A Chat With Harvey Dean, president/CEO, Pitsco

The catalogs sell the products very well, but when you talk about selling a system, you’re talking about changing a paradigm where the teacher’s been in charge of delivering the curriculum. The assumption is that the teachers are going to teach everything in a textbook, and they’ll teach 10 different textbooks each year. The fact is, there was a study done that looked at five eighth grade teachers teaching science — same textbook, same class, same lesson plans. They surveyed the teachers at the end of the year. They found that only 20 percent of the content was actually taught in every single class. Only 20 percent of that content was contiguous across the groups as having been taught. Only 20 percent! That’s not to say that the other 80 percent that the teacher taught wasn’t good content, but if you’re supposedly teaching to a lesson plan, you’d hope that each class gets 100 percent of what’s in that lesson plan.