Market Focus: 'The Dog Ate My Homework' Just Doesn’t Fly Anymore
Diskey says he thinks the digital revolution will continue on its steady, step-by-step, district-by-district march.
“We’re dealing with more than 14,000 school districts, more than 90,000 public schools. This country has a large and decentralized education system,” he says. “So it’s impossible to pinpoint which schools and which districts will move in one direction or the other. It will depend on the support of their local communities in terms of their tax base. … It will depend on state and federal support. … The school publishing business at the K-12 level is one that faces a lot of regulation at the state and local levels; it is a market that is heavily dominated by government procurement. School districts and states procure instructional materials, not individual consumers.” On the other hand, “One of the reasons that postsecondary has been able to move very rapidly toward digital is that it is a consumer market,” Diskey says.