Neal Goff

The headlines announcing Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s disappointing third-quarter results were the kind that readers of the business press are used to seeing: “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Sales Declined 7% in Q3 2016,” read one. “Houghton Slashes Expectations Again After Poor Quarter; Stock Falls Sharply,” read another. Was HMH’s stumble just another sign of how hard it…

When an organization that has created open educational resources (OER), informally known as “free stuff,” and sues FedEx, how much should publishers care about the outcome? The answer: a lot. In case you hadn’t heard, a non-profit curriculum provider called Great Minds has filed a federal lawsuit against FedEx. Here’s the background. Great Minds is…

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never warmed to the idea that disruption is a good thing in business. I’m not a fan of companies that set out to disrupt the industries in which they operate (take that, Jeff Bezos and Elizabeth Holmes) and I am particularly skeptical about those that set out to disrupt education,…

As a consultant whose primary business focus is educational publishing, I try to read as widely as I can about developments in K-12 education and educational technology. Three articles I read recently, addressing seemingly unrelated topics, led me to draw some conclusions about the future of K-12 education publishing. The headlines of these articles (which…

In an earlier blog post I made the statement that in the age of open education resources (OER), curation, not content, will be king. My thesis was that the sheer abundance of available content -- some produced by for-profit publishers and some from other sources -- reduces its value. The real providers of value, I…

One of the issues that troubles parents and educators alike is the question of whether children can learn to read on digital devices, or if they need to read good old-fashioned books in order to become literate. Many people have strong views on both sides of this issue, but the relevant research is inconclusive. Along…

In my last post, I wrote about an agreement McGraw-Hill Education has reached with a supplier of Open Educational Resources (OER) that will make hundreds of thousands of digital assets available to educators and students within McGraw-Hill’s learning platform. What was notable about this deal is that McGraw-Hill’s customers will have to pay for access…

A major conundrum for educational publishers is what to do about Open Educational Resources (OER) -- free materials, usually available in digital form, that educators can use in their classrooms in lieu of textbooks or more traditional supplemental materials. At a time when many K-12 publishers are still struggling to establish profitable digital business models,…

One topic of discussion at Digital Book World earlier this month was the degree to which the “Big 4” technology companies -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- are setting the agenda for what happens in the publishing industry. In the K-12 sector of the industry, however, it has seemed -- until recently -- that…

At the end of 2015, Democrats and Republicans in Congress surprised nearly everyone by coming together to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. This law, which replaced what was known as No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, embodies the federal government’s education policies and sets guidelines for billions of dollars in federal spending.…