This week's announcements from "Inside The Beltway."   more »

Hardly the best way to introduce the chairmen of the two education committees to the dynamics of the school improvement market. But school improvement providers are the victims here, not the perpetrators, and our trade associations could turn this into a positive. They should stay out of the "reading wars" and cast the story as one of arbitrary and caprious regulation by biased officals. Kennedy and Miller seem primed for that interpretation. EIA, NEKIA and others should be taking advantage of their predisposition.   more »

Whatever you think about Fordham, its people, or their policy views - you have to admit their April Fool's issue of the Education Gadfly is funny. The more inside baseball you know the funnier it is - so it can even be read as an annual test of expertise in the Washington politics of school reform. As someone who habitually forgets the significance of April first until he is halfway through the issue, your editor can testify that these guys are very clever.   more »

The turmoil continues....   more »

This is not the first time Kennedy, Miller and the other senior Democrats who lined up behind NCLB I have said as much. It will not be the last. It is the major strategic choice facing the administration. Provide the funds and it wins on the margins of all or most of the technical issues affecting the school improvement industry. Fight Kennedy and Miller on resources, and every one of these technical issues becomes a little battlefield. The opposition has no end of resources to fight every one of these small engagements, the school improvement industry cannot fight one on an equal footing. And with the war in Iraq moving from $2 billion a week to $4 billion, surely NCLB can be fully funded within a month without any meaningful impact on the federal deficit. This industry's most important interest lies with the law's accountability provisions - indeed on the budget front school improvement providers share an interest with the Democratic leadership. More money for NCLB is potentially a larger market for our firms, but without tough accountability provisions the industry will never see the money.... NCLB authorization for appropriations is the subject of next week's Letter From The Editor in New Education Economy®   more »

There is no escaping the need to demonstrate program efficacy, and that the bar constituting "proof" will be going up. Firms that have not made this a priority have no future in the market for school improvement services. Firms that are commited to demonstrating superior performance should be gathering as much insight into the subject as they can. The National Center for Education Statistics - part of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences - is part of the interagency mix that will be setting the bar. It offers a variety of free/low cost resources for evalution, including training. Every firm should be sending people to these activities - for a variety of reasons, but at a minimum because this is an open door invitation to the world of k-12 evaluation - and your profitability is affected by the rules this community will set.... One last point. If you look through the one training opportunity given as an example here and you can't think of anyone in your firm you can send, or even a close advisor or consultant - you have a staff capacity problem you need to fix. If you are an investor reading this and ask your CEOs who they might conceivably send to this kind of a session and they don't have good answers - you have one or more management problems.   more »

Sometimes philanthropy is helpful to the point of buying our programs for schools. At other times, philanthropic intiatives compete with school improvement providers by offering districts "free" programs. At other times, they complicate the lives of firms with classroom initiatives that conflict with the specific kinds of support and cooperation providers need from their "partners" in the central office and classroom to achieve superior program results. In this case, how will the Kellogg Foundation]s $10 million grant to improve reading skills in Hawaii affect schools implementing America's Choice? Every, providers' local managers need to keep track of these "school reform" initiatives, so they don't come as a surprise degrading implementation and hence expected student outcomes.   more »

Here in the U.S., LightSpan - now part of PLATO, used the PlayStation system for a program sold into the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program market in the late 1990s. Not only did it leverage existing home gaming technology "simple enough for parents," but it deliberately engaged them in their children's education - building a level of parent support for a classroom-based literacy program this writer never saw before, and has not seen since. Can Sony repeat this?   more »

Could private contractors do better than the state in operating juvenile justice detention and education? If there was ever a time to make the proposal for a pilot project, this is it.   more »

The distinction between the providers district like and dislike has very little to do with tax status, and almost everything to do with whether the provider competes with them for students or works for them with students. The school improvement industry needs the competitors to motivate the districts to do things differently - including buying the new providers' programs. But most individual school improvement providers will be far more profitable working with districts as partners than against them as adversaries.   more »

This story is relevant less for its specifics than to illustrate a more general point.... Every human endeavor attracts sub-par performers. Some are incompetent, others cut corners when financial circumstances get tough, some are thieves. If the measure of merit for charter schools is media coverage, all of these losers are the stars. When the least capable providers get all the attention, everyone else suffers the consequences of tighter regulation, abandonment by political fence-sitters, and the loss of public trust.... In most fields the quality providers recognize their shared interest in separating themselves from the riff-raff. They form membership associations to protect their interests and advance their industry..... Charter schools have broadly-based state membership associations. Their national advocacy organizations are controlled by philanthropy, run by policy wonks, and have their own internal dynamics and agendas..... The charter schools' committed to quality need a national voice they control, with a code of conduct, peer review, and standards of operation - indeed a "brand" that distinguishes them from the pack. If 300 independent quality schools invested $1500 each in such an organization, they could make a start - with a spokesperson in Washington and a few young staffers to make their case and respond to stories like this.... The only other point worth mentioning about this story is that if a charter school deliberately misreprsents enrollment, the motivation may be larcenous, but it may also be one of those moral shortcuts taken to keep a school from insolvency. The act is a crime in both cases, but if per pupil payments to charter schools were equitable these stories might only be about the crooks. c   more »