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News : July 7, 2003
Learning Tools on a revenue growth path
SANTA ROSA, CA -- Learning Tools International is on a roll, with 120% revenue
growth in the past six months and a projected whopping 800% jump for the whole
year, according to vice president of marketing Cathy Zier.
Learning Tools is the nation's leading provider of compliance, planning, and
achievement tracking software for special education and Title 1 programs and the
only provider whose tools are Internet-enabled. The 25-year-old company's sudden
surge in school district and state customers can be partly attributed to the
Bush Administration's Leave No Child Behind effort and partly to the efficacy of
its day-to-day assessment of struggling students and underperforming
schools.
Replacing the inch-thick files that track special education and underachieving
students through the system, Learning Tools' GoalView also provides
administrators and legislators with immediate knowledge of which schools must be
warned to step up performance levels and/or compliance. Learning Tools' previous
product, computerized compliance software, has been supplemented with planning
and goal setting tools and achievement reports that teachers can share with
parents and students over the Internet.
Well positioned
The system was developed by software pioneer Kirk Wilson, PhD, whose original
program ran on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. The current version has
the scalability to track all the students in a state or in any of the nation's
15,000 school districts with their 60 million K-12 students. Multilingual
versions will be completed by next year, says Dr. Wilson.
According to Education Turnkey president Charles Blaschke, $80 billion is spent
annually on special education, with about $300 million-$400 million going toward
electronic compliance and tracking technology. Although Learning Tools doesn't
disclose revenues, the company says it already commands the largest slice of the
special education market. If tracking and assessment tools are applied to the
general student population, that figure would jump to $1.2 billion.
“Title 1 (underachieving students) is an emerging market, and our performance
tracking tools adapt to it perfectly,” says Ms. Zier. “The market for K-12 student
achievement planning and tracking has been slow to develop, but we're well
positioned to enter it. We're also well positioned to partner with companies that
provide instructional material, like Pearson, Lightspan, and RiverDeep, because our
management tools can sit on top of theirs.”
An early warning system
Learning Tools' products are being used at 6,000 sites nationwide. Utah is one of the
states that has selected GoalView for implementation in all of its schools. Half the
districts in Utah are being trained this summer to use GoalView.
Learning Tools has fewer than 20 employees, and though it plans to grow its staff to about
45, the staff is focused solely upon developing its core Internet technology. Functions such
as onsite implementation, sales and distribution, and call centers are all outsourced.
“We want to concentrate on the technical side, improving our application and readying it for
global, multilingual markets,” says Dr. Wilson.
Since its original federal mandate in the 1970s, special education has become a black hole:
Students placed in the program have typically never left it, according to Dr. Wilson. He says
the focus has always been on the process, not the results.
"Special education and general education tests used to evaluate skill levels only measure performance
at the time they're taken,” notes Dr. Wilson. "And often the results come out months later, when the
child has a new teacher.
“What GoalView provides is immediacy, an early warning system that alerts students and parents far
ahead of the testing date that goals and standards are not being reached. The time to work on a
particular skill level is when classroom assessment shows it's needed, not weeks or months later
when the student will be even farther behind."
GoalView also produces a paperless interface, already implementing a bill currently passing through
the U.S. House and Senate, mandating a reduction of special education paperwork.
“Learning Tools is in a sweet spot,” says Plato Learning vice president of education industry
partnerships Kathy Hurley. “They've always had a vision and lived within their means, and now the
market is coming to them.
“The type of achievement tracking required by special education programs today simply cannot be
done without technology. Teachers can no longer spend the 18 days a year it took to do manual tracking.
Systems like Learning Tools reduce that to a day and a half."
According to Dr. Wilson, it's an exciting time to be in the education industry. “We're happy that state
and federal legislators are calling for improvements in special education achievement, because
achievement has always been our central focus,” he says.
For more information email info@goalview.com or call 800.333.9954.
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