These might be great programs....
Yet, like so many press releases in our industry this seems self-defeating in that it plays right into the prejudices of a very jaded and cynical audience.....
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CompassLearning Inc.... provider of K-12 education software, will announce... at the National School Boards Association’s Annual Conference in San Francisco, an exclusive partnership with Parent Tutor Corporation. Parent Tutor Corporation is the publisher of The Parent Tutor, an electronic tutorial service that provides parents with the tools they need to help their children achieve success in elementary and middle school classrooms.
As a result of the partnership, CompassLearning will bring directly to K-8 teachers the tools that The Parent Tutor offers currently to parents so educators can work directly with parents to increase parental involvement in the education of their children.
Called The Parent Toolkit™, the program will be available to teachers via... a password-protected website populated with articles, activities, ideas and on- and off-line tutorials that parents can use — with guidance from teachers — to assist their children with schoolwork at home. The Parent Toolkit™ meets the requirements of the Federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires and provides funds for parent involvement programs....
In addition, the easy-to-administer program allows a school district to get started with the program in as quickly as one day, saving the district time and money by not requiring in-depth staff development.
“Studies show that schools with an active parent outreach program perform up to 40% better on standardized tests than schools that do not offer such a program,” says Ann Henson, CompassLearning’s Vice President of Curriculum and Instruction. “Increasing parent involvement is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve student achievement and The Parent Toolkit™ will provide overworked school districts with an easy and cost-efficient way to help teachers get parents more engaged in their children’s education.”
“CompassLearning has long been a leader in
providing education software that allows educators to personalize and
individualize their instruction to address the varied learning needs of
students,” says Bill Tudor, Parent Tutor
Corporation’s President. “We’re
delighted to be partnering with CompassLearning as they continue that
mission.”
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These might well be great programs, but this press release invites a sceptic to ask:
1. The potential investor: A niche market or a marketing angle? Is this just an entry point to
district sales that others have neglected but won't forever, or can it stand alone as a
(narrow) defensible market segment?
2. The potential purchaser: What studies, and are they of these firms' services?
Sceptics - like your editor - need to be shut down before their first sceptical impression can be confirmed.
The press release could easily inform potential investors and buyers if
it identified the parts of NCLB the program meets, explained why the offering would
reinforce classroom teaching rather than conflict with a school's
existing curiculum, learning and outreach resources, and cited the studies. That
would add
three lines to the release. Surely there are three lines that could go.
A
press release distributed as a pdf gives the writer a way to
hotlink the
reader to the source. All the more reason to preempt the sceptics
questions. The release does link the reader to a site where the general
relationship to
NCLB is identified. On the other hand, not every release will come to
the reader as hotlinked pdf, so links can't bear the full burden of
information. And even if every reader of the release did link to the site,
it does not
answer the other questions.
Communication firms working with school improvement providers should: tie their clients' programs as directly as
possible to needs identified in law, demonstrate coherence with
schools' existing teaching and learning content, see that specialised
programs are linked to distinct funding streams, and understand that
every program will soon require
more than a written assertion of some connection to some study or
body of research.
There is a bigger point here.
If this press release was about a new drug and aimed at doctors or a new fuel additive aimed at automotive engineers, it would emphasis technical issues - specific improvements in performance, the specific study and where to locale it, costs and the budget line the item would be paid from. This release, like so many others, reads more like a consumer ad appealing to convenience and feeling good, with vague references to why.
Marketing school improvement programs is not simple a variation on marketing textbooks in the good old days or even technology under EdTech. The context now is NCLB - a performance-based k-12 regime with very serious consequences and increasingly demanding purchasing requirements; the specific relationship of offerings to the law must be drawn very tightly. Yesterday, education sales were more like consumer sales. Tomorrow they will be more like pharmaceuticals. Today's ad copy needs to address the world of tomorrow.
Schools care about three things: proof that programs will improve student performance; their compatibility with curriculum standards and existing content; and total cost and how they get paid for. If these questions are not addressed, the reader will assume the answers are unfavorable. No one should be handing any reader any reason to throw their handout in the trash, along with the mass of marketing materials awaiting the janitor. Today, meaningful answers are the way to break though the marketing noise.
Most comunications firms don't seem to understand the law all that well, and so find it difficult to write a compelling pitch for an increasingly sceptical audience. But NCLB is not written in Latin. The firm that takes the time to understand each provision that affects their clients and to study the marketing implications in detail - and become smarter on the subject than its customers - will have a real competive advantage over its peers.
New Education Economy®, available for free download on this website until June 1, is reviewing NCLB "provision-by-provision". Each issue includes an excerpted summarization of each provision's core elements; the Letter from the Editor discusses that provision's relevance to the school improvement industry and how it might be changed to improve our market. Each is a quick read, and the content is a lot easier to digest than you might think.
Get started - Section 1001 was covered in the March 20 issue.