GENERATION - School enrollment statistics - Statistical Data Included

American Demographics, Sept, 2000 by Alison Stein Wellner

Wollery's company, HOSTS, has created a database that includes thousands of the best educational materials that are produced each year, and which pass his organization's 14-point quality standard check. Schools or school districts contract to use the database, which is then aligned to each state's individual requirements. Teachers are able to activate highly customized searches of the materials. If little Jenny, for instance, is interested in cars, and needs help with grammar, her teacher can pull material designed specifically for her. Or if Jimmy is interested in computers and needs help with math, the teacher can select educational materials that will teach those lessons in a way that will be most effective. HOSTS is now serving more than 500,000 students in 44 states, and by 2010, programs like this will enable teachers to provide better education to a more diverse student body.

Customized educational materials is just one of the ways that technology will aid educators. Gwinnett County Public Schools, in Georgia, is handling the diversity challenge by using a strategy that's familiar to marketers - data mining. In the last school year, Gwinnett piloted the program in seven of its 87 schools, and saw academic achievement soar, says Alvin Wilbanks, the district's superintendent. "We're experiencing a much more diverse population, and while the majority of our students come ready for school, other students do not," he says. "And the number and percentage of those who don't is growing. These students don't have word recognition skills, and they're not the most psychologically prepared students. It creates a challenge to make sure that those students are getting what they came to school for."

Gwinnett County's solution: Arm teachers with as much information as possible. For example, a teacher can pull from a number of resources on her computer, and customize a lesson for a particular student. An instructor who notices a fifth grade child struggling in math, for instance, will be able to see at a glance whether that's been a pattern throughout the child's elementary school career. The teacher will be able to discover which subjects the child has excelled at, and which provide a clue to the child's best learning style. Plus, the teacher can cross-reference that data with any information on file with the guidance office, to check if the child is struggling with issues at home.

This level of information is unprecedented for educators like Wilbanks. Before, teachers could only rely on "toplines" about an entire class: The class average on a standardized test; or how the third grade reading scores in one school compared to another. But starting now, and in full effect by 2010, teachers will be able to "target market" education to students. "Teachers will have to challenge and engage all students," he says. "It will stop kids from falling through the cracks."

This level of customization in the classroom will have huge implications for marketers who will sell to this generation. Children who grew up in the old days (last year) learned to expect that every member of a group would receive roughly the same kinds of information and materials. The elementary students of 2010 will not. In an environment of mass customized classrooms, products and services that are not equally tailored to their fingerprints will seem hopelessly generic and outdated. Welcome to Generation 1-to-1. "These kids will be used to an extremely customized environment and they will bring that expectation to the marketplace at large," says Tim Coffey, president of The WonderGroup, a Cincinnati-based market research firm that specializes in the kids market. "Clothing should be custom fit, shoes should be designed just to fit me," he says. School supplies will be equally customized, Steven Jacober, president of SHOPA, speculates. "There will be notebooks or writing surfaces that are customized for posture and size, notebook covers and other supplies designed by you at an in-store kiosk, or online," he says.