What makes a good school?

From the economist this week an in-depth look at the changing approaches to education. Very interesting reading for anyone interested in how children will (or won't) be educated in the coming years (Economist):

Above all, though, there has been a change in the quality of the debate. In particular, what might be called “the three great excuses” for bad schools have receded in importance. Teachers’ unions have long maintained that failures in Western education could be blamed on skimpy government spending, social class and cultures that did not value education. All these make a difference, but they do not determine outcomes by themselves.

The idea that good schooling is about spending money is the one that has been beaten back hardest. Many of the 20 leading economic performers in the OECD doubled or tripled their education spending in real terms between 1970 and 1994, yet outcomes in many countries stagnated—or went backwards. Educational performance varies widely even among countries that spend similar amounts per pupil. Such spending is highest in the United States—yet America lags behind other developed countries on overall outcomes in secondary education. Andreas Schleicher, head of analysis at PISA, thinks that only about 10% of the variation in pupil performance has anything to do with money.

Many still insist, though, that social class makes a difference. Martin Johnson, an education trade unionist, points to Britain’s “inequality between classes, which is among the largest in the wealthiest nations” as the main reason why its pupils underperform. A review of reforms over the past decade by researchers at Oxford University supports him. “Despite rising attainment levels,” it concludes, “there has been little narrowing of longstanding and sizeable attainment gaps. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds remain at higher risks of poor outcomes.” American studies confirm the point; Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington claims that “non-school factors”, such as family income, account for as much as 60% of a child’s performance in school.

There is also a sobering league table (if your children live in Europe or the US) in the article:

Strategically Managing Data for Long Term Benefit

In this series of articles (1,2,3), I have attempted to describe the organization and development of a corporate-wide approach to data management. In doing so, I have suggested that product metadata is a good place to initiate a phase one approach to centralizing management of a business’s data. The underlying premise of this series is that data represents a core asset of any organization and, if effectively managed can produce incremental benefits to the organization as a whole.

In my view, the efforts detailed in the prior articles will have a material impact on the business in three ways: (i) The application of scale economies to the management of data; (ii) the attribution of control mechanisms (such as thesauri) and (iii) a greater ability to merge and mingle metadata to improve revenues. Below, I suggest how some of these benefits might be actualized:

Scale:

Centralizing metadata management allows the organization to take advantage of scale economies in factor costs, technology and expertise. Not every business unit can afford to acquire state of the art technology or the market’s best metadata expert but these types of decisions are almost encouraged if their benefits can be spread across the enterprise. The financial benefits of better data management can also be most appreciated and captured at the corporate level, thereby providing greater financial justification for the adoption of technology and staffing to support the data strategy.

Collective Dictionaries “You say tomato, I say tomato” - Thesauri, ontologies and the attribution of consistent cataloging rules:

Business units don’t speak to one another nearly enough and this is absolutely the case in the way they manage information about the products they sell. The manner and method one business unit may use to describe a product could be vastly different than that which a sister unit may apply to a similar or likely compatible product. Take, for example, a large legal publisher publishing journals and educational materials: It would make logical and strategic sense that the metadata used to describe these complimentary products would be produced using the same metadata language and dictionary, yet that is rarely the case. (Think of this as a ‘chart of accounts’ for data).

Additionally, the manner and method by which authors and contributors are required to compile (write) their authored materials are unlikely to take account of the potential for compatibility and consistency across content type. As is readily apparent, traditional content silos are breaking down as users are accorded more power in finding specific content and an organization will be significantly hampered if it cannot provide relevant material to customers irrespective of its format.

Inter-relationships and cross selling:

Companies frequently leave it up to channel partners to aggregate compatible or complimentary products. Naturally, at the retail level this activity happens across publishers; however, to not provide the supply chain with an integrated metadata file that represents the best complete presentation of all the company’s products suggests a contradiction with the wider corporate business strategy of acquiring or developing products that ‘fit’ with corporate objectives. In other words, why doesn’t the company’s data strategy support the corporate business strategy in managing a collection of related and complimentary products and services? To do this, data strategy should be a component of business strategy planning.

The opportunity inherent in managing data in this manner will be a real ability to sell more products and services to customers. Providing relevant “packages” of content that add related and complimentary products to the item originally sought will generate cross- and up-sell opportunities. Why rely on a hit-or-miss approach provided by your channel partners? (Or worse, an association with a competing product). This activity is only possible with good data yet; if done effectively, can become a significant competitive advantage with incremental sales. Return on investment would be seen in metrics such as average revenue per customer and/or average shopping cart revenues. Importantly, selling more products to a customer who is already interested in buying from you is always easier and more profitable than finding new customers.

Market, promotions and branding:

Combining a company’s products in a logical manner reinforces branding and messaging. If product information is disaggregated and disorganized, it is likely that the branding and messaging in the mind of consumers similarly lacks effectiveness.

Channel Partner Relationships:

A company may be able to exert more leverage with a channel partner if it is in a position to represent all of its products in a coordinated and managed manner than if this interaction is dispersed across the organization

Matching and marrying data with partners will be less problematic and more effective if data models can be allied – time to market will be significantly reduced and planned benefits of the relationships should accrue in shorter time frames.

Additionally, providing a well-managed metadata file that supplies the type of product descriptive cohesion described above is going to benefit your channel partners as well, not only making their lives easier but also make them money by selling more of your products.

Acquisitions – integration of new data:

Historically, the integration of companies and new products with respect to product metadata might have been a haphazard affair. At a consolidated level this task becomes much easier with the added benefit that connections between products, adoption of standard dictionaries and standards may have an immediate financial impact. As noted before, it is likely the justification for the acquisition of the company in the first place was its compatibility or consistency with a strategy and it is logical that this be reflected in the manner in which the products are managed.

It is likely we will see that companies with ‘best in class’ approaches to data asset management will be valued more than those without. Increasingly, companies will be asked about their data policies and management practices and those which ‘under-manage’ their data will be seen as less attractive – for acquisitions, partnerships and other relationships.

Those are some of the general benefits of better corporate data management and developing a corporate data strategy. The effort required to implement a data strategy program isn’t inconsequential and planning should be rational and realistic; however, as data management across a business becomes more and more ‘strategic’ the faster you adopt an approach, the faster your business will benefit. If you believe the tasks involved are difficult (or near impossible) now, they are only likely to get more so; therefore, it would be best to get started now.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 37): Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

The New York Times takes up the issue of "pricy" scholarly journals and leads with their view point (NYT):

After decades of healthy profits, the scholarly publishing industry now finds itself in the throes of a revolt led by the most unlikely campus revolutionaries: the librarians.

Whoever pays the bills, publishing is not free. Under the traditional business model most of the costs were met by subscribers, though some journals do also charge contributors, making scholarly publishing one of the most consistently profitable, if least noticed, corners of the business. Elsevier, for example, reported profits of £724 million on revenues of £2 billion last year alone. According the Mr. Suber converting to open access “will involve some cost shifting, But also considerable cost savings” for libraries and university budgets.

The traditional model does have its defenders. After George Monbiot, a British academic and journalist, published an article in The Guardian newspaper last month calling academic publishers “ruthless capitalists,” Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at the London-based Publishers’ Association, told the journal Times Higher Education that all publishers “aspire to universal access” but that it would take time to find a “sustainable, scalable, funded” way to achieve it.

Writers at the Scholarly Kitchen blog, who are mostly involved in the less commercial end of publishing, said that although subscriptions for popular titles might be expensive, the cost for each individual reader remained very low.

They also noted that many titles with high fees for American or European readers were available free or at lower costs to researchers in the developing world through the Hinari program, a partnership of the World Health Organization and several major publishers including Elsevier, John Wiley and Blackwell.

Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning, an organization that helps developing countries improve access to education, said such efforts did not go nearly far enough. “One of the major obstacles to education in the developing world is the lack of high quality teaching materials,” he said. “The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.”

“I’ve seen it from both sides,” said Sir John, who was once briefly on the board of Blackwell. “I saw the vast industry built up from publicly funded research, and it was never clear to me what value was being added. But if you needed the material, they had you over a barrel.”

On the whole this article meanders and doesn't offer any insight. The author notes the Elsevier profit numbers as de facto proof that academic publishers are blood-suckers.

Appreciation for Michael Hart the founder of Project Gutenberg from the Observer:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault. He never made much money, repaired his own car, had scant faith in medicine and built most of his own electronic gear from stuff he picked up in garage sales. On Saturday mornings over breakfast in the local diner, he would work out the optimum route to cover the maximum number of garage sales that day; it was his version of the travelling salesman problem in mathematics.In his obituary of Hart, his colleague Gregory Newby described him as an "unreasonable" man, in George Bernard Shaw's celebrated use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

From the Economist: It's good to have gatekeepers (Economist):

The more general question, however, is whether publishers like Amazon (and particularly Amazon) represent a threat to the older magazine model, in which a variety of articles are bundled together and sold for a price that, even on the newsstand, is lower than what a reader would expect to pay if buying everything piecemeal. Part of the reason readers buy magazines is because they are comfortable outsourcing some of the decision-making about content delivery, and welcome the fact that magazines curate the news. The last issue of the New Yorker, for example, included articles about Mr Perry, the gold standard, tarot cards, Wikipedia, Syria, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, and Rin Tin Tin.

According to the Economist there are a raft of regional literary festivals going on in Asia. I need an invite. (Economist):

In contrast to bleak conditions in Western book markets, the Indian divisions of international publishers are busy signing up new authors. London’s literary agencies have opened offices in India. Namita Gokhale, a novelist and one of the Jaipur festival’s organisers, says that South Asia is having a “literary moment”. It is “exploring its place in a new world” in English, while also maintaining traditions in the region’s native languages. She believes making sense of South Asia’s many upheavals has something to do with the outbreak of writing and reading.

Fellow traveler Peter Brantley is now writing for Publishers Weekly. Here on defining "library" (PW):

We are now engaged in acts of social reconstruction. Just as digital networks have forced us to deeply question the role of publishers, they also force us to reconsider the role and purpose of libraries, which developed in the modern era around the presumption of the Industrial Age book right along with publishing. A library fills many needs in its community; it is an after-school day care and gaming center, an employment hall and meeting space, offering shelter and privacy. It has also been a place with shelf upon shelf of CDs, newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, our understanding of libraries is so bound up in the physical world that their presumptive value has most often been measured through a single proxy: how many books they hold.

Statement from Paul Courant of the University of Michigan in response to the Authors Guild suit against scanning (UM):

“The University of Michigan library has been digitizing books for more than 20 years Sections 108 and 107 of the federal Copyright Act provide the guidance and the authority for this work, which supports our ability to preserve and to lawfully use the collections that we have purchased and maintained. Moreover, our digitization efforts enable us to make works accessible to people who have print disabilities because the overwhelming majority of works have never been available in an accessible format.

And from the twitter this week.

From InfoBoy: New Report from EU: Electronic Clearance of Orphan Works Significantly Accelerates Mass Digitization: Link

IBM starts its own NYC high school: http://bit.ly/qvl4Ad

Pearson buys virtual school co for $400 million | Reuters uk.reuters.com/article/2011/0…

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And in sports, Lancashire County Cricket Club which hasn't won a championship for 77 years won one this week on a squeaker end to the season. For Mr PND Senior who is Chairman of the Club, I think this is almost a crowning achievement. And, they get to go to the Palace. (MEveningNews)