Rose Else-Mitchell, President, Scholastic Education Solutions
Company
Scholastic Education Solutions provides teachers, families, and communities with tools to support children with classroom libraries, print and technology-based learning programs for pre-K to grade 12, expert professional development, family and community engagement, and literacy initiatives. At its core, Scholastic has always been a company dedicated to helping children to learn to read and love to read. Beginning in the 1920s, when Scholastic began to publish magazines for students, and up to the explosion of technology and digital learning, the company has stood out as a true partner to teachers and administrators. Today, Scholastic is in 115,000 schools, reaching 3.8 million educators, 54 million students, and 78 million families/caregivers domestically and harnessing the power of engagement and social emotional learning with programs grounded in research to help students achieve significant growth in reading.
Scholastic Education Solutions offer a wide variety of programs with solutions for whole-class instruction with print and digital materials, small group instruction for reading, and student book clubs, summer school and independent reading, and take home books. Solutions include:
Curriculum – targeted solutions for use in every area of the literacy block, featuring a wide range of authentic text and research-based instruction, includes a core PreK program, PreK On My Way, and a K-6 modular core program, Scholastic Literacy. The wide variety of supplemental programs including two popular Summer School programs, can be used in conjunction with existing materials or together within an integrated literacy framework.
Magazines+ – engaging totally hybrid print and digital magazines and powerful instructional resources including short form video for learning, for every grade and subject preK-12 that build knowledge, skills, and excitement in any learning environment, with over 12m subscriptions in market.
Collections & LitPro – Scholastic is known as “the” classroom collections company with culturally-responsive offerings known as the Rising Voices series as well as custom collections, take home book packs, Grab & Go as well as eReading choices led by LitPro, the company’s ereader used for independent and instructional reading.
Professional Learning – Scholastic partners with learning professionals to help provide the highest quality instruction for students and build effective family-school partnerships.
Literacy Initiatives & FACE Solutions – Scholastic’s commitment to children does not stop at the school door or end after the bell. Following the latest research trends, this division builds the capacity of school staff to work with families and community partners to support the whole child —all day and all year, leveraging local partnerships and foundations in addition to school district funding and bespoke State programs.
Scholastic Education Solutions is a division of Scholastic Corporation, a publicly-traded American multinational publishing, education, and media company that publishes and distributes books, comics, and educational materials for schools, parents, and children.
Opportunity
As a member of the Scholastic Education Solutions Division’s Executive Leadership team, and reporting to the President of the division, the SVP Platform will lead a digital transformation, building and launching the Scholastic Education Solutions Literacy Platform. The SVP will be responsible for the strategic direction and execution of the Literacy Platform and key related products, including product vision, product innovation, product development, product analytics, and user experience ensuring that it is built and designed for scale, and relevance for children and educators of tomorrow.
A successful change leader, the SVP Platform will build digital capacity and skills within their team, who will become change agents to support continued digital transformation across the division. Building a culture of innovation centered on end-user value creation, the SVP will implement modern product development practices and scale existing and new solutions to drive the Scholastic Education Solutions broader goals, including the delivery of blended learning products and services and improved customer experiences—and revenue. Key to success as a digital evangelist will be the ability to communicate and collaborate with other departments and divisions in carrying out these goals and objectives.
Direct reports include VP, Product Development; VP, Design and UX; Senior Director, Platform; VP, Publishing Operations; Project Manager. Key working relationships include close collaboration with heads of marketing, sales, and engineering.
Primary responsibilities:
- Define and articulate a roadmap for launching the Scholastic Education Solutions Literacy Platform
- Integrate existing products into the platform, developing a platform-oriented product management practice
- Define and communicate goals, expectations, and measures of success for the teams and the division in partnership with the President of the division
- Where needed, implement new processes, technologies, and systems to improve and streamline organizational publishing processes
- Participate in strategic initiatives to improve the health of the division and customer experience
- Establish and administer the department’s budget
- Maintain knowledge of emerging technologies and trends to improve customer experience and operations
- Develop close collaboration and shared processes with the Education Engineering team as well as corporate technology services to collectively deliver platform capabilities and products on-schedule and with high levels of product quality
- Serve as a public evangelist for the power and reach of Scholastic’s blended and digital solutions with customers, education, and ed tech communities
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate has extensive experience leading digital transformation at a platform level, including leading the development and launch of a successful platform, ideally in the education or learning space. You are a creative and innovative thinker with exceptional business judgment and analytical skills, and you have the ability to craft and sell a vision and execute on it throughout an organization as well as externally with customers.
You should have the following experiences and skillsets:
- Experience transforming a diverse product portfolio into a cohesive and end-user focused technology platform with a multi-year product and enablement strategy
- Outstanding leadership and people management skills with the ability to successfully motivate and challenge a team of talented and creative people at all levels of the organization and manage large scale change initiatives
- Demonstrated successes simultaneously building and executing digital/blended product and business strategy
- Oversight of delivery of content-heavy/content-rich and interactive product/platform experiences
- Experience leading large scale agile development processes across the business (not only product owners and/or engineering)
- Strong financial acumen, including the ability to build the investment case and understand sustaining financial needs for both platform and products
- M&A experience, including due diligence and post-acquisition integration of assets, capabilities, and people
- Demonstrated successes in creating, delivering, and being obsessed with a best-in-class user experience leveraging iterative user research practices and/or co-design.
Learn More
Submit your resume to Alison Thompson at Knowledge Leaders.
The Knowledge Leaders search process is thorough and may include: a written assessment, multiple interviews (recorded and in person), background and social media checks, employment and education verifications, a drug screen, and professional reference checking.
