Standardization may boost publishers
A group of state governors and education officials have announced a proposal for new common K-12 academic standards. The move could be a boon for the publishing industry. Amy Scott reports.
A kindergarten class (Phil Mislinski/Getty Images)
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Kai Ryssdal: It's not quite a complete overhaul of the time-honored traditions of reading, writing and arithmetic. But the proposal out today on new academic standards could prove to be a very big deal. A panel set up by state governors and education officials lays out, year by year, what public school students ought to learn in math and English to better prepare them for college and, eventually, for working.
There is a big sweetener to get states to sign on to the new standards -- that's a notoriously difficult prospect, by the way. They'll get a chance at a share of $4 billion from the Obama administration's Race to the Top. But the publishing industry might come out the biggest winner. From the Marketplace Education Desk, Amy Scott reports.
AMY SCOTT: Anytime states adopt new education standards, companies that publish textbooks and tests cash in.
JAY DISKEY: It certainly will lead to new business. Whether it will be a bonanza, I don't think anybody knows at this point.
Jay Diskey is executive director of the Association of American Publishers' School Division. He says after a big push to rewrite curricula in the 1990s, some publishers saw double-digit sales increases. Standardization could also save publishers money. Diskey says having to customize materials to meet a patchwork of state standards has driven up costs.
But analyst Kathy Mickey says while all but two states have signed on to help develop the new standards, she expects far fewer to adopt them.
KATHY MICKEY: The key thing I think for the industry will actually be how many and which states implement the common core standards.
Texas has already implied it will not. Mickey says the state is a big player in the textbook industry. She says its standards often dictate what ends up in other states' books. If Texas opts out of the common standards, Mickey says the state's influence might change.
MICKEY: If a significant number of other states have adopted common standards, that may make it much more attractive for publishers to build a textbook around those common standards. But they're certainly not going to ignore selling to Texas.
Analysts say standardization may ultimately hurt the testing industry. If states adopt a national set of tests, some publishers could lose out.
In New York, I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace.
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From Milan, MI, 03/17/2010
You said "... to prepare them for college and, eventually, for working." But that way of putting it is a large part of the problem with education in America: we've been pushing *everybody* toward college, which has three bad effects. First, college used to be a useful qualification for jobs requiring things like a great deal of critical thinking, letting employers remove large numbers of badly-fitting applicants for their jobs from the pool with little effort; now, employers have to use post-graduate degrees for the same purpose. Second, as with any situation where demand for a good or service is artificially inflated, the price of a college education goes up. And third, when you push everyone into--and require everyone to pass--college-track high school courses, the classes have to slow down to the speed of the people who would have been in a lower track before. In effect you've just eliminated the honors track and started calling the lower track the honors track. This sort of thing is why colleges have to teach large numbers of remedial courses, and on the longer-term why they used to have entrance exams that today's college graduates couldn't pass.
From West Orange, NJ, 03/11/2010
Educators in many states (including Massachusetts where I previously worked) have already adopted a comprehensive set of curriculum standards (along with mission statements for each school)- as of the 90's. Yet they have been said to vary quite a bit from state to state. Massachusetts is one state where the standards are already highly ranked...so instead of coming up with a brand new set of standards for all 50 states why not just adopt those that have already been meticulously worked out and which have already been highly rated?? (perhaps with just minor changes as needed for the whole nation).
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