Featured Podcast: “‘Transcript of Sold a Story E9: The Aftermath”
Peak: So, this is GovSpend. They’ve been tracking basically every purchase order that comes out of a public agency that they’re able to get their hands on since 2015. And it has everything from your state highway patrol all the way down to your local trash pickup. And …
Hanford: Wow. So you can go in here and you can just type in some terms like the term “Heinemann” and come up with which schools are buying what Heinemann products?
Peak: Exactly. So I put in right here, you can see this says Heinemann and its LLC’s name, and this is tracking purchases since 2015. It’s more than a billion dollars’ worth of sales. And we know that school districts spent most of that money on Heinemann’s reading products. Heinemann built its brand largely around Clay, Fountas and Pinnell, and Calkins — and their way of teaching reading. That’s been the bulk of their business for decades.
Hanford: OK, so what I’m looking at here is a graph that shows sales have really cratered.
Peak: It’s a big change. What we can see here is the company was consistently breaking its own sales records every year, just going higher and higher, until 2019. That big mountain there in May 2019, that’s their peak. And if you look at last year, 2023, it’s now more like a little hill. So from what we can see in the data collected so far, sales last year were down to less than a fourth of what they were in 2019.
