World's Largest Education Company Crashes After Dire Warning, Warns Of "Unprecedented" Business Decline

World's Largest Education Company Crashes After Dire Warning, Warns Of "Unprecedented" Business Decline

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by Tyler Durden
Jan 18, 2017 5:57 AM
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British education group, and the world's largest education company, Pearson PLC lost a quarter of its market cap in an instant this morning after it issued a dire warning about the state of the textbook business, cut profit forecast, and warned of an "unprecedented" decline in its North American business. It also put its stake in the iconic Penguin Random House book business for sale in a bid to raise cash, not long after selling the Financial Times to the Nikkei.

In an unscheduled update ahead of its full-year results in March, the former owner of the Financial Times said it was revising down its prior operating profit goal for 2017 and rebasing its dividend this year after a sharp slump in an arm of its American business. Pearson said its North American courseware market was “much weaker than expected”, with net revenues falling 30 per cent in the fourth quarter, taking the overall yearly decline to 18 per cent. Operating profit in 2017 will be 570 million pounds to 630 million pounds, the London-based company said in a statement, below the average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg of 702.9 million pounds. The world’s largest education company withdrew its profit goal for 2018 after sales of materials for U.S. higher education dropped 30 percent in the fourth quarter.

“Whereas we had previously anticipated a broadly stable North American higher education courseware market in 2017, we now assume that many of these downward pressures will continue”, the company said. Furthermore, while Pearson said it expected 2016 operating profit in line with guidance, it scrapped its 2018 profit goal.

Chief executive John Fallon said Pearson was taking “more radical action to accelerate our shift to digital models, and to keep reshaping our business”.

“The education sector is going through an unprecedented period of change and volatility. We have already taken significant steps on restructuring, reducing our cost base by £375m last year”, said Mr Fallon.


The stunned market reacted quickly, and the company lost about a quarter of its market cap in minutes at the start of Wednesday trading. The shares were then halted on volatility after continuing their decline as analysts peppered executives with questions about their business and the industry on a conference call that extended past an hour. The company’s enrollment projections were too aggressive, Chief Financial Officer Coram Williams said on a conference call. Pearson sank to 585.5 pence in early trading in London, cutting the company’s market value to 4.81 billion pounds ($5.9 billion)


Pearson's sudden capitulation contrasts with months of optimistic statements CEO John Fallon about the challenges Pearson faces in the U.S., where college enrollments and its testing business are down, and textbook sales unexpectedly declined, Bloomberg reports.

“It’s a difficult time for Pearson,” Fallon said on the call. The company is seeking to build a more sustainable and growing digital business, he said. “We’ll manage our balance sheet so we can sustain the company through this challenging transition.”

Despite record amount of student loans in the US, fewer older students are enrolling, community college admissions also are dropping, and more students are renting textbooks.

The company will also issue an exit notice over its 47% stake in publisher Random House to JV Bertelsmann, Europe’s largest media group by sales, “with a view to selling our stake or recapitalising the business and extracting a dividend”. The Penguin stake may raise as much as 1.2 billion pounds, according to Ian Whittaker, an analyst at Liberum Capital. Pearson will use it to strengthen its balance sheet and return excess capital to shareholders, the company said.

The dividend, which amounted to 52 pence a share for 2016, will be cut beginning this year to reflect the lower earnings guidance. The current dividend equals 6.4 percent of Pearson’s share price, the highest yield among companies in the U.K.’s benchmark FTSE-100 Index.

As Bloomberg adds, analysts have been questioning the health of Pearson’s education business since last year. Neil Campling, an analyst at Northern Trust Securities, called the announcement “the warning we’ve been expecting,” in a note on Wednesday. “The higher education business declined further and faster than the company expected in 2016 although in light of the plethora of negative data points we have highlighted throughout the year we are not surprised,” Campling wrote. “The North American higher-education courseware market essentially collapsed in the critical fourth-quarter back-to-school season.”

Pearson combined Penguin with Bertelsmann’s Random House in 2013, leaving the British company owning just under half of the venture, which publishes books from writers including John Grisham, Ken Follett and George R. R. Martin. In 2015, it generated revenue of 3.7 billion euros ($3.95 billion) and operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 557 million euros.

Random House, the world’s largest book publisher. The German company is open to increasing its stake in the venture “provided the terms are fair,” CEO Thomas Rabe said in a statement. “Strategically this would not only strengthen one of our most important content businesses, it would also once further strengthen our presence in the United States, our second largest market,” Rabe said.
Pearson gets almost all its profit from education after already selling the Financial Times and its half of the Economist Group. The company announced a reorganization last year as it seeks to address sluggish demand in its main business.

If $3B of school turn around funding does not help, what does?

I suspect the answer is that great school leaders make great schools.  Everything else is window dressing.

School Improvement Grants: Implementation and Effectiveness

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 injected $3 billion into the federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, which awarded grants to states that agreed to implement one of four school intervention models in their lowest-performing schools. Each of the models prescribed specific practices designed to improve student outcomes. Despite the sizable investment, comprehensive evidence on the implementation and impact of SIG has been limited. Using 2013 survey and administrative data from nearly 500 schools in 22 states, this report focuses on whether schools receiving a grant used the practices promoted by SIG and how that compares to other schools. The report also focuses on whether SIG had an impact on student outcomes. Findings show that SIG schools reported using more practices than other schools, but there was no evidence that SIG caused those schools to use more practices. There was also no evidence that SIG had significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

OER Content vs Curriculum

Memo to OER Purveyors: Teachers Don’t Want Content, Teachers Want Curriculum!

• By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
• 01/03/17

It’s not an uncommon mistake — especially for those who have no classroom experience — to confuse content with curriculum. After all, the “stuff” that is supposed to be learned in a K–12 classroom is content and curriculum is, well, a kind of content, right? For example, we have heard — on numerous occasions, in fact — educational technologists say statements of the sort:

• "We have to make sure the teachers have the content they need."

And, here is a definition from an educational website that appears to be conflating the two notions:

• "The term curriculum refers to … academic content …"

Ouch!
But: curriculum is not a type of content. Curriculum does include content, but curriculum includes all sorts of other elements too, e.g., learning goals, instructional strategies, methods of assessment. And, curricular elements are sequenced and organized in a structured, coherent fashion. Curriculum is constructed; curriculum is created through an active design process. And, teachers use a curriculum — not content — to direct them in helping their students learn the content. As well, students use a lesson — an example of a curriculum — to guide them in their learning activity.
While textbooks were dominant, there was no big need to worry about the distinction between content and curriculum: Textbooks — and their accompanying teacher’s guides — provided teachers with curriculum. Of course, of course, of course: Teachers changed the curriculum that was provided to them — to take their own locale into consideration, to differentiate the materials to better address differences in their students’ learning abilities, etc.  
But, with the demise of textbooks, K–12 teachers are being asked — encouraged, might be more accurate — to create curriculum — to actively engage in a design process to produce instructional materials for their classrooms. So, teachers need to construct coherent, rationalized sequences of learning activities that use content-oriented resources, e.g., watch a video, read a PDF, write a report, collect specific things.
So, if textbooks are out, where do teachers find content-oriented resources which they use in the construction of curriculum? Drum roll, enter, stage right:

• "Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes."

And, most conveniently, there are a number of websites — OER marketplaces — that provide teachers with those content-oriented, "free and openly licensed educational materials." For example, gooru.org, one of the OER marketplaces, points out that it contains “2 million” OER resources.
Here’s where it becomes "interesting." (Translation: Here’s where the challenges arise for K–12 teachers.)  
While some OER sites are providing actual digital curricula (e.g., gooru.org has posted 35-plus full courses as OER), the focus of the OER marketplaces tend to be on the pieces of OER content, e.g., the 2 million PDFs, videos and assessments. But, curriculum is a product of an active design process. Yes, each of the OER marketplaces does have tools to support teachers in creating curriculum using their content-oriented resources. But, quite frankly, the UI — the user interface — of the OER marketplace tools leaves much to be desired in the UX — user experience.   
Indeed, as we have argued before, in moving to a 1-to-1, digital classroom, support for the entire life cycle of a digital lesson needs to be provided:

• Create a lesson/Modify a lesson: A teacher must be able to quickly and easily create a digital lesson from scratch using OER resources — or take an existing digital lesson and modify it, e.g., add/delete an OER resource. For example, see Collabrify LessonBuilder, a tool that enables teachers to construct digital lessons from OER elements, e.g., check out a sixth grade lesson on thermal energy expressed as a Roadmap — a node-arc, visual depiction of a lesson.
• Distribute a lesson: A teacher must be able to send a lesson to her/his students quickly and easily. Importantly, a teacher needs to be to put students in groups so that the students can work collaboratively on the lesson. (Of course, it must be quick and easy to add/delete a student from a collaborative group, since on the day of lesson enactment, invariably students will not be in class.) For example, see Collabrify Dashboard, a tool that enables teachers to distribute lessons to groups of collaborating students or to students working solo.)
• Monitor the enactment of a lesson: A teacher must be able to quickly and easily "watch" what her/his students are doing as they are enacting the activities in a lesson — and make both written and verbal comments to the students on their work. For example, using Collabrify Dashboard teachers can monitor students as they enact the learning activities in a Roadmap-specified lesson, while the students themselves are using Collabrify LessonLauncher, a tool that enables students to engage in the learning activities specified in a Roadmap-represented lesson.
• Post-enactment, assess and provide feedback: In a lesson, students may well create three to five different artifacts using artifact-appropriate applications, e.g., use a concept-mapping tool to create a concept map, use a word processing tool to write a report. Teachers must be able to quickly and easily access all the artifacts created by the students (solo and/or collaboratively). For example, teachers can again use Collabrify Dashboard, this time to view all the artifacts created by students during lesson enactment.
• Provide learning analytics: Teachers must be able to quickly and easily see key analytics that characterize student performance. For example, if the students are working in groups, a teacher needs to see at a glance if one of the group members is not contributing.

Over the years, in textbook-based classrooms, teachers have developed effective procedures for managing paper-based assignments. In contrast, it is early days for OER marketplaces and LMSs (Learning Management Systems) in supporting all the phases of the life cycle for digital curriculum. For example, while a specific digital lesson can use an OER element such as a video or a PDF on the OER website, when the lesson calls for a student to write a report, say, the writing application is, typically, accessed outside of the OER website making the monitoring of students’ actions and making access to the resulting students’ artifacts challenging, to say the least. And, while the tools in our free, device-agnostic, Collabrify Roadmap Platform (e.g., LessonBuilder, LessonLauncher, Dashboard) address many of issues in the life cycle — we readily acknowledge that more work needs to be done!
There is no question that OER marketplaces are wonderful sources of content for K–12 teachers. But, the following lament from a third grade teacher reminds us that teachers don’t want content per se — they want content as it is integrated into curriculum:

• "In the absence of textbooks, individual teachers are forced to spend hours searching the internet for resources. The process is not only time­consuming, but much of the material online has little to no editorial oversight. With no textbooks, every teacher becomes an improvisational curriculum designer, which they try to do on-the­fly while also teaching their classes every day. When this amount of effort is multiplied by all the teachers doing the same thing around the country, it is clear that we are reinventing the wheel, nightly, to the detriment of both the students and the teachers."

About the Authors

Cathie Norris is a Regents Professor and Chair in the Department of Learning Technologies, School of Information at the University of North Texas. Visit her site at www.imlc.io. 

Elliot Soloway is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of CSE, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan. Visit his site at www.imlc.io.

Find more from Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris at their Reinventing Curriculum blog at thejournal.com/rc. 

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/01/03/memo-to-oer-purveyors.aspx

Google Unveils Graduation for G Suite

• By Sri Ravipati

• 12/09/16

Google for Education earlier this week unveiled a new product to build out its G Suite for Education offering, as well as additional features for parents and guardians.

Next year, high school students transitioning to the next chapter of their lives will be able to keep all of their digital work without the hassle. “Students will be able to copy emails and Drive files from their G Suite for Education accounts into another Google account before they leave the domain,” according to the Google blog post announcement. “This will enable students to easily retain their emails, essays, resumes, science projects and any other files stored on Google Drive if their school removes access to their old account.”

Although the feature launches early in 2017, administrators can now adjust their Admin Console settings according to the needs of their schools (i.e. allowing access for one grade level at a time). Schools with Takeout enabled will have access to this feature by default.

For parents and guardians, Google is providing easier access to email summaries of student work in Google Classroom, allowing them to receive updates without a Google account.


The updates were revealed at Google’s free, online conference, Education Air, held on Dec. 3. A video recording of the Education of Air Product Keynote explaining the new G Suite for Education features is available here. Further information is available on the Google blog.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/12/09/google-unveils-graduation-for-g-suite.aspx

CA finds that Google Complies with FERPA and CA Privacy Requirements

CETPA finds Google Education AppsComplies with AB 1584 and FERPA
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Hundreds of school districts throughout California and the rest of the country use a suite of education products formerly called Google Applications for Education (“GAFE”) and recently renamed G Suite for Education ("G Suite").  Questions have been raised as to whether G Suite complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”) found in 20 U.S.C. 1232(g), and California Assembly Bill (“AB”) 1584 found in California Education Code section 49073.1.  Both laws establish privacy protections for pupil records stored or analyzed by digital education providers.  These protections include, but are not limited to:

(1) prohibitions against the unauthorized use of the records;

(2) requirements to allow a student or parent to access the records;

(3) disposal of the records at the end of the term of the agreement; and

(4) requirements to maintain adequate safeguards for the records, including notification of unauthorized access to pupil records.

One reason questions may have been raised about G Suite data privacy compliance is that not all FERPA and AB 1584 required terms are found in the G Suite for Education Online Agreement (“G-Suite Online Agreement”).  Given the widespread use of G Suite there was an urgent need to determine whether G Suite complies with FERPA and AB 1584.  CETPA and its counsel, Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost, undertook an extensive analysis of the G Suite privacy terms and conditions, including the G Suite Online Agreement.

The analysis found that central to determining privacy compliance is understanding that the G Suite privacy terms and conditions consist of more than just the G Suite Online Agreement.  FERPA and AB 1584 requirements can be found in several additional G Suite documents, including but not limited to: the G Suite Privacy Notice; the Additional Terms for Use of Additional Services; and the Data Processing Amendment to G Suite Agreement.

When taken together, these documents show that G Suite likely complies with all material portions of FERPA and AB 1584.  In most cases, the elements of the data privacy requirements are explicit in G Suite's privacy terms and conditions.  However, some aspects of FERPA and AB 1584 requirements are not referenced verbatim in privacy terms and conditions.  Some of those requirements require statutory interpretation to conclude that G Suite has met a particular data privacy requirement

There are two factors of the data privacy compliance laws that require statutory interpretation to conclude that G Suite has met its obligations under FERPA and AB 1584.  The first requirement is to provide students with the opportunity to establish a separate account for student-generated work and the second is the right of a parent to access a pupil's record and correct any erroneous information.  Currently, the G Suite privacy terms and conditions state that G Suite will only take a ministerial role to meet these obligations.

The issue then is whether the federal and state laws require Google to actively manage these processes, or whether Google’s role may be ministerial by implementing the directions of a school district.  We conclude that the creation of a separate account and the modification of pupil records is a power that AB 1584 and FERPA intended to leave to school districts and not to Google.  Therefore, Google’s ministerial role stated in the G Suite privacy terms and language on these two topics is consistent with the intent of the statutes.

CETPA’s finding that the G Suite data privacy terms and conditions comply with FERPA and AB 1584 is bolstered by recent findings of Ernst & Young, which held that G Suite privacy terms and conditions were consistent with the privacy standards established by the International Standards Organization for data privacy.  These standards have many similarities to those found in FERPA and AB 1584.

We hope this guidance will provide reassurance to the many California school districts using or contemplating the use of G Suite.  Please note that student data privacy laws are relatively new and subject to interpretation, and G Suite may amend its terms and conditions at any time, which could alter the foregoing analysis and findings.  CETPA has posted the underlying legal analysis supporting this conclusion on - The F3LAW Partner Resources Page

Sincerely.

Andrea F. Bennett

Executive Director, CETPA

Jeff Sacks - Smart machines and the future of jobs

Smart machines

and the future of jobs

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Since the early 1800s, several waves of technological change have transformed how we work and live. Each new technological marvel — the steam engine, railroad, ocean steamship, telegraph, harvester, automobile, radio, airplane, TV, computer, satellite, mobile phone, and now the Internet — has changed our home lives, communities, workplaces, schools, and leisure time. For two centuries we’ve asked whether ever-more-powerful machines would free us from drudgery or would instead enslave us.

 The question is becoming urgent. IBM’s Deep Blue and other chess-playing computers now routinely beat the world’s chess champions. Google’s DeepMind defeated the European Go champion late last year. IBM’s Watson has gone from becoming the world’s “Jeopardy’’ champion to becoming an expert medical diagnostician. Self-driving cars on the streets of Pittsburgh are on the verge of displacing Uber drivers. And Baxter, the industrial robot, is carrying out an expanding range of assembly-line and warehouse operations. Will the coming generations of smart machines deliver us leisure and well-being or joblessness and falling wages?

 The answer to this question is not simple. There is neither a consensus nor deep understanding of the future of jobs in an economy increasingly built on smart machines. The machines have gotten much smarter so fast that their implications for the future of work, home life, schooling, and leisure are a matter of open speculation.

 We need to pursue policies so that the coming generation of smart machines works for us, and our well-being, rather than humanity working for the machines and the few who control their operating systems.

 In a way, the economic effects of smarter machines are akin to the economic effects of international trade. Trade expands the nation’s economic pie but also changes how the pie is divided. Smart machines do the same. In the past, smarter machines have expanded the economic pie and shifted jobs and earnings away from low-skilled workers to high-skilled workers. In the future, robots and artificial intelligence are likely to shift national income from all types of workers toward capitalists and from the young to the old.

 CONSIDER ENGLAND’S Industrial Revolution in the first part of the 19th century, when James Watt’s steam engine, the mechanization of textile production, and the railroad created the first industrial society. No doubt the economic pie expanded remarkably. England’s national income roughly doubled from 1820 to 1860. Yet traditional weavers were thrown out of their jobs; the Luddites, an early movement of English workers, tried to smash the machines that were impoverishing them; and poet William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills’’ of the new industrial society. An enlarging economic pie, yes; a new prosperity shared by all, decidedly not.

 Looking back at two centuries of more and more powerful machines (and the accompanying technologies and systems to operate them), we can see one overarching truth: Technological advances made the society much richer but also continually reshuffled the winners and losers. Similarly, one overarching pattern was repeatedly replayed. The march of technology has favored those with more education and training. Smart machines require well-trained specialists to operate them. An expanded economic pie favors those with managerial and professional skills who can navigate the complexities of finance, administration, management, and technological systems.

 Overall, better machines caused national income to soar and the man-hours spent in hard physical labor to decline markedly. Seventy-hour workweeks in 1870 have become 35-hour workweeks today. An average of around six years of schooling has become an average of 17 years. With increasing longevity, most workers can now look forward to a decade or more of retirement years, an idea simply unimaginable in the late 19th century. It’s amazing to reflect that for Americans 15 years and over, the average time at work each day is now just 3 hours 11 minutes. Those at work average 7 hours and 34 minutes, but only 42.1 percent of Americans 15 and over are at work on an average day. The rest of the time, other than sleep and personal care, is taken up with schooling, retirement, caring for children, leisure and sports, shopping, and household activities.

 Smart machines in the 19th century provided massive power (the steam engine), transport (rail, steamships, automobiles), information (telegraph), and material transformation (steel and textile mills), and also, crucially, a more and more powerful substitute for human brawn – that is, backbreaking physical labor — on the farm and in the mines. Seed drills, cotton gins, threshers, reapers, combined harvesters, and by the early 20th century, tractors, not only opened up vast new farmlands but also replaced millions of farm workers by machines. Mechanical cotton pickers in the early decades of the 20th century displaced millions of African-American sharecroppers on Southern farms and contributed to the great African-American migration to northern cities.

 Hard physical labor declined as machines did more and more of this work; but so too did jobs and earnings for lower-skilled workers. Those lucky to get an education could obtain the higher skills needed for the new jobs. Those who could not suffered stagnant or falling wages and a further loss of social status. In the past two decades, more and more low-skilled men have simply dropped out of the labor force entirely.

 The most important policy response is to ensure that students stay in school long enough to achieve the skills they need for the new and better jobs. As long as the national supply of skilled workers roughly keeps pace with the rising demand for skilled workers, while the supply of low-skilled workers declines in line with the decline in the numbers of low-skilled jobs, the gap in earnings between high- and low-skilled workers remains relatively stable. In this way, the rising school attainments of Americans during the 20th century roughly maintained a balance with the shift from low-skilled work to high-skilled work.

 Yet after around 1980, the earnings of highly educated workers (notably, those with bachelor’s degrees and higher) increased sharply relative to less-educated workers (those with high-school diplomas or less). Greater international trade and offshoring probably had a role in this, and so did technology, with smarter machines replacing high-school-educated workers in a widening range of manual and repetitive tasks. The shift of the labor force toward higher-skilled workers wasn’t fast enough in recent decades. Many American lower-skilled workers have been hit hard by lost jobs and falling wages.

 YET TODAY’S smart machines now are not just replacing brawn but also brains. The futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have popularized the term “singularity’’ to mean a time in the near future when machines are simply better than humans at just about everything: moving, assembling, driving, writing, calculating, war-making, teaching (yikes!), and the rest.

 Several recent studies, including at Oxford University and McKinsey, have tried to estimate the share of jobs that are likely to be up for grabs by smart machines in the next 20 or so years. Each occupation is analyzed for the kinds of tasks needed. Are they highly repetitive or highly context-specific? Do they require highly specialized mechanical skills, a high degree of interaction with others, or a high measure of emotional empathy? And so on. From this categorization of job tasks, the researchers estimate the share of jobs that can be substituted by robots and artificial intelligence systems. Their answer: Roughly half of today’s jobs are susceptible to at least some kinds of replacement by smart machines.

 The implications are a bit tricky. On the one hand, smarter machines mean more economic output and, in principle, a larger economic pie to share among the American people. Investing in machines, or in the companies that produce the smart systems that run them, would seem to offer high returns; capital owners would be very likely to benefit. On the other hand, smarter machines could mean a decline in the demand for workers. Young people with labor to sell but little wealth to invest could find themselves on the short end of the economic stick, with lower wages and no grand prospect of benefiting from the higher returns to capital. Older and richer Americans would tend to benefit, younger and poorer Americans would tend to fall behind.

 This would not be the end of the story, however. If today’s young people find themselves without jobs, they not only will be poorer, but will also save less as a result of shrunken incomes. Yes, the smarter machines will offer a higher return to saving, but the supply of national saving will shrink. A careful theoretical analysis reveals a stark truth: Smart machines could actually set in motion a downward spiral, wherein today’s young workers can’t find decent jobs, and thereby cut back on their saving, which in turn leaves the following generation of young workers even worse off.

 This is indeed a frightening vision. And yet the same analysis suggests a way out. If the rich capital owners transfer some of their windfall profits to the struggling young workers, then both the old rich and the young poor would be better off with the smart machines than without them. In effect, the rich older shareholders would compensate the poor younger workers in order to offset the fall in wages.

 There are two ways this “offset’’ could happen. Within families, parents could transfer some of their increased wealth to their children; but alas, that is a solution that is likely to be relevant mainly for richer households.

 For the non-rich, the real solution could and should be achieved through fiscal policy. Rich older shareholders should be taxed in order to make transfer payments to the poorer, young workers.

 Such transfer payments could be carried out in many ways: a cut in payroll taxes; tuition-free higher education; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-wage workers; or a “reverse’’ Social Security system with payments from the old to the young. One policy that has been suggested is a capital grant to every newborn, financed by a wealth tax. In essence, each newborn would receive a robot (or financial claim to one) at birth.

 THE NEW AGE of smart machines has already seen a shift in national income away from wages and toward profits. In automobile manufacturing, for example, where robots have already displaced many assembly-line workers, the share of wage compensation in the industry’s value-added has tumbled from 57 percent in 1997 to 47 percent in 2014. For the economy as a whole, a recent study reports a decline in the labor share of national income from around 68 percent in 1947 to 60 percent in 2013. The shift toward capital income seems to be well underway, and would seem to be a key factor in America’s sharply higher inequality of income. As machines become even smarter in future years, the economy-wide shift from wage income to profit income is likely to continue.

 In addition to income redistribution from capital owners to workers (and from old to young) there are three other steps we should plan to take.

 First, as old jobs disappear and new ones are created, we should emulate Germany’s successful apprenticeship programs, which train young workers in the skills needed in the economy. The President’s Council of Economic Advisers has rightly emphasized the need for scaling up this kind of active training.

 Second, we should prepare for a workforce in which workers will change jobs with much greater frequency than in the past. In an age of disruptive technology, we should plan for disruption. Changing jobs should be regarded as normal; training and skill upgrading should be life long, and health care and other benefits should follow workers, not jobs.

 Third, and finally, let us remember that ever-smarter machines could enable us to enjoy much more leisure time, and more hours of the day at valuable but nonremunerated activities and volunteer work.

 Suppose that singularity indeed arrives, so that robots and expert systems really do perform all the unpleasant and humdrum work of the economy. As long as fiscal policies ensure that everybody, young and old, can share in the bounty, the results could be a 21st-century society in which we have much more time — and take more time — to learn, study, create, innovate, and enjoy and protect nature and each other.

 Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.’’  

What "jobs" do educators need help t o solve?

In his new book, Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, Clay Chistensen argues: "Successful innovation can seem like a matter of luck—but it need not be so. Every day, “jobs” arise in people’s lives that they need to resolve. Needing to get one of these jobs done is the mechanism that causes people to “hire” an offering—whether it be a product or a service.."

So what are the jobs in education that school districts want to "hire" services to help resolve:

1. Manage Competencies.  An individual educator or an education entity can create a competency framework that aligns to other source standards documents like the Common Core, TEKS, and Next Generation Science Standards to be used by assessment, content and curriculum management, and student learning record tools.

2. Manage Digital Content and Curriculum.  An individual educator or an education entity can curate a collection of content organized in a logical progression and tagged to learning standards that can be used (via LTI or TCC) by one or more learning management system to support standards-aligned instruction.

3. Deliver Classroom Competency Assessments.  An educator can create and administer a classroom assessment that produces standards-aligned outcome and proficiency level that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

4. Deliver Interim Benchmark Assessment.  A district assessment office can curate and support classroom administration of common interim benchmark assessments that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

5. Integrate Embedded Assessment Learning Tools.  An educator, parent, or learner can use an assessment embedded learning tools (e.g. Kahn, IXL, 10 Marks, Accelerated Reader) to supplement and support learning and produce diagnostic assessment data that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

6. Sustain Access to an Integrated Student Learning Record.  A user can access a view of a student’s learning profile that integrates (though xAPI/Caliper) standards-aligned assessment results (outcomes) from multiple sources including assessment embedded learning tools, interim benchmark assessments, and classroom assessments scored to standard rubrics.

6. Support Personalized Learning.  An educator, learner, parent, or extended learning agent authorized by the parent can access an integrated learning profile that summarizes from multiple assessments instruments the competencies a learner has demonstrated a level of performance and provides access to instructional materials and interventions that are customized to that learner’s profile.