The State of the K-12 Industry in 2021: New Findings From an Exclusive Survey
One year ago, many education companies were struggling mightily as school districts reeled in the wake of COVID-19 restrictions and upheaval.
Now, an EdWeek Market Brief special report takes a follow-up, in-depth look at the state of the K-12 industry a year later and finds that many businesses have now largely rebounded, even amid ongoing worries about the impact of the Delta variant and shifting health conditions.
Education companies are seeing more districts investing in their products once again, and as those businesses’ financial footing has stabilized, they’ve rebuilt many of their core departments and functions that had taken a major punch earlier during the pandemic.
The report is based on a survey of 316 K-12 business officials, a strong majority of whom identified themselves as either executives or managers within their companies. It’s a follow-up to a benchmark report conducted last year, during the height of COVID. Available exclusively to EdWeek Market Brief members, the new report offers a window into the health of education companies and the key challenges that they and their peers across the education market continue to face in a fast-evolving market.
The report comes at a critical time for schools, and for the companies serving them. The vast majority of the nation’s school systems are planning on delivering in-person instruction this fall, even as they keep a wary eye on potential disruptions caused by the Delta variant, and plan for contingencies for how they might be forced to shift to hybrid learning or alternate means of instruction.
Among the questions the new state of the industry report answers:
- How are K-12 businesses projecting that their revenues will change over the next 12 months, and how has their level of optimism/pessimism changed from a year ago?
- To what extent are companies’ sales lagging or taking off, as schools and society struggle to emerge from the virus? How many vendors are seeing contracts revised or cancelled, compared to earlier during COVID?
- What new product areas are education companies planning to invest in as a result of the flood of federal stimulus funding? EdWeek Market Brief’s research looks at areas like social-emotional learning, and products focused on English-language learners, summer learning, and elementary and secondary grades curriculum.
- How has the pandemic disrupted or accelerated companies’ product development cycles?
- How actively are companies – many of whom are being courted by investors — pursuing new venture capital opportunities, or actively exploring mergers or acquisitions?
- And much more.
More information on how to access the report can be found here.
Image: DigitalVision Vectors/Getty
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