Public school teachers can have more purchasing control of classroom learning materials. The key technologies are now in place in purchasing management integration. I have learned about these methods of vendor interface purchasing management integration through my day job at a small family friendly manufacturer of chemicals for molecular biology. Large educational and research institutions such as Emory and Yale are customers of integrated systems installed by companies like SciQuest. In this system the buyer accesses a catalog with thousands of vendors and millions of SKUs. SciQuest earns a consultancy fee from these institutions for implementing their system by removing a mountain of accounting problems.
For teachers within a school system ,this style of purchasing management integration would open up the universe for low cost buying on the internet for books and school supplies for the classroom. There would till be county, state and federally involved vendor approval process to keep the wackos out lead crayons out, but there are an huge number of good companies with colored pencils and flashcards for teachers and their students that it would be acceptable for every stakeholder, especially parents, for their teachers to have a substantial purchasing budget with discretion. It will be good for teachers and their students to be able to purchase directly from within a classroom budget. This can happen tomorrow with purchasing management integration, because all kinds of accounting doubts are eliminated, the pads of paper, the justifying at the assistant principal’s office for every little thing, because all the orders which occur are tracked through the central compiled catalog of vendors within one shopping cart, which is vendor neutral and not based on commissions for SciQuest. Teachers would make their choices and the order records could be available automatically to the principal and to the county. Decisions could still be collaborative at the classroom, departmental, school and county level, but it would be much more free and easy for teachers to have more budgetary discretion on classroom materials with this type of purchasing management integration.
In this world of my day job, SciQuest gives chemical manufacturers a good platform to communicate with customers because their system has good integration with product information management systems so companies like mine can provide protocols, application guides, education, and material safety data sheets in a seamlessly integrated environment. In schools, I think that SciQuest would save tax-payer dollars if used for purchasing management integration. Why should a parent pay school taxes and then pay $4.95 for one box of colored pencils for their child to then take to school along with every other child in the class. Their teacher could use the fully accounted classroom budget to buy colored pencils by the case from the Oriental Trading or Dollar General Stores. Teachers should demand a much larger classroom budget and take control of at least the supplemental learning materials because these purchases can all now be so easily accounted.
The only person I have ever talked to at a purchasing management company is in their technical support department, and I haven’t done extensive research, but I am sure other purchasing systems work the same way and there could be a competitive market providing these purchasing systems to teachers to get these systems implemented. Any person can look at the current General Services mess at the Federal Level and see the dangers and inefficiencies of bureaucratized procurement systems. An old friend of mine is the Finance Manager of a city school system. Maybe I could convince him to pilot purchasing management integration in his Georgia city and free the teachers there to purchase school supplies and learning supplements. What do you think his opinion will be?
What systems are out there integrating purchasing management in the public schools? Can unions and professional organizations use this model to achieve purchasing discretion over a much larger portion of the classroom budget? With such a system, teachers would not only be able to improve education and save taxpayer money, they would be able to try new things out, share ideas and find the cheapest vendor for school supplies on the network or the best math curriculum, whether Wiley, McGraw Hill or an open source curriculum from the Government of Singapore. It is my opinion that teachers should definitely lobby for SciQuest style purchasing management integration through their unions and professional organizations.