Lock, Stock and BlackBoard

Not that long ago I mentioned that BlackBoard has representation on their board from the Carlyle Group, an investment bank controlled by mostly former political figures from the Reagan and Bush administrations, including Carlucci and Baker. The Saudi royal family is also nicely represented. The first President Bush had a rather cozy arrangement with them allowing him to claim not to be a partner by doing speaking engagements for them and then funneling the rather significant honoraria back into Carlyle as investments. A useful, lucrative fiction. For some money is more important than dignity it seems, and they do think that you can't be too rich.

Carlyle specializes in investments where governments have an undue impact, such as military contracting and heavilly regulated industries. If you are a former high-level defense chief, even if you don't actively influence policy you do have a Rolodex and knowledge that allow you to pretty much guarantee that your bullets and bombs will get purchased. Education, which is also largely a government activity is also a place Carlyle can work the phones because even if it is local it is still highly regulated. Your Rolodex therefore counts for a great deal.

Even if I don't have the evidence to prove this I'm sure also that BlackBoard used government contacts to get that exclusive e-learning deal in China last year. It is also certain that evolving standards such as AICC and SCORM will be a big part of military and Homeland Security training, and of course that means software from a company like BlackBoard. Carlyle can make a killing if they position product to get the lucrative contracts for this, but then there are also the huge state university systems and extension programs to get as well, many if not most of which have trustees who are current or former politicos. Again, Rolodex Power.

So is it any suprise that last week when BlackBoard went public the price went up 40%? I think not. The product really isn't all that good, and much of it is even based on open source, but who cares? BlackBoard went as far to kill the Prometheus project a number of years ago by buying it and shutting it down for all practical purposes. Open source is at a disadvantage because they can't buy the university CIO lunch or a round of golf and, of course, they don't have the Rolodex.

Small Schools

My daughter's school used to be a program that shared a public school building with another program and a middle school. In the mess of the transition from the Board of Education to the Department of Education over the past year no one even seemed to know what was going on once you went above the level of the program heads, but now the legal fiction of the "school" as building has been eliminated in favor of both programs having the status as small schools with their own PS number and the middle school being phased out. It's a good thing. I think. Both schools will be small enough to function in much of the way that progressive educators believe is the best way for schools to be organized. They will each be schools of choice as well.

The problem is now there is some rather silly bickering over things like schedules, the sharing of the yards, the use of the school busses and all that nonsense. What kind of message do kids get if the adults can't share? Why can't my kid be on the same bus as a kid from the "other" school? Hope that everyone gets together and solves this before the Fall.

That Swipe Reader

So what does it mean that Vassar has a BlackBoard branded card swipe reader on their elevator? A great deal, actually. During the tech boom companies like BlackBoard and WebCT were setting their sights on virtually minting their own currency as universities became transformed by the Internet. "Bricks to Clicks" was one pet phrase of the digerati. Of course, it didn't happen. One of the more spectacular failures, Fathom, burned through millions of dollars of Columbia University's money, as did similar projects at NYU among others. This isn't to say that it didn't work at all as evidenced by such ventures as the proprietary University of Phoenix, but tranforming education is a tricky business. It isn't just about the delivery of instruction after all. In K-12 we don't just teach kids, but babysit, feed and inoculate them as well. In some school districts most kids might just get their only nutritious meal of the day thanks to a school. In higher education we aren't just teaching kids, but socializing them and providing them with a health club too. I'm not too crazy about the health club part.

Universities do something spectacular that you really can't replicate with an Internet business model: they incubate and produce scholars in a community of practice. This is really the core business of the university, and while a course management system or portal technology can help it doesn't replace the buzz you get when you walk into the cafeteria at Rockefeller University and realize you just spilled coffee on a Nobel laureate. Sure, they all use e-mail, but proximity and the TLC provided to professors is what creates brilliant scholarship and those things that only a university can really do better than anything else. So much for "transforming" higher education.

So BlackBoard isn't printing money and the founders will not be as rich as Bill Gates as they stand over the ivy-covered rubble. You still have to make a living though. If the card swipe is any evidence it looks like now they are getting into the business of not just course management, but also that of running the data infrastructure needed to process financial aid, registration and other such computer-intensive jobs that colleges need to get through the year. How will they do? Considering that much of BlackBoard is cobbled together from shareware and that they aren't really all that big a company I'd bet that Computer Associates, SAP, IBM, Oracle and PeopleSoft probably will not allow them to take a business that they already understand and can do quite well. They'll also want the business that BlackBoard has with China. So I think the future for BlackBoard is to be bought out at some point, especially if it goes public. PeopleSoft or Oracle would be well-served if they killed BlackBoard like a python does a chicken. What is interesting is that Robert E. Grady of the Carlyle Group is on their board of directors, so they might just be so well connected that they might just be one phone call away from some pretty lucrative business. Only time will tell.

BlackBoard Swiper

Was up at Vassar yesterday and saw on the dorm elevator a card swipe reader with the BlackBoard logo on it. Looks like they use it as an authorization system for dorm access. Interesting. Will write more.

Gorbachev

Today is the funeral of Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States. For the past week all I've heard is how he "won" the Cold War, but I do beg to differ. I think that one can talk about many things with that period of history, but for Reagan to get the credit for this is a bit ingenuous. When Lech Walesa and his fellow union members were striking in Gdansk they had no illusions that the United States would help them. When the poets, playwrights and musicians of Prague were risking their lives for jazz and going to jail they were not thinking of Ronald Reagan. They were thinking about their own integrity. The United States had little to do with the forces that changed the Eastern Block from the inside.

I don't think Reagan can fairly be described as one who was all that interested in freedom for anyone but Americans, and one must remember that if it were up to President Reagan Nelson Mandela would have died in jail, Sadaam Hussein would have killed all the Kurds and a junta would still be running Argentina. He might have wanted to defeat the Soviet Union, but he was no friend of freedom around the world. We are not only cleaning up his mess still today, but criminals like Elliot Abrams are back in the White House despite their convictions, as are such dubious characters like Paul Wolfowitz. If you compare Reagan to Willy Brandt, Nelson Madela, Charles DeGaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower or even Bill Clinton you see exactly how cruel and unproductive he was in making a better world. He was a kinder, gentler Kissinger.

When you look back the figure who stands out is Gorbachev, who by any estimation ended generations of fear and, through a fundamental sense of justice and decency, ended a terrible and evil division of the world. While there are some who say that the arms buildup drove him to it the fact is that the people of the Warsaw Pact who grew up in the brief bright period of the Kruschev era and who experienced the Prague Spring wanted change from within. Gorbachev, one of the most decent and idealistic politicians of our time, brought the horror to an end because he believed in humanity, not because he feared the United States. Keep in mind Star Wars still doesn't work, and no matter what Reagan said, you cannot win a nuclear war. We didn't win. It's enough we didn't lose.

Testing Redux

Last week it was announced that no less than 10,000 3rd graders in New York would not be promoted as they failed the standardized tests. It is a problem not just for those kids, but for all of us. While the term social promotion is fashionably bandied about the simple fact is that someone who is left back is left behind in more ways than one. They will be much more at risk to drop out before graduating.

I have a horse in this race. I'm the only child of six to graduate from high school and one of my siblings is a grammar school dropout. I was a SEEK student who only gained admission to college because there was a political will to give meaningful access to the underprivlidged. My daughter is a student at a public school here in New York. This is something that I cannot ignore.

To start high stakes tests do not tell you how well you will do in later life. They do a terrible job of that. The SAT exams for one underpredict achievement by women and overpredict achievement by men routinely. It is also the simple fact that such tests are normed, which means they are designed to impose a bell curve on data at all costs. The idea of imposition of a distribution is very important as you have to have by design a "below average" and a "talented tenth" no matter how well people do in actually answering the questions. And someone has to be below average for the test to work. It's also true that, as the sociologist Claude Steele has seen that such tests reinforce and feed into the social and cultural pathologies we have here in America. They are crude sorting devices. In terms of kids they are particularly pernicious and hurtful. They have clear cultural bias and do favor by design the dominant culture. How many of those kids actually are doing well but the test cannot tell you that?

The economists and statistician W. Edwards Deming believed that we create on a regular basis a situation of artificial scarcity. We make the world fit the bell curve in his view. Why can't everyone be educated well instead of being well-educated? Fear is a much less critical element in success than pride. Leadership trumps standards. Even more important, build quality into what you do rather than looking for it after the fact. Deming wasn't a grammar school teacher, but he would understand an empowered, interested kid is much more valuable than an ashamed one who has been called a failure. Build on and with pride. Interestingly enough Deming's ethics are also those of the Open Source movement, a subject of earlier posts.

And of course we have here in America a cruel and pernicious caste system that is imposed culturally on all of us. It is the legacy of hundreds and hundreds of years of slavery and abuse. Testing, as Claude Steele has shown, is to no small extent a part of this legacy, but it does the dangerous thing of giving a pseudo-scientific sheen to what is really a cultural travesty. Handle with care.

The Travails of Higher Education Funding

While the name of the institution will remain nameless I will be spending some time over the next week or so deliberating on technology fee allocations. It is, to tell the truth, an illuminating process that exposes the current problems in public higher education.

As you've probably noticed private sector education pricing goes up regulalry in response to inflation and other pressures. My Ivy League graduate school has gone from $550 a credit in 1997 to $825 a credit by 2002, which is by any estimation quite a leap. Public education however operates according to political dictates, meaning that tuition is not an economic but a political question, as is the ongoing non-tuition funding that colleges get from the State. States have cut their contribution to schools while at the same time holding the line on tuition. Politicians also like to add services without paying for them too. Flat revenue actually means declining revenue as inflation erodes the value of a given dollar every year. Keep in mind that you could buy an egg breakfast for $1, a subway token or a slice of pizza for .75 cents and a nice house for $50,000 in 1978. The dollar isn't a dollar now compared to the 1978 edition. It is really something like a Quarter, but that doesn't mean revenue has kept pace in state allocations or tuitition increases. Inflation now runs something like 2% a year, so your revenue devalues by that amount each year. Still, since the legislatures have politicized the question of tuition charges they cannot be raised in response. No assemblyman or state senator wants to go on record that they increased tuition.

So what to do? In most states there in a stealth increase in revenue to offset inflationary erosion in the form of fees for everything from transcripts to student activities. Fees generate needed revenue and are in fact stealth tuition supplements. Here we have a technology fee that brings in needed revenue and supports things the college didn't even think about a decade ago, like Internet access. The problem of course is that most people don't get it. They see it as "new" money for new things. They also think that it is a great deal of money, which it most certainly is not. It isn't enough to buy every student a Palm Pilot and it barely offsets the ground we have lost due to inadequate state support, eroding tuition revenue and evolving technology needs. It is very distressing and unpleasant to deliberate over all this because in the end we are something like cannibals.

Memorial Day

Spent the entire day yesterday at the ancestral roots of my family, the South Bronx. Why couldn't it have been the Hamptons?

There is a park at Longfellow and Bryant named after my great-grandfather James, who ran away from the Bronx to Boston to join the Union Army. He got through the war, and was at Bull Run and Sheridan's ride through the Shenandoah Valley after Jeb Stuart. He escaped from Libby Prison. Later he was in command of an escort for President Lincoln and witnessed the surrender at Appamatox. He returned to the Bronx and had thirteen children, including seven sons. We put a wreath in the park every Memorial Day and then have a barbecue on City Island. It is, for us, less of an opportunity for shopping or beachgoing than a solemn but lonely occassion. Back in the sixties the park would be full of WWII veterans in their overseas caps paying tribute and we would go to a VFW post near Crains Square for a big party, but the veterans of that war have moved to the suburbs or died. Now the only people that come are family.