music exec in the room, and he suggested we just have some of Universal Music’s rap artists become the stars of our math textbook.

Needless to say that it may have been a little too extreme for a 170 year old publisher… Some of these artists had arrest records, their lyrics were highly controversial, their life styles clashed with the education culture. What never really was debated was, if they could help kids learn math faster. Or, if we could take a piece of that idea, modify it, and come up with something even better.

I have been very lucky. A lot of people get siloed in their professional life. Their work experiences are focused on just one task or just one area. I’ve been allowed to work in nearly every area of publishing, M&A, marketing and sales, operations, business development, assessment, you name it. I have been incredibly fortunate to live in multiple countries, from South Africa to France or the United States, and have occupied senior management positions in companies as prestigious and diverse as the Boston Consulting Group, L’Oreal, Vivendi Universal or Houghton Mifflin There is a lot of value to having a global view of business. You learn to think differently.

Now might be an interesting time for me to look at the overlaps between consumer gaming, what kids do, and how kids learn. All the big players in the tech youth consumer markets are looking for opportunities in education. That may be one great opportunity. But there are many others in education as well as outside of education too. I want to remain open to opportunities and go where I can make a difference, find the biggest challenges and opportunities.

I came from the business side and fell in love with this education sector. I’d love to make the sector more attractive to investors, so we can have education fulfill its potential in this country. I’d like to give back on what I’ve learned. I am glad to have the time to step back, look at a lot of things, and decide where the next challenges and opportunities lie. This is an exciting time for me…

Are US Schools better today?

Interesting trends from the 2001 Status of the American Public School Teacher that still have meaning today. The document can be viewed at
http://www.nea.org/edstats/images/status.pdf

There is a new study coming out in the next year.

The study shows 40 years of data, from 1961 through 2001. There is a lot in the report that indicates how much better our schools were in 2001 (and by extrapolation, today) than they were 45 years ago. By 2001:

• Teachers were substantially better educated,
• Teachers received more professional development during the school year
• There were more teachers in Math and Science
• Teachers prepared more for their classes, and spent more hours per week on their jobs.
• Classes were substantially smaller in Primary Schools
• Teachers saw fewer students per day in Secondary Schools
• Teachers were paid substantially more

But, fewer teachers say that if they had to do it all over again, they would definitely choose teaching.

Here are some of the details (of the 300+ page document).

The level of education of teachers is going up, most teachers now have a Masters degree or higher.

Year	No Bachelors	Bachelors	Masters	Doctors
1961	15	62	23	0
2001	0	43	56	1

Teaching experience has stayed flat through 40 years, the average teacher has a median of 11 to 14 years teaching experience.

Over 40 years, in Secondary Schools, English teachers have remained about 20%; math has grown from 11% to 18% of teachers. Science was flat at around 12% but jumped to 15% in 2001. Special Ed and “Other” (combined) have gone from nothing to 10%. The biggest drop-offs have been in Industrial Arts and Home Economics, going from 11% to 2%.

In Elementary Schools, class sizes have decreased from 29 in 1961 to 21 in 2001. Secondary classes have remained about the same size, but teachers were seeing an average of 132 students per day, decreasing to 89 per day by 2001.

Teachers are spending more hours per week, going from 47 in 1961 to 50 in 2001.

In 1966, nearly ¼ of all secondary teachers spent no time preparing for classes (70% spent 4 hours or more),. By 2006, only 3% spent no prep time and 83% spent 4 hours or more.

Total number of teaching days has remained a constant 180 to 181, but professional development has grown from 5 to 7 days a year.

Interestingly, lunch “hour” has decreased from 40 minutes down to 32 minutes.

In 1961, 50% of all teachers said they would definitely choose teaching as a career if they had the opportunity to do it all over again. In 2001, only 32% said that.

In today’s dollars (assuming 4% inflation), the average teacher made $25,000 a year in 1961, as opposed to $44,000 today.

Note: Farimah Schuerman, Rita Ferrandino, and I will be conducting a pre-conference workshop at IIR’s Education Industry Investment Forum. The Forum is being held from March 26 to 28 at the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. Our workshop will be on Developing Outside Investments to Drive Growth. There is a 15% discount off of registration if you use the code XU2253MW or if you click this link:
http://iirusa.com/edu?registration=XU2253MW

2007 PreK-12 Educational Publishing Outlook

Simba Information (http://www.simbanet.com/webinars/index.htm) sponsored a webinar today featuring Kathy Mickey (Simba), Gail Pierson (Riverdeep) Steven Ritter (Carnegie Learning), and Leslie Wilson (Michigan’s One to One Institute).

Below are interesting highlights from each of the presenters.

Kathy Mickey

Supplemental publishing is changing rapidly. It is about 18% of the educational publishing market. Tech products are stealing market share from print. Five years ago, the focus was aligning supplemental products with textbooks, now the products have to be aligned to state standards.

US school enrollments in the South(+10.3%) and West (+6.2%) are growing, while those in the Northeast (-3.8%) and Midwest (-0.3%) are shrinking over the last 10 years.

Federal funds are expected to remain flat over the next year, with moderate increases in state spending for education.

Simba forecasts a 5% growth in textbook sales, 6% in electronic media, and an overall growth of 4% in all instructional materials for the next year. The fastest growing segment will be comprehensive software.

Gail Pierson

Increasingly, the district is making curriculum and purchasing decisions, leaving less flexibility to teachers and individual schools.

Nearly every district has, is installing, or is evaluating district-wide portals and LMS systems. The goal is to provide both internal access and community access 24 x 7.

The Riverdeep/Houghton-Mifflin vision is that adoptions and larger contracts are requiring the winner to provide a solution that integrates both core curriculum and supplemental content, while also providing pacing calendars, curriculum and lesson planners (with content accessible from the planner), differentiated instruction, single sign-on, flexible print/online content with capabilities to change the lesson sequence and to fragment content, and content accessible from the district portal.

One could say that they are betting the company on that vision.

Steven Ritter

One unanticipated problem with differentiated instruction is that it is easier to differentiate online content than classroom time. Pacing flexibility is limited in the classroom.

For K12 software, quality is measured by higher test scores.

Leslie Wilson

There is a three year learning curve in instituting one to one computing into schools. Teachers start assigning work based on the textbook, but by the third year, they are looking for the best resources available to teach a topic.

Michigan had Memphis University analyze the changes resulting from the one-to-one initiative:

• Students feel more effective, they enjoy schoolwork more, and they feel they are better students with better job prospects.

• There is more parental/caregiver involvement.

• Students are doing more collaborative activities, more problem solving, they debate and question more, they integrate subjects areas better, and they discuss schoolwork with other students more.

• Test scores are significantly higher.

One anecdotal difference is what happens in the classroom when a substitute teacher shows up. The students get right to work; they know what they have to do, and they provide their own support for each other. This is an indication that students, being more empowered, take more ownership of their learning when they have the tools they need.

One anomaly is that technical support costs have actually dropped. With daily use of the computers, teachers and students are able to help each other over most technical problems.

The PowerPoint slides, while not up as of this posting, are supposed to be available from the Simba website, along with a schedule of additional webcasts.