“. . . as education companies we can't just come up with a great product, show it to teachers, and expect to be successful. Our products and services have to help decision makers with their state and federal compliance and intricately defined funding requirements if we are going to be successful. If we don’t know what these are, we can’t get our products accepted.”  — Mitch Weisburgh, Managing Partner, Academic Business Advisors

Business-to-business information companies are scrambling to expand their revenue mix and reduce their vulnerability of being overly dependent on any one revenue stream. But when everyone has an events business, a marketing services business and fledgling paid content and data business, is recurring revenue emerging as the real king of valuations?

Federal funding of the U.S. Department of Education is set at $71.5 billion for FY19 with the President’s signature on H.R. 6157. The funding is an increase from FY18 levels by $581 million.  The conference report recommends the Department of Education to award no less than 20 new grants between $100,00 and $1,000,000 in an Open Textbook Pilot. A 12-institution consortium led by UC Davis was awarded $4.9 million for open STEM textbooks under the FY18 appropriations Open Textbook Pilot which limited the amount of grant funds to $5 million. The Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants received a $70 million increase over FY18. The Department of Education also announced a state survey to examine the early implementation of these grants in all states. The survey will be conducted in Spring 2019. Other key funding streams are outlined below:

In what can be compared to a modern-day technology sprint, California’s legislature introduced and passed far-reaching privacy legislation - the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) - in less than a week. The multi-year effort by privacy advocates, technology companies, network providers and others before introduction ended in the final push in the legislature was completed in the just six days. This far-reaching legislation will have impact across many different business sectors when it goes into effect on January 1, 2020 requiring for-profit businesses, not just technology companies, to provide the consumer access to the personal information collected about her, the opportunity to delete the data, and to allow her the opportunity to opt-out of the sale of personal information to third parties (or, if under the age of 16, the ability to opt-in). Much like the software development process, the California legislature has acknowledged the need to fix the “bugs” ...

Congress approved and the President signed the government spending bill for fiscal year (FY) 2018 on Friday. The bill includes large increases for education which is a huge departure from the President’s budget submitted to Congress in early 2017.

The 21st Century job landscape so far has been characterized by the rise in high-tech jobs to support the digital landscape.  The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that there are currently over six million job openings in the United States due to the lack of applicants that possess necessary technical skills.  With the increase in this type of job availability and the advent of automation, supporting career and technical education are becoming more important than ever. Just last week, Google announced its new initiative called “Grow with Google” where it will spend $1 billion in grants to nonprofits who will train American workers and also help to grow American businesses.  This announcement came in Pittsburgh, historic for its center as a manufacturing hub, showing its evolution into a major tech hub in the rust belt. The billion dollars in grants will mainly support high-tech jobs in an effort to train workers to meet the skill requirements necessar ...

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, yesterday announced the winners of the 2017 CODiE Awards in education technology. The announcement was made during an awards celebration at the Education Impact Symposium in San Francisco to an audience of over 200 attendees. 35 awards were given for products and services deployed specifically for the education technology market. The program was also streamed to a global web audience. 

On Wednesday, the Washington Post obtained a leaked version of President Trump’s fiscal year (FY) 2018 education budget proposal. Set to be officially released next week, the proposal would, among other items, significantly reduce investments in skills training and adult basic literacy and eliminate ed tech investments under ESSA’s Title IV. The proposal would shift some of those funds to new investments in school choice, including expanding charting schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. more

I had the opportunity to join Larry Jacobs this morning on Education Talk Radio for a conversation on federal education policy. We talked about the Trump education budget proposal, the goings on at the US Department of Education, and what the Every Student Succeeds Act really means for states and schools.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has filed suit against Google for violation of the K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy.  The suit will work its way through the legal system and a judgement made based on its merit, but it is important to point out that the suit contains some important misunderstandings about the student privacy pledge. The complaint alleges that Google violated the student privacy pledge because it collected information about students who are using general purpose services. The pledge, however, only applies to applications, services, or web sites “designed and marketed for use in United States elementary and secondary educational institutions.” In addition, the complaint suggests that the pledge is violated because Google uses layered privacy policies (for its general purpose services and a more restrictive policy for its educational services) and educational websites related to its privacy policies (google.com/e ...