Great Minds’ New CEO on Navigating State and Local Markets Gripped by Upheaval

Education companies are tasked with serving districts in states with increasingly divergent approaches to funding schools, making buying decisions, and setting curriculum standards.

Meeting districts’ needs across disparate state markets isn’t a new problem for organizations developing products, but it is one that’s become more complex amid culture war battles, science of reading-related mandates, and states like Texas becoming curriculum-creators themselves.

John White, who stepped into the role of CEO at nationwide curriculum provider Great Minds at the beginning of the year after previously serving as its chief success officer, has seen the way states approach K-12 materials and purchasing shift from a variety of different vantage points.

He previously served as state superintendent of education in Louisiana and the head of the Recovery School District, an entity that oversaw schools in New Orleans and other parts of the state after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Prior to that, he was the deputy chancellor of New York City’s school system.

“There’s a really important lingering strategic question for a company like ours, our partners, and our peers,” White said. “How do you adapt in a way that provides quality, that assures scale, and that’s sustainable in a landscape where states are taking really, really different positions in their roles as market makers?” White said.

White spoke to EdWeek Market Brief about navigating the changing tides in state markets. He also offered his thoughts on how education companies can best serve districts amid upheaval at the federal level, and the pressure K-12 leaders feel to raise performance in the wake of dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In addition, White touched on his hopes for and doubts about AI, and where he sees the market for academic resources heading.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Now that you’re in the CEO role at Great Minds, where do you hope to take the organization?

Like any company or organization, we’re always changing to meet the needs of customers and evolving. Right now, there are a couple of things that those of us in curriculum publishing need to be particularly attuned to. If you think about our customers, at the state, district, and school level, states are changing. You see different regulatory and purchasing behaviors from states.

What state activity stands out to you?

They range from Texas, which has really taken a very novel, very assertive, and very powerful regulatory and market-making approach to curriculum, to states whose standards are really becoming very idiosyncratic, and who don’t have a robust response necessarily, from the commercial players.

There are states that have moved their standards away from the national standards that had existed before, and we’re not seeing that kind of same response from publishers and providing high- quality instructional materials.

What does that mean for education companies trying to serve those states?

[It’s a] very different place from where we were a dozen years ago, when you could say that states were operating in some unison, with respect to the kind of platform that they were offering publishers.

Also in that 12 years, we’ve learned a lot about implementation. We have a lot of evidence that when the curriculum is implemented well, our products, and some of our peers’ products, have really positive effects on student learning — but the research isn’t consistent enough. The implementation isn’t consistent enough.

What do you see as the most critical elements of strong curriculum implementation?

What’s important for us, as publishers or education technology makers, is to ask, what are the missing pieces that can assure high-quality implementation at scale in a way that really works for teachers and for kids?

What has been tried too often has been materials [that come] without an adequate explanation of how to differentiate and without an adequate explanation of how to integrate all the different components — from assessments to intervention tools and so on — into the lesson.

What’s also being tried very often is just putting kids on laptops. As happy as I am that the kind of movement toward high-quality instruction materials has taken off, I think we should all be troubled by the kind of inconsistency in implementation, and we have to own some of that, and to ask, really, what is needed in the life of the teacher to make this work for all kids in her classroom? And I don’t think there’s anybody who’s exactly figured that question out.

What kind of approaches should education companies consider as they look to adapt to these widely varying state markets?

There was a time before 2010 when a plausible response from publishers was [that] there are a handful of states that matter, and the rest of the states don’t as much, from a product perspective. The products are going to be built to meet the specifications of the few, and then we’ll see what happens with the rest.

I was very proud that my state in Louisiana was part of a movement to change that and to really assure that there was an emphasis on states that have been overlooked before. Because we created a context where businesses could work in partnership with all states.

For many reasons, that has changed, and you see states moving in a very different direction right now.

How do content providers respond to those more individualized needs from states?

What does that mean? Personally, as somebody who was the lead administrator in a state system that’s mid-sized, that wasn’t on the list with New York, Florida, California, and Texas,

It is incumbent upon all of us to say we have a moral obligation to ask what’s the right way of assuring fair access to high-quality materials. And for teachers to have fair access to them in times when state market conditions maybe aren’t as obvious and aren’t as easy to navigate as they would have been when states were doing more cross-state collaboration.

So how does a company providing academic resources make sure those smaller state markets — there are many of them — don’t get ignored?

Some of that is just about your internal operations. There are things that companies have figured out [over the] years as to how to do that.

I would say that the way that content has been managed, quite often to accommodate the need for scale, has sacrificed quality, and our company is committed to not making that [mistake]. We have a history as a social impact organization, and we’re not going to violate our standards of quality and attempt to scale.

There are pieces of solving this issue that are just organizational. They’re how you design your product or how you run your business, but there are interesting efforts to cut through it on the state side, as well as on the private side, and to do things a little bit differently.

Where are you seeing some evidence or examples of states doing things differently?

I would look at Texas as one example, where it has said, even though we have unique standards, let’s create favorable conditions through our purchasing power and through our ability to elevate what we think is the best in the market, including owning a curriculum.

They reviewed, in a very public process, the top products, the most well-designed content, to be financially viable and to be successful for kids in their markets.

That is one approach, and you do hear a robust conversation about states looking at that, examining whether or not that’s an alternative for them. But Texas has really leaned in.

There are other states that have passed standards, and the shift has been pretty significantly away from the past approach with shared standards….you’ll see smaller players stepping in to do some of that customization work.

What’s an example of that smaller customization work?

I’ll point you to an effort in Cobb County, Georgia, for example, that has long been a pioneer in custom curriculum at the local level. They created a product called Georgia Digital Flex that really is an attempt to, at their local level, create a customization that meets the needs of Georgia standards, but doesn’t sacrifice high-quality curriculum.

It’ll be interesting to watch Georgia Digital Flex, and you can see these more micro-efforts to customize, to meet state standards, customize at the local level, or customize at the state level, taking off to meet the fragmentation in a way that’s sustainable for larger businesses.

Clearly, technology plays a role in all this. Any industry conference you go to, there are a lot of talking heads [discussing] the cost of production in light of artificial intelligence. And there are obviously, in our business and others, people on both sides of that debate.

How do you believe AI will influence the development of curriculum products?

It is obvious that anybody in content or language creation is going to be trying to understand what advantages to quality and what advantages to productivity are offered by new technologies. And they’re going to ask what [new solutions] — both in the production of their product as well as what’s [built] within their products — offer that.

We’re a part of that. All of our competitors and peers are a part of that. What certainly is not yet clear, and probably won’t ever be precisely clear, is what’s the line, not just around ethical issues and protections of intellectual property, but what’s the quality line?

Really, truly, what is best for kids and best for teachers in the way we create content, and in the way that we [manage] the user experience? There is clearly a kind of popular school of thought that there are use cases for artificial intelligence in creating content. But there are also use cases for helping teachers to deliver the content that are potentially really powerful.

What are the most pressing unresolved questions you have about AI’s role in the classroom?

What doesn’t seem to be as clear is the extent to which a publisher like us — which has a historical orientation toward a whole-group product, and the highest-quality standards in the creation of materials — and our peers have a view on machines providing direct services to kids in ways that actually change the role of teachers.

We don’t have a resolved answer on that. I haven’t seen a high-quality instance of that manifesting in the market, and I think we should be skeptical of attempts to do it right now. But it’s an important thing to examine, and we’re certainly looking at it, just like anybody else is.

How are you managing the general uncertainty schools are dealing with when it comes to federal funding and policy?

Stating the obvious, pronouncements about freezing grant funding, pronouncements about changing rules, and changing agencies, are a matter of great uncertainty to our customers. Tariffs impose a different sort of uncertainty on them, and on us.

To some extent, recalibrating what our expectations are for the way that deals will be done, the way that money will work in the future, is maybe an obvious step. But what’s more important, in a way, is that we not be an absent partner to our customers in a time like this.

I’ve been, both as a district leader and as a state leader, always a little surprised at how much most education businesses want the purchase order to be cut, want to send the invoice, and then want to provide training to launch, [but then] aren’t really longstanding, flexible partners that meet the very bespoke needs of districts on an ongoing basis.

I can’t think of a more important thing than to be present, to be understanding, asking the right questions, and to be helping districts to solution in a time when resources for implementation are going to be tight.

Focus on student achievement is going to be a source of a challenge for administrators, because there’s just so much else going on.

What do you believe acting as a good partner to districts tangibly should look like on the ground?

We’re a 180-day-a-year product, we’re not a half-hour supplemental once a week. You are part of the life-blood of the school system. It could be New York City, it could be Caldwell Parish, Louisiana. You’re not just a product that gets unboxed, or [for which] there may be [just a little bit of] training. Your obligation is to ask and understand what’s necessary in order for there to be success, and therefore you do have to have someone who doesn’t come at is as as an account manager, but as a true guarantor of customer success.

You have to have confidence in measures of success, seeing the curriculum implemented with fidelity, knowing whether or not it’s manifesting in student learning, and also understanding in a given district what is the barrier to success, and having a view as to how the district can resolve it.

Many companies talk about ‘fidelity of implementation,’ but how do you make it a reality?

That’s an investment of talented people. It’s not a line of service that most companies extend. But for us, our product challenges kids, our products challenge teachers. We have to do work with districts every step of the way, and that means what I could call more of a customer success orientation than a PD orientation.

It’s not just workshops and launching. It’s not even just coaching and packages of days of coaching. It’s a monthly check-in with someone who knows that school system well, and the school systems in the region.

I can’t think of a better way to approach a time of uncertainty than to have a reliable partner who’s with you as a source of solutioning and success, rather than just being there to sell you the next batch of whatever else.

As the K-12 market faces upheaval, where do you see signs of growth and opportunity?

I’m very excited that the movement toward high-quality instructional materials has taken off. And it’s not just what it was 10 or 15 years ago, when in Louisiana, you’d see one or two names on that list. Now you see multiple.

I don’t want to get away from the idea that multiple high-quality instruction materials providers, growing in scale, taking more market share, to me, is very important. I don’t just say that as somebody who’s the CEO of a business that’s associated with that movement, but as a former consumer and an advocate for that movement. I am excited about that, and I don’t think our foot should be off the gas.

But how widespread is that adherence to quality, in your view?

The majority of the market is still not using, with deep commitment, the highest-quality and strongest materials, even though that share of the market has grown significantly. You just need to look at some of the more recent research the Center on Education Market Dynamics, for example, has done to that effect, or that [the RAND Corp.] has done.

Still today, much of the market is made up of duct tape and bubble gum curriculum, purchasing of supplemental and even core products that don’t have a strong evidence base, and that ongoing shift needs to change. Even the science of reading. Let’s not put a flag on the ground and say that fight has been won. We are far, far from that, and the NAEP results should indicate that.

How do you think schools and content-providers should be responding to the recent lackluster national test scores?

The NAEP results are a source of sleeplessness, if you’re thinking about them in the right way. All of us who are in the business of supporting kids and teachers and school systems share in the burden of understanding them — and I don’t think we do understand them.

I’m encouraged that there are places like Louisiana, Los Angeles, Guilford County, where [Great Minds’ products] Eureka Math and [ELA product] Wit and Wisdom have very, very strong, long histories. So I’m proud to see the gains in those places.

But, as a publisher to the whole country, we should all be concerned that we don’t really understand them, especially the 8th grade results. [Editor’s note: Student test scores were flat in math at that grade, and fell in grade 4.] My hope is that at the policy level, states, cities, and the national leadership take a moment to lead us through an active reflection, working with researchers to actually try to explain what is going on, because it must be that whatever we’re doing in schools is not having its desired effect.

There may be things that aren’t just insufficiencies within schools, that are happening outside of schools, that we need to start not just guessing about, but actually having some legit hypotheses about.

What would be some of your early hypotheses?

For example, if it is true, as has been speculated, that screens and algorithms are detrimental to reading outcomes at the adolescent level, especially in comprehension.

That obviously has seismic implications for purchasing and product creation, but you don’t sense in the response to the NAEP that there’s a thoughtful unpacking of that question right now.

And there should be. So I wish that were a market trend, but it’s really not yet. Maybe a couple of us need to step up and start talking about it more. The industry has always felt, to me, scared to acknowledge how complicated the digital issue is.

To carry that thought forward, what implications does a reassessment of students’ digital interactions have for organizations like Great Minds?

I’m very proud to be in a company where we’re a blended product that tries to be judicious about the right modality for kids at a given time, be it paper-based or via digital.

Clearly, the economics of that are harder to manage, and I think the industry has been maybe slow or reticent to want to engage in the question of, are the modalities, as well as just the time allotment we have been giving to kids, especially adolescents, a driver of some of the troubling outcomes we see in 8th grade?