Not unless you have friends in high places, can recover your customer acquisition costs quickly or the switching costs from your offerings are very prohibitive.   more »

A top-notch team of researchers from your editor’s former employer find “statistically significant” improvements for students taking advantage of SES. But what is the significance of “significance” in this context? And what of the dogs that didn’t bark? What we have here is “the truth,” “and nothing but the truth,” but not quite “the whole truth.” Statistically significant effects are not necessarily educationally significant - and RAND is close to slient on the latter point. The fault here lies less with RAND, than those who will take advantage of the report's incomplete nature and a naïve public - and a Department of Education that has once again politicized education science.   more »

1) If we knew now what we didn’t know then about the influence of tutoring on student proficiency.… 2) The school improvement industry's reputation for quality is no higher than its lowest quality provider....   more »

Market-shaping speeches, studies and reports. Summarized in one page. Linked to the source. Plus a different kind of editorial.   more »

No retreat, no surrender, no discussion of Reading First, no mention of a school improvement industry.   more »

Given the thousands of schools in or on the verge of some form of improvement status under No Child Left Behind, and despite the interest of many local education agencies in “district-wide” reform activities (e.g. Pittsburgh), there will be a growing business in individual school turn arounds.   more »

Pay me now or pay me more later.   more »

Without information on academic performance and demography, knowledge of upcoming grant RFPs and funding releases have little value to sales representatives. With this information, sales reps can identify targets and prioritize efforts even if they know nothing about grant RFPs or funding releases.    more »

Blessing a "race to the bottom" or making the case for national standards?   more »

Maybe regional oprganization is the way for school improvement providers to organize the new education industry.   more »

The alternative may be Alvarez and Marsal at the back end.   more »

What can school improvement providers learn from their experience with Paul Vallas? Should Edison or Victory Schools follow him to New Orleans?   more »

Market-shaping speeches, studies and reports. Summarized in one page. Linked to the source. Plus a different kind of editorial.   more »

District compensation policy reviews offer eduwonks a chance to get their hands dirty working "real-world" decisions.   more »

Once Contract RFPs are exhausted, the willingness of a potential buyer to purchase the kind of product or service offered by the firm can only be determined by sales staff. This is true of the discretionary Grant RFPs available to schools. Still, by providing insight into potential clients’ readiness and ability, marketing and sales research can place sales representatives in positions where they are more likely to close more deals.   more »

Unlike the search for contract RFPs, most marketing research is not easy to outsource.   more »

Contract RFPs are the closest thing to a qualified lead, but they are not perfect. One way to think about how much to spend finding them.   more »

If you know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide - and have determined a few basic rules of thumb from your own experience - you can start thinking strategically about investments in marketing research.   more »

Do you?   more »

Superintendents and Chancellors don’t turn school districts around – that's the job of principals and teachers. What they do is establish conditions that make turn-around more likely – budgets, infrastructure, incentives, empowerment, buy-in, and accountability. Michelle Rhee has a record of some sucess in teacher development, but she is not being hired to improve DC's teaching force, she's supposed to manage the district. Can she? Will she?   more »

A multi-part series for providers on marketing research for the school improvement industry.   more »

Essential reading for the school improvement industry executive - linked to the primary documents.   more »

Here’s where we need to draw the ethical line. It's not the size of the bribe that matters, but breaching the duty of loyalty to students, teachers and taxpayers.   more »

School improvement providers who walk the talk of scientifically based research - reading or otherwise - need to form their own trade group and start lobbying hard for a market based on outcomes rather than marketing budgets. Their investors need to get behind them or push them into it. Absent this, expect to see cultural change at a pace that makes watching paint dry exciting by comparison.   more »

Your editor has no doubt that the academic consultants and Administration officials were engaged in a massive conflict between their duty to carry out NCLB faithfully as office holders or their agents and their personal loyalty to ideology, pedagogy or financial self-interest. Still, when the roles of the officials and the academics are untangled it is possible to see how each might honestly rationalize their actions.   more »

And NCLB changes nothing....   more »

Before NCLB the Department of Education's academic advisors enjoyed a central location but had little real influence.   more »

Others may imply or infer that monopoly is an epithet, it is meant here only as a description of public education's current economic structure.   more »

What the discussion of academic consultants' ethics in Reading First says about public education’s changing industry structure. A multi-part discussion.   more »

Essential reading for the school improvement industry executive.   more »

From K-12Leads & Youth Service Markets Report.   more »

The efforts of Title I Monitor and Richard Lee Colvin, the director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University, to rationalize, explain and even excuse the conflicts of interest of Edward Kame' ennui and his colleagues in the Reading First scandal, could not strike this lawyer as more bizarre if they came out of Bizzaro World in Superman comics.   more »

Assignment: Read SES provider spokesperson and Education Industry Association President Steve Pines’ letter to the Chicago Sun Times discussing the poor showing of most local SES providers on state tests. Then read the letter of the law. Identify the gaps and overlaps. Discuss the implications for SES providers and the broader school improvement industry in NCLB reauthorization.....    more »

Commenting on the Department of Education's recent approaval of Adequate Yearly Progress systems based on growth models in Ohio and Indiana, the American Federation of Teachers NCLBlog Let's Get It Right, "gripe(s)" about the Department's decision to include two representatives from an education group on the fifteeen member review panel recommending the Secretarey's decision and no one who actually works in schools. Your editor is inclined to agree....   more »

The legislative intent of No Child Left Behind is to shift the measure of success from what meets the various desires of public education’s principal institutions - constrained only by budgets, to what actually works to improve student performance. Your editor has long argued that the ultimate demonstration of a commitment to student performance is a provider's investment in ongoing research. Many readers know of the nonprofit Success for all Foundation’s years of study behind its interventions. Your editor has pointed readers to ongoing research by privately-held provider Carnegie Learning and ProQuest’s (NYSE:PQE) Voyager Expanded Learning unit. Now consider Scientific Learning (NASDC: SCIL).   more »