It is no secret that the cost of elementary, secondary, and higher education in the US has risen rapidly since 1980. Pundits point to a variety of different sources that contribute to these increases in cost, but scarcely is the finger ever pointed at the bloated bureaucracy surrounding the education system. Over the course of the past two weeks, we have gotten to experience this bloated, inefficient bureaucracy for the first time.
The digital textbooks we offer have begun to attract some attention within the high school and college markets due to their high quality, multimedia approach to learning and their affordability. On April 8, we had someone from the Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) reach out to us and say that they would love to check out the books. In order to be considered for adoption, we had to submit a request for proposal (RFP) to their procurement department, which did not seem unreasonable; however, this is where the fun began.
Assuming that the procurement office would have the RFP on hand for potential proposers, we reached out to this office to ask how one obtained a copy of the RFP. It turns out that just to be granted permission to read the RFP, one has to pay $10 to a government contractor (DemandStar Onvia) whose only function it seems is to host static PDF documents on a server for download. While $10 is a trivial amount of money, the fact that a government contractor exists simply to fulfill this role is slightly ridiculous.
After obtaining and reading the RFP, a significant amount of information was requested, but not so much as was unreasonable; it would make sense that a school district would want to know all of the credentials of an organization creating books to educate their children. However, several stipulations regarding the preparation and delivery of the RFP were some of the most inefficient and wasteful directions we had ever read. According to the RFP, six printed copies of the proposal had to be submitted to the procurement office via traditional mail as well as an electronic copy either via email or on a DVD with the 6 printed copies. Why, in what is the Internet age, would any government office request that an organization print out and waste over one hundred pieces of paper when the exact same information could be relayed via a PDF attached to an email also puzzled us. The package of printed copies also had to be delivered to the procurement office by 3pm on April 14 or it would not be considered.
We complied with all of these guidelines and shipped our proposal package with an electronic copy on DVD at 8am on April 12 via USPS with delivery confirmation. We also submitted a PDF version of the proposal via email as a precautionary measure. According to USPS, our package arrived at the VBCPS building at 9:05am the morning of April 14, roughly 6 hours before the deadline for the RFP. When following up with the procurement office though, our proposal did not get delivered from the VBCPS mailroom to the procurement office until April 15 at 10:22am, which disqualified us from being considered for adoption.
As we had complied with all of the guidelines of the RFP and the proposal had been delivered to the physical office of the VBCPS, we assumed it was just a misunderstanding that would be rectified with a phone call. Instead we were told by the procurement office that there was nothing they could do and the decision would stand. The representative from the VBCPS told us that even if the package had arrived three days before and never made it to the procurement office by 3pm on April 14, it was not their problem (he admitted this had happened in the past). Instead, he decided to blame us for submitting our proposal so close to the deadline (which he does have a point about), even though we only became aware of the need for textbooks only 5 days before.
This whole scenario is definitely disheartening on a number of levels. First, everyone knows that traditional textbooks are massively expensive and now the VBCPS students are being deprived of even the opportunity to have considered for their use a high-quality, very low-priced, more functional, modern textbook. Second, and more importantly, it makes us wonder how many times every year smaller organizations that are actually trying to improve education (vs the major publishers who clearly are more concerned with their profit margins) are shut out of processes like these due to incompetent bureaucrats.
Recently, J K Rowling launched the Pottermore online reading experience that will sell Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free eBooks of the series for the first time. Although devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad lock downloads to their respective platforms to prevent illegal sharing and copying, J K Rowling will be the first author of many to take this open and unprecedented approach. eBooks may soon be available to read on any device, changing the way publishers and the eBook industry conducts their business.
