The undiscussed importance of procurement, request for proposal (RFP) processes, and contractual considerations in the context of K-12 public education
Trends, personal observations, and potential areas of improvement in educational procurement, RFPs, and contractual matters from the perspective of a former West Baltimore educator, former ed-tech nonprofit founder and director, and current multi-state assessment project manager.
As a fourth and fifth grade teacher at a public charter school in West Baltimore for five years, I only now appreciate that my students and I were constantly surrounded by thousands of educational products and services. We were surrounded when we walked down the hallway to gym class, when we learned in my classroom, when we gathered for lunch and recess in the cafeteria and playground, and certainly when my colleagues and I engaged in professional development. These products and services were ubiquitous, blending into our school environment. For teachers and students on the go, we rarely had a chance to think much about them.
After leaving my classroom in West Baltimore, I founded an ed-tech nonprofit called Student Opportunities & Academic Resources (SOAR). SOAR was an online platform where students could digitize and fund their academic needs, interests, and passions by connecting with a community of individual donors and online supporters. In building the SOAR platform, I worked with thousands of K-12 educational product and service vendors to make available nearly 100,000 educational products and services for individual student funding. Through my development of SOAR, I gained a deep knowledge base of K-12 vendors in the market, their associated products and services, and a broader sense of education-based contracts.
Upon my transition from SOAR, I became the project manager of the Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System (EC-CAS) at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, Center for Technology in Education. As the project manager of the EC-CAS, I develop scopes of work and budgets, support proposals for state-issued RFPs or grant opportunities, manage several education-based subcontractors, and manage schedules and project deliverables for five client states. Over the years, I have had the unique opportunity to observe trends, areas of differences, and potential areas of improvement for procurement, RFPs, and contractual matters in K-12 public education.
Although surrounded by many educational products and services, teachers and other education professionals usually don’t ask themselves some basic questions as it relates to procurement in education or education-based RFPs:
- Who decided to select these educational products and services in my district or school?
- What processes are in place to evaluate which products and services best fit our local school and student needs?
Procurement, RFP processes, and contractual matters in education are clearly an equity issue for all learners, even more so for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Teachers, paraprofessionals, school and district administrators, school psychologists, and students — essentially all stakeholders in public education — would benefit from a heightened awareness of the role procurement and contractual matters play in learning outcomes and educational equity.
Based on my professional experience, I feel uniquely positioned and compelled to share several observations, trends, and potential areas of improvement in procurement, request for proposals (RFP) processes, and contractual matters in the context of K-12 public education. I’ve identified eight themes and several potential areas of improvement for procurement and RFP processes within the context of K-12 public education. This is not an exhaustive list, but can serve as a dialogue starter for educational stakeholders on this important topic as we strive to optimize educational equity and inclusive learning.
Theme 1: There is a common disconnect in communication between agencies/departments issuing RFPs and the procurement department.
I have experienced several common trends which highlight a break of communication between the procurement office and the educational agency/department issuing an RFP for needed products and services. Examples of this include:
- The inclusion of “boilerplate” RFP content that is not aligned to the context and complexity of the services and/or products being requested. An example of this would be inserting contractual language geared for a construction project into an educational software RFP.
- Sponsoring agencies largely unaware of major requirements excluded by procurement in the issuance of the RFP. An example of this would be an educational department submitting a draft of an RFP with language for a targeted grade/age, yet upon submission to procurement, the procurement department omits that grade level or age specification in the final RFP.
Some of the likely effects of miscommunication between the procurement office and the issuing/sponsoring agency include, but are not limited to:
- An RFP that doesn’t align with the needed requirements from a product or service for learners and other educational stakeholders. Consequently, districts, schools, teachers, students, and all other stakeholders won’t receive a product or service that meets the scope or quality of what was originally sought or needed.
- An increased likelihood that more vendors with “off-the-shelf,” low-quality products or services (which can’t be customized to meet the needs of all learners and educational environments) will respond to an RFP and be awarded a contract.
Theme 2: For some RFPs, cost seems to be disproportionately weighted during the proposal evaluation process, which largely affects the proposal development process and product/service selection outcomes.
In every single education RFP that I have worked on, cost was the most weighted factor in the proposal evaluation process. Cost is obviously an important factor for many reasons, including the efficiency of tax dollar expenditures. However, cost being the most heavily weighted proposal evaluative factor can indirectly result in the following outcomes:
- Low-quality proposal submissions winning the contract on the basis of their highly weighted cost-benefit, even if other high-quality proposals were within the sponsoring department’s budget.
- Larger, high-capacity companies, with low-quality products or services, underbidding their proposal costs in an effort to promote overall future market dominance. In other words, larger companies are sacrificing costs up front in an initial contract to widen their market share and promote larger field relationship with their product/service
Although I don’t dispute that cost should be a high priority factor in educational proposal evaluations as there are budgetary limitations and sensitivity around how tax dollars are efficiently being spent. However, it should not exceed the importance of a product being high-quality or customizable, especially if that product or service is still within the budget that procurement or the sponsoring department has allocated. Take this instructive example for consideration:
- An RFP is issued for a complex, nuanced product or service with no budgetary parameters with the goal of soliciting competitive pricing. Cost is the top weighted factor in the proposal evaluation process.
- The RFP collects submissions from “Product A” and “Product B.”
- “Product A” is lower-quality and less expensive than “Product B.”
- Both “Product A” and “Product B” have costs which are in the allocated amount for the department, yet “Product A” wins the contract because cost is disproportionately weighted in the proposal evaluation process.
- As an effect of the RFP and procurement process, educational stakeholders (school leaders, teachers, students, etc.) are provided with a lower-quality product when they could have acquired access to a higher-quality product that was still within their sponsoring department’s budget.
For more complex or nuanced educational products and services in an RFP, there should be an established protocol to determine whether the available budget is posted in the RFP. In doing so, cost could still be an evaluative factor, but it would allow the quality of product or service to be a more significant factor in the proposal evaluation process. Many education-based RFPs related to complex and nuanced products and services should have the factor of product/service quality weighted more in the evaluation process than the factor of cost (of course budget permitting).
Theme 3: Procurement offices have inconsistent processes to guarantee subcontractor participation from people of color, women, and veterans.
It is not uncommon for RFPs in education to require a percentage of the overall awarded contract to include Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs), Women Business Enterprises (WBEs), and/or Veteran Business Enterprises (VBEs). However, I have frequently encountered RFPs which did not require mandatory participation from MBEs, WBEs, or VBEs. Some RFPs require MBE, WBE, and VBE subcontractor participation for a proposal to be considered, while others promote the optional use of these entities by awarding “bonus points” during the proposal evaluation process.
It is my belief that procurement departments have a responsibility to require the participation and input of MBEs, WBEs, and VBEs in education-based RFPs. From an equity perspective, these subcontractor entity participation requirements should not be treated as optional. Further, I believe that the perspectives and values which people of color, women, and veterans impart in their educational products and services — take diverse perspectives in K-12 curriculums as an example — are integral to incorporate in all learning environments, especially in communities where those perspectives and values are underrepresented.
Theme 4: Requests for Information (RFIs) are rarely publicly posted before Requests for Proposals (RFPs).
If a sponsoring agency issuing an RFP has low familiarity with the complexity of a needed product or service, they can work with procurement offices to issue a Request for Information (RFI). RFIs typically allow sponsoring agencies to gather more information on the complexities and nuances of a product or service, as well as get a better sense of what is currently being offered on the market.
In all the RFPs that I have seen or been engaged with throughout my years in education, only one has required companies/organizations to respond to an RFI before issuing an RFP. In this instance, I responded to a required RFI for an early childhood observational assessment by a state which clearly wanted to further familiarize themselves with market options, get a better sense of high-quality factors for this product, and understand how other states were implementing a similar instrument. The information gathered from this RFI clearly helped this state write a high-quality RFP to solicit what was specifically needed within the context of their state. Without this RFI, a low-quality RFP would have likely been developed, ultimately creating a greater chance of procuring a low-quality product/service through low-quality proposal responses which didn’t align to their state needs.
Essentially, procurement agencies should have some mechanism to evaluate the due diligence performed by sponsoring departments to ensure they have adequate content and market knowledge of the requested product or service before issuing an RFP.
Theme 5: States commonly encounter procurement roadblocks when pursuing the adoption of high-quality products and services that were developed with federal funding by initial state adopters and collaborating companies/organizations.
Historically, the federal government offers grants (i.e. Race to the Top) where multiple states, in conjunction with organizations and/or companies, can submit a proposal for the development of a needed educational product or service. These federal grant opportunities for states and companies/organizations are meaningful for several reasons:
1) They promote state-to-private and state-to-nonprofit collaboration around the development of high-quality products or services;
2) They offer increased opportunity for initial dissemination of a product or service, once developed; and
3) They are more likely to promote the larger dissemination and adoption of high-quality products/services to other states.
To put it simply — high-quality products or services that are developed with federal dollars by states, in conjunction with companies/organizations, should be able to be easily procured by other interested states. Instead, interested states commonly encounter roadblocks from their own procurement offices when trying to procure and adopt federally funded products or services that were built in collaboration with initial adopting states and companies/organizations.
Let me provide a bizarre example of this dynamic. I once worked with a state that co-owned and developed a student assessment system with my organization under a federal funding grant. Even though this student assessment system was highly liked by the field, useful in instructional utility, and co-owned by the state as intellectual property — the state could not continue the programming under a sole source contract. Alternatively, the state had to put out an RFP to then have my organization essentially bid their own product. As an effect, there was a risk that another system could be selected during the RFP process even though the state co-owned a high-quality existing system which was federally funded, further developed with previous state funding, and was well liked by the field.
State procurement agencies should automatically have an efficient and streamlined Intergovernmental Agency Agreement (IGAs) policy in place. IGAs are a mechanism by which states can adopt a product or service without issuing an RFP or jumping through hoops during the contract initiation process. If state agencies had the initiative to build and put in place strong IGA policy, it would help promote the broader dissemination and adoption of high-quality products and services which were initially built with federal funding in collaboration with early adopter states and companies/organizations.
Theme 6: There is a need to support small — to mid-size vendors who offer high-quality products and services, yet don’t have the business development personnel or organizational capacity to respond to RFPs or grant solicitations.
All companies and organizations have to be strategic when deciding to submit a proposal to an RFP or grant opportunity. However, some companies and organizations have much greater capacity to respond to RFPs and dedicate more personnel and time given their organizational structure. In my current role at a university-based nonprofit center, and reflecting on the experiences of being awarded our first RFP, our organizational capacity to prepare a proposal submission was much less than some larger corporate entities such as Pearson. Large corporations like Pearson usually have dedicated, full-time business development work groups who review, analyze, and prepare business proposal submissions to RFP and/or grant opportunities. However, small to mid-size organizations commonly face some capacity disadvantages, including, but not limited to:
- Personnel who are responsible for day-to-day programming and are also responsible for RFP proposal and/or grant development and submission, essentially taking on “two jobs” for a period of time.
- Acquiring multimillion dollar liability insurance, which is commonly needed for educational RFP submissions.
- An overall lower level of overall familiarization of RFP/grant solicitation structures and availability of insertable content for proposal submissions.
- Difficulty in accessing and/or affording robust RFP aggregators or databases, which larger companies use are intensely monitoring to pursue RFP product/service solicitations.
Theme 7: Besides respondents submitting a “formal protest” of an issued RFP or awarded contract, procurement offices and sponsoring agencies rarely offer respondents and/or educational stakeholders the opportunity to provide feedback on RFP content and/or structure.
In virtually every sector of work, particularly education, we hear the term “continuous improvement.” The concept of “continuous improvement” should be applied to evaluate the development and deployment of RFPs and/or grant proposals. As such, respondents to an RFP (both primary and subcontractors) or grant solicitation should be able to provide formal feedback on the format and content of the solicitation as a mandatory step for their submission process. If pursued, I would recommend having this be submitted with the proposal, but the procurement and sponsoring department aren’t able to view the feedback until after the contract award. This review process would help ensure that feedback on the solicitation does not influence the proposal evaluation process.
Overall, feedback on RFP and grant structures and content could help improve the development and dissemination of future education-based RFPs, which in turn, could help departments solicit and procure higher-quality, more cost-effective educational products and services to benefit K-12 learners.
Theme 8: Procurement departments should require some level of “procurement competency” and “project management certification” for departmental leaders who develop content for RFPs or product/service solicitations.
Whether it be the directors of assessment, early childhood, college and career readiness, or any other departmental leader, their content expertise and experience lend themselves to advocating for learners and procuring products and services that best fit their educational stakeholders’ needs. It is not uncommon for educational leaders to be world-class instructional leaders and content experts, yet have minimal business and project management acumen. However, being a content expert or having a depth of experience in an educational field is not all that is needed for educational state and district leaders to procure high-quality products and services. It is essential that educational state and district leaders also have high competency and familiarity with their own procurement departmental processes. This may be achieved by requiring a course in procurement familiarization before a departmental leader could pursue the development of an RFP. Further, educational state and local leaders who seek products or services via an RFP or grant should have a baseline, formal training in project management and acquire their Professional Project Manager (PMP) certification. By having content expertise and field-specific experience, as well as strong familiarization and competency in procurement processes and project management, state and district leaders will be best-suited to procure high-quality products and services for their educational stakeholders.
By having strong familiarization and competency in procurement processes, training, and project management — state and district educational leaders will have more of a robust understanding of the following, which will help inform their RFP and/or grant development process:
- Logical contract structures to align to the dynamic of a needed educational product or service (multi-year, single-year, fixed, time and materials, fixed by milestone, one-year mandatory contract followed by a set of yearly renewals based on annual performance, etc).
- Availability and key decision-making factors for various procurement options (sole source, RFP, grant, intergovernmental agreement, etc.).
- Strong understanding of key personnel and designated roles inside their own procurement office.
- Processes and tools for billing, invoicing, scheduling, and progress reporting.
- Ethical guidelines and protocols within the context educational procurement.
- Key characteristics of a strong project scope of work and project implementation plans (developing project charters, activity dependency outlining, personnel plans, risk mitigation planning, subcontractor acquisition and management, lessons learned repository).
The Bottom Line: All educational stakeholders need to make a commitment to expanding their familiarity with procurement, RFPs, and contractual matters in K-12 public education if optimizing educational equity and inclusive learning is the ultimate goal.
Once again, these high-level trends, observations, and potential areas of improvement in K-12 education procurement, RFPs, and contractual matters are not an exhaustive list. However, I do believe they serve as an effective dialogue starter on this extremely important topic. I believe that if we build awareness around these issues in the public, as well among education-based stakeholders (parents, students, district and school administrators, etc.), we can optimize our chances of procuring high-quality products and services, and, in turn, promote greater educational equity and inclusive learning for all learners.
About the author
Bobby Moore is a former Teach For America educator who taught fourth and fifth grades in West Baltimore for five years, and was also a Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Summer Fellow in the District Office of Achievement and Accountability. He was also the founder and executive director of SOAR, an online platform which allowed students to digitize and fund their academic needs, interests, and passions. Through his founding of SOAR, Bobby was selected as a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Social Innovation Lab and the Halcyon Social Incubator in Washington DC.
Bobby is currently the Amplify Program Manager for Virtual K-5 Tutoring Initiative in Baltimore City Public Schools. This virtual tutoring initiative spans 28 schools in Baltimore City. Prior to joining Amplify, Bobby was formerly the project manager of the Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, Center for Technology in Education where supported the management of educational assessment programming in Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and South Carolina. He is currently taking several courses to pursue a certification in Leadership and Management through the Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business, Executive Education Department.
Bobby resides in the Patterson Park area of Baltimore City with his wife (Jade), daughter (Margot), and dog (Hemmi). He can be reached at bobbymoore570@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @pmpbobby
