Why Innovation in the Textbook Market is Hard

2012-01-27T08:29:00-05:00

On his AVC blog Fred Wilson shares an interesting piece from the American Conservative about why innovation in the textbook market is so difficult:

Within the world of regular public school education, educational professionals have distinctly limited ability to express any kind of preferences – and the Bush-era education reforms have reduced this scope even further. The target market for textbook publishers is the politicians who set the curriculum for the nation’s largest school systems where that curriculum is set statewide: California and Texas. It matters very little what an individual teacher in Houston or Oakland wants or needs – or thinks their students need.

If you want to see disruptive change in the textbook market, then, you’d need to identify both a potential supplier of the product with no stake in propitiating the incumbents, and a buyer of the product for whom the product solves a problem.

My suspicion is that your best bet would be to have the supplier and the purchaser be, in some sense, the same entity. And I can think of two parts of the educational landscape where that situation might obtain: the KIPP network of high-performing charter schools and the home-schooling movement.

In the past I've shared my frustration with the whole textbook cartel. I'd love nothing better than for someone to blow that industry up and figure out a better way to get teachers and students the tools they need.

Does "Forsaking All Others" Still Cut It?

2012-01-26T08:15:00-05:00

Newt Gingrich's purported request to his second wife for an "open marriage" prompted a couple of economists to look at the marriage contract:

Marriage can be strengthened by shifting to individualized marital contracts that emphasize those things essential to making each relationship work. Is “forsaking all others” essential? What about splitting the housework? Should we live near my parents, yours, or neither? Who stays home from work when the kids are sick? Should we be spenders or savers? Will we retire at 55 or 75? How many kids? How will we allocate time between work, family, friends and each other?

These questions are at the heart of married life, but only one of them — sexual fidelity — is in the standard marriage contract...

The great Nobel laureate Gary Becker has suggested a way out of this bad equilibrium. What if it were compulsory to write a personalized marriage contract with your spouse, tailored to your own circumstances? Replacing today’s default marriage vows with compulsory personal contracts would create the space for two adults to seriously and soberly sit down and decide what it is that they want from married life.

JonLowder.com

Why Innovation in the Textbook Market is Hard

Does "Forsaking All Others" Still Cut It?