Thread regarding Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. layoffs

@1r4
doesn't matter if there are long term contracts or not.
HMH is on the financial Abyss.
They will cut until they are sold off in pieces or until they write off the PE vampires and be sold off as a whole.

After all, the CEO needs to buy his new yacht doesn't he?

What do you think about the NWEA state solutions? Is that a safer bet given we signed longer term contracts?

How will they honor Center for Model Schools contracts given the team is out?

I feel like he must be bad - because DreamBox was doing better than MAP - like Sabine and Renaissance - they wanted her out. She probably brought over a fellow crony that has no idea what he’s doing.

Dreambox guy will be good. NWEA org needed an overhaul. Expect him to bring in his folks

And another one bites the dust. Nwea VP. He was a good guy. Telling for Nwea demise.

The amount of money that is getting poured into Pulse and the performance suite is scary and all at the expense of the core curriculum line. If you don't have that core beach head then I am not sure what value the Performance suite will be.

@am
Vj listened. He just didn't care. His goal was to come in, lay people off and then leave before the Jack stench became something he couldn't wash off.
I'm told tomato juice works. Just like washing off the smell of skunk.

@OP
Jack destroyed the company and is now sweating out what little if anything is left of his already very bad reputation. He has driven the company into financial ruin and now needs to either find the bigger fool to give him even more money for him to loose, or auction off the parts to the highest bidder. Either way jack has his golden parachute and will retire on the corpses he left in his wake. The fascinating part is his total lack of human conscience or financial responsibility. for him it's just another 1,000,000 in his "go and hide on a gated estate" exit strategy.

Real answer is I don’t think anyone knows. They may try to sell it off. HMH is in a lot of debt. It’s bad. Veritas is not, they’re fine, but seemingly unhappy with performance.

I think the main problem is that HMH aquired NWEA without understanding the space at all. Then, they didn't bother to learn anything about the NWEA products or systems. That is why BTS went so horribly last year, VJ didn't want to learn or listen to anybody.

peopel keep saying core reps can just sell nwea products like it's another curriculm package. it's not that simple. assesment data, implementation, district reporting, intergrations, all of that requires people who know what they're doing. nwea spent years building that expertise. once those people are gone you don't just hire a couple of replacments and get it back. but i guess none of that matters when the only metric anyone cares about is headcount.

my guess is they eventully fold most of NWEA into HMH sales... and keep a smaller team for renewals and technical support.... the core reps already have relatonships with the districts, so from a spreadsheet perspective it probably looks great. Fewer people, fewer managers, same revenue, yep.... Whether those reps actually understand what they're selling is apparently a problem for another day.