On Thursday, McGraw Hill (NYSE:MH) discussed fourth-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
McGraw Hill Inc reported fiscal year 2026 revenue of $2.1 billion, exceeding IPO expectations, with recurring revenue growing 6% and representing over 73% of total revenue.
The company launched eight AI learning tools, serving over 7.5 million users, and announced plans for three additional tools, enhancing their AI-driven educational offerings.
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2027, McGraw Hill expects revenue between $2.115 and $2.175 billion, with adjusted EBITDA guidance set to grow to a range of $750 to $790 million.
The company highlighted significant investments in literacy curriculum, viewing the science of reading as a major growth area and potential catalyst for a new market cycle.
Management emphasized the strategic use of AI in education, noting the development of agentic AI tools and partnerships aimed at expanding McGraw Hill's reach beyond traditional education markets.
McGraw Hill reduced gross debt by $646 million in fiscal year 2026, focusing on achieving a net leverage target of two to two and a half times.
The company announced a $50 million share repurchase plan, reflecting confidence in future growth and profitability.
Challenges in the K12 market were noted, particularly with the slower-than-anticipated adoption of the California math curriculum, though long-term opportunities in literacy were emphasized.
Full Transcript
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the McGraw Hill Inc. Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen only mode. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and a written transcript and webcast replay will be made available in the events and Presentation section of the company's investor Relations website. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Danielle Kloblin, Treasurer and Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.
Please go ahead.
Danielle Kloblin (Treasurer and Senior Vice President, Investor Relations)
Danielle Good morning. Welcome to McGraw Hill's fiscal fourth quarter and full year ended March 31, 2026 earnings call. Joining me today are Simon Allen, Chair of the Board of Directors Philip Moyer, President and Chief Executive Officer and Bob Salman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on our current expectations and the current economic environment.
These statements, estimates and projections are subject to significant uncertainties beyond the control of management as detailed in the cautionary language in our fiscal fourth quarter and full year ended March 31, 2026 earnings release, the accompanying investor presentation, our Form 10K and other SEC filings. We will also reference certain non GAAP measures today which we believe provide useful supplemental insight into our financial and operational performance, though they are not a substitute for GAAP measures.
Definitions and GAAP reconciliations are available in our Earnings Release, the Appendix to the Investor Presentation and on our Investor Relations website. For those listening to a recording of this call. Please note that the remarks are as of today, June 11, 2026 and have not been subsequently updated. With that, I'll turn the call over to our Chair of the Board, Simon Allen.
Simon Allen (Chair of the Board of Directors)
Good morning everyone. Fiscal year 2026 demonstrated the strength of our business, our strategy and the enduring importance of education. Our mission to support learners and educators build human intelligence and power. The future of learning has never been more relevant. In a year marked by rapid AI advancement and global uncertainty, McGraw Hill reinforced our position as the partner educators and learners trust most. That foundation fuels our trajectory as a data driven learning company. We made significant strides in AI powered innovation, launching new tools, expanding existing solutions and deepening key partnerships that position McGraw Hill to lead the next era of AI enabled learning. This execution reflects the strength of our strategy and the caliber of our leadership team led by the right person.
Having worked closely with Philip over the last 120 days, the board and I have full confidence in his vision and his ability to drive McGraw Hill's next chapter of growth. We are fully aligned and energized by what lies ahead. I'll now turn the call over to McGraw Hill's President and CEO, Philip Moyer.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Simon and good morning everyone. It's a privilege to step into the CEO role and lead McGraw Hill in this exciting moment in education and technology. My first 120 days have been filled with over 250 customer, team, industry and investor meetings and it's clear that education is at a seminal moment. Student populations are growing, the learning landscape is increasingly complex, and outcomes are more important than ever. Students, teachers and institutions are looking for an enterprise partner they trust to ensure the next generation of students are prepared.
What is also clear to me is that McGraw Hill is uniquely positioned to be this partner. Our trusted content, our learning data, and our pace of AI innovation, along with the scale of our relationships are unmatched and I believe we are positioned to be the global leader in this next generation. McGraw Hill has a great financial foundation and my focus for shareholders is to maintain our profit profile, reduce our debt and accelerate our growth. In fiscal year 2027 and beyond, I see many opportunities to lead in innovation, streamline and scale our execution, and profitably expand our TAM.
In fiscal year 2026, we exceeded our IPO expectations for revenue and adjusted EBITDA and achieved several important milestones. Recurring revenue grew by 6% and now represents over 73% of our total revenue. In K through 12, our capture rate exceeded expectations despite the expected cyclical decline in the market in higher education. Our net dollar retention reached 114% and our customer satisfaction reached its highest level ever in fiscal year 2026.
We also proved that we could profitably accelerate execution. We introduced a record number of curriculum offerings and AI learning tools while improving our adjusted EBITDA margin by nearly 80 basis points year over year. We now have launched eight AI learning tools which served more than 7.5 million users, and we have three additional launches planned this fiscal year. We launched our California Math curriculum and a new literacy curriculum, the latter of which is our single largest investment in curriculum in our history.
We also introduced a K through 12 AI curriculum designed to teach AI concepts and integrate them into the classroom learning. As we enter fiscal year 2027, we see clear opportunities for growth. The market dynamics support a multi year acceleration of revenue growth and underpins our confidence in our medium term framework for mid single digit plus revenue growth. Now, one of the most exciting areas I see that supports our growth expectations is the use of AI.
While I'm frequently asked by investors if AI will disrupt our business, I've rarely been asked that question by our customers. Students, teachers, parents and institutions don't want to park a child in front of a generic LLM and hope for a good outcome. They know that AI is only as good as its data and its training. And in my past 120 days I've deepened my excitement about the competitive moat we are building in AI trained specifically for education and the outcomes we produce.
Our proprietary content catalog includes tens of thousands of courses spanning more than 500 subjects, mapped to hundreds of thousands of regulated learning objectives and academic standards across roughly 12,000 school districts and approximately 3,300 higher ed institutions. We build our tools to meet digital accessibility requirements, ensuring broad access for learners, and we have our student outcomes measured by independent third parties. We have over 100 million active licenses by students and educators of this curriculum.
From this usage we captured over 25.6 billion learning interactions and have decades of data over 190 terabytes on how students learn, where they struggle, and how instruction must adapt in real time. This extraordinary content and data mode is what we use to build and tune our education specific AI learning tools. It is also what we use to deliver a precision education experience, the right content and the right question at the right moment. I'm excited about our use of AI because I'm seeing how we are expanding this precision experience and creating new opportunities for TAM expansion.
One great example is the emerging agentic AI landscape. AI is evolving from answering questions to taking actions, but customers need purpose built agents that they trust. As a result, we are being asked to be a part of new agentic AI strategies in both education and non education customers and I'm excited to announce that we are piloting our new agentic AI tool that will make our precision education experience accessible as a trusted AI agent. This represents a new business model and one of several opportunities to expand our tam.
At the same time, we continue to enhance our core learning solutions with artificial intelligence. We are expanding our Connect platform with Learning Coach, an AI conversational tutoring tool developed with Chiron Learning. We've added new accessibility features to AI Reader including translations across 38 languages and we've created new AI literacy modules. As I mentioned earlier, the education market is not just asking for better tools, it is demanding measurable outcomes.
In fiscal year 2026, McGraw Hill extended our trust with educators with meaningful improvements in student comprehension and grades, which is now validated by more than 100 independent researchers. Aleks, for example, continued to set the benchmark for adaptive learning with math students achieving topic mastery more than 90% of the time. In Pennsylvania, elementary schools that were using aleks adventure had first grade students improving nearly 25 points on math assessments and second graders improving more than 55 points.
Over the course of the school year, AI reader generated 57 million learning interactions across 2.4 million students, driving higher engagement with teacher assigned reading topics. And with our SHARPEN Tool, students engaged up to four times more with study activities than compared to generic AI tools. At Rowan College in New Jersey, for example, students who use SHARPEN achieved final exam scores 47% higher than peers who didn't use the tool. Looking ahead, our strategy focuses on four priorities strengthening the core, expanding our cross sell opportunities, growing our addressable market, and driving operational efficiencies in K through 12.
We're continuing to evolve our California math program to meet the emerging requirements of the market. This California math adoption cycle has been slower than expected, but 80% of the market remains undecided. Also in K12, we're entering one of the most important nationwide curriculum refresh cycles in this millennium as an unprecedented amount of schools evaluate new English language arts programs. Since 2021, we've invested over $100 million in our new Science of Reading ELA program, Emerge, Summit and Soar.
This is our largest curriculum investment to date and we are seeing early district wins and a strong rubric of scores ahead of emerging opportunities in higher education. We continue to gain share as institutions adopt inclusive access, expand their use of our Evergreen model, and seek more integrated Learning experiences fiscal fourth quarter marked our 40th consecutive quarter of market share gains in higher ed with our share approaching 31% according to NPI.
Our net promoter score reached a record in the spring and we saw strong retention in volume growth. We've also seen solid adoption of our new offerings in credentialing and AI professional development within our global professional business. Medical education represents more than 75% of revenue. The World Health Organization projects a shortage of 11 million health care workers by 2030, and this year we expanded our offerings into clinical training and AI powered diagnostic simulations.
We remain well positioned to serve this market with our innovation and trusted high stakes learning solutions. Internationally, we see education market conditions improving, higher education enrollment in Canada is stabilizing and new opportunities in favorable demographic markets such as Latin America and the Middle east support a more attractive setup. ALEKS remains a key driver internationally with calculus now available in additional markets.
Looking to fiscal year 2027, we see a clear path to revenue growth, expanding margins and strong free cash flow. We've made significant progress in reducing our gross debt and we will remain disciplined in capital allocation, which Bob will speak to shortly. We're looking forward to sharing a broader update on our long term strategy and capital allocation framework at our Investor Day later this calendar year, but after this first 120 days as CEO, I am more excited than ever.
At McGraw Hill we build human intelligence. Our mission has never been more important, our assets have never been stronger and our opportunity has never been greater. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob to review our financial results and provide guidance for fiscal year 2027.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you Philip. Fiscal year 2026 was defined by market share gains, margin expansion and accelerating digital momentum. We exited the year with a stronger balance sheet, greater financial flexibility and stronger pricing power driven by deeper adoption of our AI enabled solutions, all reinforcing our confidence in long term value creation. For the fiscal year, revenue was 2.1 billion above the high end of our guided range and $2 million above prior year recurring.
Revenue reached 1.5 billion, growing nearly 6% year-over-year, exceeding the high end of our guided range, reinforcing the durability of our model. The remaining performance obligation was 1.7 billion and will increase in the fiscal second quarter of 2027, reflecting the typical K12 seasonality. Fiscal year adjusted EBITDA was 744 million, up 2% year-over-year, exceeding the high end of our guided range with margin expanding nearly 80 basis points to 35.4.
During the fiscal year we reduced gross debt by 646 million inclusive of the IPO proceeds. We remain focused on achieving our net leverage target of two to two and a half times. Turning to the fourth quarter, revenue was 464 million, down 2% year-over-year, reflecting a smaller K12 market opportunity partially offset by continued outperformance in higher education. Reoccurring revenue totaled 373 million while digital revenue reached 393 million, representing 81% and 85% of total revenue respectively.
Fourth quarter gross margin increased nearly 50 basis points driven by operational efficiency and favorable digital mix. Adjusted EBITDA was 131 million with margins expanding nearly 40 basis points year-over-year reflecting operational leverage and early AI efficiency savings. While we continue to invest in growth turning to segment performance in higher education, fiscal year revenue grew 12% year-over-year to 879 million, with recurring revenue up 10% to 734 million.
Growth was largely driven by market share gains which exceeded expectations alongside enrollment pricing and lower sales returns and the associated release contributing roughly 3 points of growth. Market share is now approaching 31%, according to MPI. Momentum continued in the fourth quarter with higher education revenue increasing nearly 2% year-over-year to 258 million. Despite more schools starting spring semesters later in the quarter compared to last year, our spring selling season was a success with year-over-year activation growth and share gains supported by strong commercial execution and our Evergreen Delivery Model.
Evergreen, a continuously updated content delivery system that improves retention and frees our sales teams to pursue competitive takeaways. This remains a competitive differentiator in the market and now represents 68% of higher education revenue. Demand by discipline was particularly strong in business and science, which represents subject areas where we over index. Underpinning that demand is the Inclusive Access Delivery Model. Inclusive access represents 56% of revenue in fiscal year 2026 and continues to expand as existing campuses adopt additional courses.
As a reminder, we typically add about 100 new campuses each year, with those significantly scaling over the following two to three years. At the same time, our customer success organization continues to strengthen faculty partnerships supporting retention and driving net dollar retention of 114% in the fiscal year. Turning to K12 fiscal year revenue was 884 million, down 9% year-over-year, reflecting the anticipated smaller market opportunity and difficult prior year comparison.
Reoccurring revenue grew 3% year-over-year to 620 million in the fiscal year. Despite market decline, performance came in slightly ahead of expectations due to stronger capture rates in key adoption markets in the fourth quarter, K12 revenue was 126 million, down 10% year-over-year with sequential improvements while recurring revenue declined 3% as prior year adoptions provided some durability. As we progress through the key selling season for the 2026 and 2027 school year, we are gaining real time market intelligence In California.
Some districts are taking longer to finalize curriculum refresh plans amid higher volume of rubric choices, pilots and tools available. We have always expected the California math refresh cycle to take place over a handful of years, but the phasing has been recalibrated as we learn more from prospective customers. This delay has allowed us to better customize our materials to the market's rapidly evolving and fragmented needs and improve our capture rates and subsequent adoption years.
Importantly, the market opportunity and opportunity to win remains intact. In Texas, our math program has been well received while state sponsored curriculum has seen early successes due to upfront incentives provided by the state, contracts have been shorter reflecting a market in experimentation mode. Historically, districts and educators favor high quality integrated solutions and that pattern continues, giving us confidence in our ability to serve Texas in a very meaningful way going forward.
We have seen this dynamic play out clearly in higher education where our win ratio against OER and AI generated curriculum Vendors has been 6 to 1. OER was often adopted through top down institutional mandates, but poor outcomes drove educators back to us, reinforcing that education is more than information. Pedagogical designs built with cognitive scaffolding, domain knowledge and alignment to thousands of learning objectives and localized standards demand deep expertise and this is where McGraw Hill excels in Florida.
ELA the market opportunity remains attractive and our capture rate is trending in line with expectations. Looking ahead, we have visibility into several years of potential market expansion in K12 driven largely by a nationwide ELA refresh cycle aligned with the science of reading. McGraw Hill has been preparing for this opportunity with our ELA programs Emerge, Summit and Soar, which integrates McGraw Hill plus AI enabled capabilities and supplemental and intervention solutions.
Early momentum in ELA is encouraging. Colorado's Department of Education scored EMERGE as the highest rated curriculum in the latest instructional material review for K3. We're also seeing early wins in urban open territory markets such as Seattle, where McGraw Hill has historically had lower penetration. The first major state adoption opportunity for ELA will occur in California starting in fiscal year 2028, with the state expected to publish its list of approved vendors later this year.
As a reminder, ELA is our largest subject area, representing approximately 40% of our historical K12 revenue so early signals from our new ELA program position us well. The global professional business remains steady in fiscal year 2026 with 4% year-over-year digital revenue growth supported by medical content and early traction from our AI enabled solutions which was partially offset by continued transition away from non core print products and in international.
While revenue declined 7% year-over-year due to macro pressure in select markets, we are better positioned across multiple key markets heading into fiscal year 2027 supported by new commercial fourth quarter performance was also impacted by Middle east project delays that have shifted into the second half of fiscal year 2027. While we recognized a 39 million dollar impairment charge in the fourth quarter driven by geopolitical and macroeconomic factors, we remain confident in the underlying fundamentals and long term strategic importance of the global markets we serve.
With the outlook improving in fiscal year 2027 as headwinds, ease and positioning strengthens. We ended the year with 254 million in cash and 704 million in total liquidity, with our revolving credit facilities remaining undrawn during the year, we repaid 646 million of gross debt, reducing net leverage by approximately 80 basis points and lowering annualized cash interest expense by nearly 45 million. Despite entering our seasonal cash trough through June, we reduced debt by an additional 50 million in the quarter, including buying 40 million of our highest coupon notes in the open market at a discount, and we will continue optimizing our capital structure in the future. Cash from operations was 331 million for the year, while capex and product development was just over 200 million. We generated 335 million of unlevered free cash flow in the fiscal year. Turning to fiscal year 2027 guidance, we expect revenue to be in the range of 2.115 to 2.175 billion, remaining consistent with the dollar expectations we established at the time of our IPO. We expect approximately 55% of the full year revenue in the first half of the fiscal year weighted towards the second quarter.
Reoccurring revenue is expected to be in the range of 1.587 to 1.6 to 7 billion ahead of our IPO expectations, demonstrating a growing high quality and predictable revenue stream. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of 750 million to 790 million ahead of expectations set at the time of the IPO. The implied adjusted EBITDA margin of 35.9% at the midpoint represents a year-over-year increase of 50 basis points. Unlevered free cash flow is expected to reach approximately 400 million, up roughly 20% year-over-year, with further growth anticipated in fiscal year 2028.
Capex and product development are expected to remain approximately 10% of revenue. Our capital allocation approach remains balanced and disciplined as we continue to prioritize reinvestment in the business, debt reduction and selective tuck in acquisitions. Consistent with this approach, our board has authorized a $50 million share repurchase plan reflecting confidence in our sustained growth, strong profitability and meaningful cash generation. To summarize, fiscal year 2026 performance exceeded expectations and our fiscal year 2027 revenue outlook in dollar terms remains consistent with the trajectory we outlined at the time of our ipo.
At the same time, our guidance for recurring revenue and adjusted EBITDA is above our IPO expectations and we expect continued growth from these levels beyond fiscal year 2027. The structural drivers of our business remain strong. In higher education, we expect continued share gains supported by durable pricing while taking a measured approach on enrollment assumptions ahead of the start of the academic year in K12, we expect improving trends as the market expands.
Supported by ELA momentum and the upcoming adoption cycle in global professional, we will continue to prioritize growth in medical solutions and in the international business, we are positioned more advantageously into fiscal year 2027. Finally, a few modeling items for fiscal year 2027 depreciation and amortization is expected to decline modestly versus fiscal year 2026, including 208 million of intangible asset amortization related to the platinum acquisition.
In 2021, stock based compensation is expected to be approximately 15 million. Cash and GAAP taxes are expected to be in the range of 20 to 40 million and GAAP interest expense is expected to be below 180 million. These assumptions support GAAP net income in fiscal year 2027 increasing significantly compared to compared to fiscal year 2026. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for Question.
Operator
We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press Star one. Again, we ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality if you are muted locally. Please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.
Stephen Sheldon (Equity Analyst)
Hey, Good morning. Thanks. First one here just on the revenue guide for fiscal 2027. Can you help Frame? Yeah, that's probably for Bob, but frame at a high level, what you're assuming in terms of segment level revenue growth and especially as we think about K through 12 and higher ed.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Sure thing, yeah. So as I think about, you know, 27, how are we sort of positioning the business and you know, certainly we're going to have continued share gains and higher ed. And you saw exceptional performance there. We see that continuing. You heard that I said we took a view of 1% enrollment gains in higher education for next year. We'll have to wait until we see students come on campus. And then when we think about our K12 business, you know, we've established, you know, what we see as a slightly smaller than our original estimates in the overall market by about 100 million. As well as, you know, we're coming in at, you know, at the lower end of our historical capture rate. So that 25 to 30%, we could walk through that in greater detail. But you know, we're seeing a couple different dynamics playing out there as well.
Really strong performance in open territory. We're continuing to take share. Supplemental intervention continues to be beneficial. We're seeing, you know, some benefits in terms of retention rates. We're seeing our ability to see the funnel grow. And then we highlighted in the prepared remarks around Texas and California, both of those markets are pretty dynamic. And while we're early in that cycle, we're performing slightly below our historical average there. So when you take that altogether, you'll see that we're at the lower end of that 25 to 30% range. And then nicely, you'll see return to growth in the international segment. We talked about some of the opportunities in select markets. We feel really good about where that business is heading.
And then the underlying core medical segment in global Professional is that mid single digit grower which gets offset by the tail of that print. And we believe we're at about the final year of the wind down of that non strategic core print business. So when I roll all that up together, Steven, that's where you get that midpoint of our guide, around 2%. We feel good about it and we
Stephen Sheldon (Equity Analyst)
think it's been a prudent guide. Very helpful. Maybe just drilling down on the higher ed segment. Obviously you've had phenomenal growth there. As we look back over the last couple years, maybe as we think about bridging expectations around fiscal 2026 growth to fiscal 2027, I mean, you talked about enrollment, I guess maybe how is that growth algorithm changing as we think about the next year relative to what you've been delivering over the past couple of years.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's been an exceptional year and continued exceptional performance by the team. So really pleased there, that 12%. Let me break it down for you. The biggest driver of that is that ongoing sustained share gains that will continue. We also benefited from enrollment. 3 to 4% of the growth was enrollment related. You may have seen, you know, national student clearinghouse called 1.3% growth. We had 3 to 4. The reason for that is the strength of business and science courses as well as over indexing to the two year colleges. So when we look at our results, we had greater enrollment rates than the National Student Clearinghouse stated rates. The other thing is I've historically called out about a 1% net price, which is inflationary price offset by the movement into inclusive equitable access models.
This year we actually realized closer to 2% and that's largely given, you know, all the additional features, all the value. As a reminder, we go through a value selling process and as we add value to our customers we're able to realize greater price. And lastly, and this would be the component that's not reoccurring, this would be the 3% benefit we had from a sales returns. As we continued to move more digitally, we saw less returns come in and then the corresponding reserve we also lowered. So that had about a 3 percentage point increase year over year and we don't expect that to continue. So that's where we land at that mid single digit growth as we think about the outlook.
Very helpful. Thanks Bob. You bet.
Ryan McDonald (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McDonald with Needham Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe shifting the conversation to the K12 segment. Obviously it sounds like, you know, a nice strong year there in the segment and sort of some good momentum sort of closing the year. You just talk about what you know, exceeded their expectations, you know, the most within K12 or pockets of strength. And then how is this informing your view A little bit more.
How, how much of a shift change are we seeing, you know, within a few of those key states, Florida, Texas, California. As we think about how you're looking at the landscape in fiscal 27 versus maybe future years. Thanks.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Sure. Ryan. Yeah, 26. We did exceed our expected capture rates and as I highlighted, you know, we are at the high end of that 25 to 30% range. Where is it coming from? Right. We have continued strength in our science program as we talked about last year, exceptional performance in Florida and Texas and science program. Now we saw that in other adoption states like Tennessee and Alabama, as well as into the open territory. So science continues to perform above our historical rates. We also saw success in Florida, ELA and some other open territory areas. So really pleased with that performance. Moving into sort of the 27. How do we think about it? As I mentioned, open territory continues to perform well.
And I do believe we bottomed out with respect to our supplemental intervention, meaning the Esser dollars are behind us and we're actually seeing some opportunity for meaningful growth. The pipeline's increasing in a meaningful way in supplemental intervention and our retention rates are also growing. So I think we're very well positioned there. You know, we're watching closely Texas math as well as California math. We did see the California math market shift a little bit while the overall size of the market remains intact. And I always knew it was a multi year adoption cycle. The overall timing has just shifted a little bit because of a few large districts moving into fiscal year 2028. And then we just watch as we move through the selling season, we're watching closely our win rates and right now they're falling a little behind our expectations.
But, you know, we're still in that selling season.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I would just add one thing, and it's related to both math and to ELA literacy. You know, literacy for us is approximately 40% of our revenues, math approximately 20%. And the two markets are very different right now. The way you teach math is very undecided. The pedagogy is not agreed upon by districts, by teachers, and certainly not by states. It's a very fragmented market. That's what we're seeing in California. There's a lot of confusion. We've talked about the sheer number of companies that are bidding in California. And it's because it's so fragmented and there's such a lot of discourse still on how you teach math literacy. I don't think we've ever seen a market like this. There's now 42 states in the United States, as well as a bill in the Senate that is mandating the way to teach literacy, which is the science of reading. That is an extraordinary legislative backdrop.
We also think it can lead to a potential super cycle in the area of literacy. We've made the largest single investment in our history in literacy curriculum Emerge Summit and Soar. And we've been bringing that curriculum out. We're kind of in year zero of it. And the exciting thing about it is that we Scored the highest score on the Colorado rubric. We won large districts like Seattle. We just won in Kansas as an example. We're winning in districts that we were not even expected to be in the literacy market. And they're big districts. And so one of the areas that we're excited about, that momentum is building is in, As I mentioned, 40% of our business, which is the literacy market. So it's a big area for us that we are excited about in 2027 and some really early optimistic wins.
Ryan McDonald (Equity Analyst)
I appreciate all that color there, both Bob and Philip, and maybe as a following up on the literacy opportunity, because it does feel like a huge opportunity over the next three to five years here, given there's that sort of state level mandate and almost nearly blanketed across the country. How are the states viewing sort of the opportunity versus sort of, you know, companies and vendors like McGraw Hill versus maybe rolling out, you know, additional you know, state owned oer kind of curriculum like you saw within Texas Math? Like, is that potential risk as we think about how this market evolves over the next few years? Thanks.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, you know, I really haven't seen a contagion, you know, or similar movements in other states as it relates to literacy as Texas in Bluebonnet Math. You know, I'll start with that. First of all, the other thing, a few things that you should know. You know, with our literacy program, we're one of the few programs in the entire United States that is using the science of reading and is multilingual for most of the grades. And so you have to have a commitment not just around the program, but also around multi languages.
And then the investments that we make in accessibility for these programs is pretty extraordinary. The third thing is that, you know, the balance of screen time versus paper, it's a really delicate balance. Early on, you actually most districts are asking for less than 20%, 20 minutes per week of screen time, which is something that we do. And then as you get a little bit more self regulation, you can introduce more screens. But literally the balance between, you know, a curriculum that is holistic, literally starting in kindergarten, all the way up to 12, up to 12th grade, doing it in a multilingual capacity, making sure it's accessible and then making sure that you've got the right balance of screen times. And it's a really, really hard thing to do. And as mentioned, it's one of the largest investments we made over $100 million investment in this literacy program. And as mentioned, you know, we're scoring the highest in the rubrics and that Colorado rubric, by the way, is something that other states actually depend on in addition to third party assessments. And so you have to have your program assessed by third parties.
You have to have it evaluated by states. You have to make sure that you built it the right way. So we're just not seeing states move into that in the same way that we saw Texas experimenting with blue. You know, and the other thing I would just mention is related to McGraw Hill. One of the challenges I think that other states are looking at is that, you know, it was just recently announced that there was over 4,000 errors in that curriculum. And you just can't take that kind of risk with a literacy program.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Alexei Filipov with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Alexei Filipov
Hi. Thank you. Yeah. A question to Philip, maybe a bit more to elaborate on the Science of Reading program and the opportunity you see ahead to capture that. Is there a way to quantify that? Is it like a time expansion for you? And which years do you expect this to fall?
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
You know, I think it's. We look at the TAM expansion as an international opportunity. You know, the need for science of reading is not just here in the United States. It is global. As I would say. The previous ways of teaching literacy around the world, you know, was highly variable. As I mentioned, you know, it's 40% of our revenue. Our program in the past wonders, actually generated over $1.5 billion for us over the course of 10 years. And so we look at it as both potential global TAM expansion and then also I'll call it TAM acceleration here in the United States. I mentioned before, I don't think we've ever seen a legislative environment like this before where 42 states are now mandating this is the way to teach. There's been a lot. One of the biggest challenges right now across the educational, you know, institutions across the United States is the challenge in literacy scores.
And, you know, it's disappointing to see that, you know, 83% of states have moved backwards. We're at roughly about a 33% reading on grade level right now. It is in a lot of ways a national crisis and an international crisis. And so the fact that it has now been settled that science of reading is the way to teach. It's really what's called a phonics based approach, as opposed to a whole language approach. Really important. And so we're seeing, as I mentioned, a lot of districts that, quite frankly, were not in our pipeline at the start of last year. Come into our pipeline. We've landed relationships that we weren't expecting to land. You know, I was just recently up at a elementary school up in Chicago that reached out to me personally using our literacy program. So really extraordinary momentum that we're seeing in that space. So we see, I'll say TAM acceleration.
We're just in the early stages of quantifying it. So we'll come back to you with more details as we're able to start assessing that.
Alexei Filipov
Yeah, thank you very much. And a quick technical on this international impairment. Can you elaborate on that? You sound like you expect international to kind of accelerate from here. How to square that up with impairment that you recognize. Thank you.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
You know, we look at international. It's really important to kind of get a sense, I think, that I spoke about this on the last call, that we look at the education market as about a $7.3 trillion market on a global basis. The middle class is growing in areas like Latin America, the Middle East, East. We've got some great traction in those marketplaces as the middle class grows. You know, middle class tends to suspend approximately 2.5% on education And so those markets, you know, I was just recently down in Latin America and I was just simply, I'll just say, so impressed with the work that was going in K through 12 in high schools, completely dedicated to science, to universities. I spent some time with the university that had over 300,000 people enrolled in it. And so we're really excited about those opportunities internationally and we are seeing growth in those markets. And so, you know, internally, inside of the company, we're better aligning to be able to be more reactive to local requirements, local language requirements, cultural requirements, pedagogy. And we do view it as a great opportunity for growth for this company.
And that's across literally our K through 12 segment, our university segment, and then also our medical segments. And so you'll see us focusing on how we are part of that really exciting growth worldwide.
Alexei Filipov
Thank you.
Steve Koenig
Our next question comes from the line of Steve Koenig with the Macquarie Group. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi there. Thank you. It's Steve Koenig from Macquarie. Congratulations on the solid quarter and solid year Question here for Philip. We noted your AI blueprint. Philip posted with the earnings materials. Super helpful in understanding your AI strategy. Maybe can you help us understand how that strategy compares with your competitors?
And maybe the second part of my question, if I may, is about open educational resources, which you mentioned in your remarks, and you did reference Bluebonnet math in Your Q and A. Just curious. How do you think about where AI and open educational resources are headed? Thanks very much.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you very much for the question and thanks for reading the AI blueprint. We're really excited about it. I think I mentioned that. We talked about the fact that we have over seven and a half millions of users of our AI solutions, and these are tools that just came out over the past 18 to 24 months. And so we're pretty excited about the early traction that we're seeing and there's a lot more ahead. You know, I think a lot of individuals that come into the education industry have a lot of misconceptions and they vastly underestimate what's necessary in this marketplace.
And so you'll see a lot of startups that come in, you'll see some organizations that have some curriculum or some tools. And, you know, the thing that differentiates McGraw Hill is four things. You know, first of all, the deep pedagogical curriculum. From the outside, most people don't realize that you're taking sequences of information. Something like in literacy, you have to weave together a thousand separate learning requirements. In mathematics From K through 12, over 4,000 learning requirements.
You have to sequence this content. So it's not just about just putting out a textbook or a piece of curriculum. You literally have to sequence it right down to the week. What is a third grader doing in their seventh week? And, you know, when they have an assembly, how do you kind of squeeze in, you know, addition and subtraction and multiplication tables? So that sequence of content is hard. We have literally hundreds of thousands of titles that we've been doing over the course of our history.
Tens of thousands that are sequenced across 500 different subjects. Where we sequence how a learner learns, that's literally many cases from through 12 years of their life. So that content is, is a huge moat versus other organizations. The second thing is that we have these tools that do personalized delivery. Sharpen is a great example. You know, it's a study guide, you know, that we use. Rowan College, a professor there analyzed it and said that the 60% of the students that were using it in his class got a 47% higher grade in their final exam, a 21% higher total grade.
We had Children and ALEKS Adventure, you know, where we saw 25 point percent or 20, 25 percentage point increases in their grades, and second graders 55 percentage points. And so personalized delivery, whether or not you want to listen to a podcast, you want to see it visually or you want to Gamify it so that personalized delivery is the second thing. The third, and this is critical in an era of outcomes, is our data. We have over 190 terabytes of data.
We get about 25.6 billion learning interactions per year. Now when you're training AI, you need to know when the AI is on task or off task. And we sense this at a very fine grained level. We can say for a subject like algebra, out of the two to the 500th power of where you're at in your learning journey, precisely where you're at. So that data is critical. The last is being able to integrate this into workflows. And we have one of the largest and most, I'll say impressive since I got here, seeing it, customer success organizations and go to market teams where they're actually working to integrate this into the classroom.
Every school that I visited, every teacher that I visited in K through 12, they've asked, you know, it's not just enough to produce this, show us how to use this in the class with different, with different types of learners. So the four things that we have are content, that is ordered pedagogically. The second thing is personalized delivery. Third is data. And the fourth is this ability to be able to close the last mile. Now one of the things that's most interesting, and I mentioned this in my comments, out of the dozens and dozens and dozens of schools and teachers and administrators that I met, investors have asked me, will AI disrupt our business?
But our customers are not. They're thrilled that we're adopting AI and that we're making it simple to them and they see the value of what we produce. And this is really borne out in the OER market. I think I've heard from a lot of people question, well, can I just take OER like a blue bonnet and couple it together with AI and boom, there's my curriculum. The reality is that we're winning almost six times as many times as we're not with oer. So for every unit of OER that we lose to, we win six in terms of our outcomes.
And we're seeing a lot of organizations in a world of AI tools, in a world of oer, we're actually seeing a lot of win backs where organizations and individuals are coming back to us because they're realizing the complexity of this. You have to tie together assessment, you have to guide together pedagogy and you have to make it work inside of the workflow and how the student learns. So a really exciting time for us.
Steve Koenig
Fantastic. Thank you for that color, Philip. I appreciate it.
Marvin Fong (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong with btig. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks for taking my questions and congratulations on the results. Maybe start with a bigger picture on guidance and just sort of how you formulated that. What's your philosophy behind the guidance? You provided both revenue and EBITDA for not only 27, but just structurally. How do you think about constructing your guidance?
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Sure, sure. Thanks, Marvin. Consistent with how we've done this in the past, and even if we rewind back to the forecast models we provided during our IPO and the roadshow, we built this process and we're consistently following that. And what we do is we understand what information we have at this point in time. And again, we're early in the selling season with K12. We've provided some insights around enrollment for higher ed, but based on information we have at this point in time, we provide that as our, as the midpoint of our guide both on revenue and ebitda. And then what we do is we provide a range. And consistent with what we've done in the past, that range provides for different outcomes. Right. Should it, should enrollments increase, should capture rates change?
All of those things are reflected in that range. And then ultimately what we'll do is we'll revisit this as we move through that. And ultimately, once we start seeing students on campus, which as you know, is after our second quarter, that'll allow us to have greater insight as to the remainder of the year. So we're following a consistent approach that we've done in the past.
Marvin Fong (Equity Analyst)
Perfect. And my follow up, maybe just something that you mentioned, Philip, in your prepared remarks, just about growing your addressable markets, I think you mentioned non educational as well as educational markets, maybe with respect to like AI and adventure tools. Could you just kind of expand on that? That does seem like an interesting point. You know, as you, as you try to grow the top line, you know, what are these kind of new markets you're thinking about?
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
One of the most impactful visits that I had was at a medical school and I was meeting with a professor and he had just come out of the American Medical association. He talked about this concept of precision education. You know, if a particular doctor has not studied or not worked with a particular patient population, how do you really make sure that that doctor, when they're walking into a situation, is able to have education just in time, right at the right moment? And this is a, this is an actual, this is a trend across lots of organizations, just in time education. And so.
And one of the most interesting things with the American Association Medicine has just given out 12 grants for precision education for addressing this exact concept of really making sure that doctors in the medical profession is able to get the right education at the right moment, especially in a changing world of education. I read a study recently that in both computer science and medicine that the number of medical papers is doubling every single year. So it's an extraordinary amount of knowledge that's coming out. I've talked in the past about the multi trillion dollar industries that are emerging and the sheer amount of knowledge that humans have to now learn, not just in K through 12, but throughout their entire lifetime.
What we announced this today that we're starting to pilot is this concept of agentic curriculum. And that is the ability to be able to consult our curriculum using agentic technologies. The MCP as an example, one of the organizations, actually two of the organizations are not traditional education companies that are actually piloting, you know, that are working with us and starting to pilot our content. These are organizations that are in the healthcare industry that actually don't educate, but they just have professionals that are working in medicine and working in pharmaceuticals that are actually want to be able to consult our content. And so I look at the lifelong journey of a learner.
Increasingly, McGraw Hill wants to connect that journey from the earliest stages to any stage in your life, whether or not it's continuing education or whether or not it's professional education and agentic technologies are going to allow us to do that. One of the things I've talked about in the past is that where I expect AI to go in companies like us is that there's going to be a knowledge economy where you'll be able to plug in knowledge, you'll be able to plug in knowledge agents. Right now we are experimenting with a knowledge agent. We view that in the same way that there's these token based models in artificial intelligence, prompt based business models.
We view this as an opportunity to expand the accessibility and the, I'll say, the business model for McGraw Hill over time with this new knowledge economy that's emerging.
Marvin Fong (Equity Analyst)
That's terrific. Thanks so much guys.
George Tong (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes to the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Hi, thanks. Good morning. I wanted to dive deeper into the agentic curriculum opportunity. Can you share more color on the timeline to launch as well as the pricing model and wallet opportunity? Sure. George, thanks very much. Thanks very much. As well for the AI framework they put out I really enjoyed reading it and really agree with the core concepts around the opportunity ahead for Gentec for us. You know, we just. Over the course of the past few months since arriving, you know, I've spent a lot of time with the team and the team has really moved quickly.
I talked in my last call about the excitement I have around innovation. Since I arrived we've been able to actually build and start to internally pilot the AgentIQ technologies and we're just starting to move into agentic pilots with external customers. This has been something that's been asked for by lots of of universities, lots of non education organizations. It's been asked, it's being requested, you know, a safe way, a I'll call it an auditable way and of being able to deliver our content.
You know, I think that there's been a choice up to now where either you take all of your content and throw it inside of a large AI model and you lose control of it or you don't do anything in AI. And this agentic technologies allows us to safely be able to answer any question and be able to monitor, be able to secure it in the same way that you would with an API. I view it almost like you call it a cloud for knowledge or an app store for knowledge.
And so it's exciting technology. It's a technology that only came out over the past roughly about 12 or so 18 months. And these standards are just starting to emerge in the AI world, MCP and agentic technologies and so really excited about the fact that team is able to build this this quickly and we're moving into pilot now. If you look at what's happening in the world of AI pricing, I think you're seeing that pricing is all over the map. I saw some stories over the past 24 hours that OpenAI may drop its token prices.
We're seeing SaaS companies have a whole variety of pricing models. In some cases it's simply an upcharge, in other cases you're actually getting charged by the token. What we're headed into pilot to do is to really understand how our customers use this. And in education, as you can imagine, they want predictability, they don't want some AI agents that's going to charge them potentially by the question they have no control over. And certainly that becomes an extraordinarily expensive proposition for the university, for the K through 12 school, for the medical school and for the student.
And you know, I would tell you that I mentioned before that there's tool fatigue where you have as many as 25 different logins for students, 40 logins for professors in one simplicity. And so we're going to experiment with the business models over the course between now and the end of the year to determine precisely what's the best model for education. And as a result, we think that we're going to be able to go after kind of new Wallet Share and as well simplify this I'm seeing in the world.
When I was in cloud, I watched a lot of organizations start adopting the cloud and then costs went out of control and they had to quickly get control of it. We're seeing the same thing in the world of AI, where costs are quickly getting out of control. And now financial finops, as we call it, is coming to AI. And so we're going to really make this simple. We're going to make it streamlined for the user, and we're going to have a business model that is probably better than a student or university could get on their own.
So we'll bring you more information on that as the business model emerges over the course next six months.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Got it. That's helpful. And then in K12, can you discuss where in the historical 25 to 30% capture rate range you expect to land in fiscal 2027? Yeah, George, we anticipate we're going to be at the low end of that range. Any color on how that evolves over the course of the year and opportunities for improvement by state? Yeah, I think the areas that we are most focused on for upside will continue to come in the open territory and supplemental intervention. And so we'll continue to watch that. And then, like I mentioned, Texas and California, as we continue to see more calls, we'll monitor that closely.
But the areas that provide me the most excitement is around supplemental intervention, where we have 5% share. That represents about 15% of our overall K12 revenues as well as open territory.
Operator
Got it. Very helpful. Thank you. Just a reminder to analysts to please limit themselves to one question. Your next question comes from the line of FISA Alway with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Faisa Alway (Equity Analyst)
Yes, hi. Thank you. I just wanted to put a finer point on, you know, your messaging around K12, because from where I said, it seems like there's been a pretty, you know, significant backlash from parent groups around digital tools and, you know, technology in the classroom. And a lot of parents are, you know, wanting to go back to paper and pen and, you know, is that, is that hurting you? And is that kind of. Is that why you're kind of at the lower end of that capture rate or do you see that as an opportunity? Just would love to get your perspective on that.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you very much for the question. It's question I get asked a lot is screen time. And this actually is a significant strength from overall hill, you know, because we had to have such a strong history of being able to deliver education in whatever way a school or student requires. And today we're one of the few organizations, you know, that that is in the world that can deliver everything from AI to paper and vice versa. And what we're seeing, you know, first and foremost is yes, screens, especially for earlier learners. There's a negative correlation between screen time and comprehension. There has been, you know, a lot of studies around this topic and you know, what we're seeing is this idea of really self regulation.
The ability to self regulate when you're on a screen is simply lower in a lot of cases than you don't have as much, I'll say, dwell time on the subjects in paper, we see as much as three to four times more dwell time and rereading of content. That's engagement, engagement for a learner drives comprehension. And so that balance, I think is something that's really people are waking up to. And you know, over the course of the past few years, as social media has really, you know, been driving up a lot more screen time, this has become an increasing focus. And we're seeing a lot of schools that are banning screens right now, you know, in the classroom, or should say mobile phones as an example. I think we're up to over 30 states in that space. And so distraction is real. Comprehension, lack of comprehension is real when there's more screens.
Now with that being said, there is a place and a time for screens. You know, when I take something like our Emerge product, as I mentioned, you know, we are down at roughly about 7% or 20 minutes per week of screen time for Merge. It was one of the most important questions that was asked in Seattle by the board when they were deciding to adopt our product. What screens are really good at is actually assessment. And so you take a product like our Alex product for algebra, within 25 questions, we can tell you precisely the 500 skills that a student needs to have, how many they have with just 25 questions. And so as an organization, we've invested. We have third party that assess how we do, you know, how we develop our curriculum and also how we deliver. We have school boards that evaluate our outcomes and then we also do a tremendous amount of testing.
We have over 7,000 teachers in the network and over 2,000 students that we use when we are, you know, we use for testing that we tap into that network before we release a product. And so McGraw Hill is one of these rare companies that can start all the way at kindergarten with paper and workbooks and reading passages on paper, move into bite size assessments and then all the way up into learning tools, studies, tools like sharpen up in higher education and even things like clinical reasoning where we're simulating parents up in the medical field.
So we have maybe one of the most, the widest and most diverse ways of delivering reading, I'm sorry, learning. And it really is a strength that's
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
unmatched, I would say. And faisa, just to reiterate, should that movement strengthen, we see that as a benefit to us and it should increase our capture rate over time. Understood. And then if I can just follow up on capital allocation and your expectations for cash flow generation in 2027, that would be. I know you announced a new buyback, so just any more color there would be helpful. Sure. You know, so I'd say we're being consistent with a disciplined approach as we think about our capital allocation. And I've always said the first place we deploy capital is on our organic internal opportunities. Those have the greatest roi. And then we take that excess surplus cash flow and determine where do we place it.
We put it into deleveraging, which we've demonstrated last year with 646 million of pay down and our commitment to the two to two and a half times we remain committed to that and we're going to continue to, as we demonstrated, to pay down and then we balance that with M and A and the funnel looks really good. As I look at a couple opportunities, as Philip and I just yesterday, we think there's some meaningful acceleration of our funnel, of our product development funnel. We think there's near adjacent products that we can acquire into. So I'm optimistic we'll get a couple deals done this year and then, you know, ultimately we look at the opportunity for share buyback and we see it as a way to create value for our shareholders.
We have conviction in terms of our long term outlook, the cash generation of the business as well as our board. So we'll balance that. And you see that with the opportunistic open market purchase of 50 million that the board approved. So I would say it remains consistent with that disciplined and balanced approach. And then from a free cash flow perspective, you know, I think you should be looking at the K12 market that really dictates that, you know, cash conversion, you know, 50 to 100% where we sit in that adoption cycle. And given where we see the overall size K12 and 27, we're at the lower end of that range.
Faisa Alway (Equity Analyst)
All right, thank you very much.
Jeff Mueller (Equity Analyst)
Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Mueller with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. As I looked at slide 27, the K12 core purchasing schedules by year, can you give us any sense of how ELA as a percentage of mix evolves by year and then just within math, any initiatives or adjustments that you can talk to to improve the capture rate? Thank you.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Sure. ELA becomes more meaningful as we move on. And I think that also not just as, as we see California ela, but if you look in that lighter gray bar section, as we see that super cycle being rolled out, ELA becomes a bigger component. And to highlight for us, that's 80, you know, that's been 40% of our revenue. So, you know, we see that becoming more and more important over time. As I highlighted, you know, as we've said before, 80% of the California math opportunity remains. And so the overall overall opportunity stays about the same size, about a billion dollar market with 20% of that being called in the first year.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
But what are you doing to improve your capture rate? I get that there's still a lot of opportunity, but it sounds like your capture rate for California mask is also lower than you expected. So I guess what are the messaging or curriculum or tech adjustments or just how are you going to improve it in California? There's a number of. There's a number. As I mentioned at the start, there's a number of techniques for teaching math. I'll give you an example.
Open inquiry is one technique where you can talk about walking into a pizza shop and needing to be able to serve enough people with pieces of pizza. And then there's kind of a linear or spiral approach where you start off talking about fractions and then you really explain fractions and then you work your way into inquiry. The market is very fragmented in California. It's very fragmented around the world right now about how we teach math. In the very first year, what we've seen is that There were approximately 26 different organizations that were bidding on California math, and it really represented the wide variety of ways that you can teach math. And so districts, we watched a lot of districts push off decisions because there was so much confusion and there was not necessarily consensus of the school board level or among the teachers about which tool was Going to represent the way that they wanted to represent their pedagogy. And so while seeing that, we also were able to get a lot of feedback around, you know, some of the materials that we had just rolled out. We had accelerated our California math program.
I think I also mentioned that over the past, I'd call it 12 to 18 months, we have produced more curriculum than we ever have in our history, with some of the biggest programs rolling out things like California math as well as our ELA program, all of simultaneously also having to support multi. Multilingual. And so with that being the case when we rolled out the product, we've been getting feedback among the districts that have been selected us and also the districts that haven't selected us.
And we're quickly responding to all of that feedback. We're really making sure we're accentuating, you know, if a district wants open inquiry, we're accentuating it even more. If a district does not want open inquiry, we can accentuate it slightly less the way that we deliver our, you know, the materials. And so we're in. And this is one of the strengths that I think that really should dwell on with McGraw Hill. We're one of the few companies in the world that can actually deliver pedagogy down to the zip code or down to the professor level.
And our ability to be able to respond at scale multilingual offerings with pedagogy, with materials, whether or not it's paper or whether or not it's screen time. We're one of the few companies that can to respond, respond at this scale. And so we're in the process of demonstrating our strength as an organization and our strength of understanding the local requirements and then also our ability to be able to produce them. And we're in that process as 80% is still to be decided.
You know, our teams are out working with the districts that haven't decided. You know, we're making sure that our materials are reflective of the exact pedagogy that the local districts need. And so we're excited for the next selling year.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
And Jeff, I'll highlight we've demonstrated the ability to course correct in the past. We saw that in Florida social studies a few years back where we had our first year was slightly below expectations and we had a nice recovery in year two. So we're following that same playbook. And we've done this before.
Jeff Mueller (Equity Analyst)
Got it. Thank you.
Tony Kaplan (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Tony Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks so much. You know, I Feel like there's a few different factors here that are leading to the lower win rates and capture rates. The California delay, the Texas Blue Bonnet, and then, you know, I guess, and maybe there are others, but I guess when you think about it, which is the most meaningful, which is the one easiest to sort of see a reversal of how long does it take, you know, for a state to maybe make a decision and then sort of, you know, turn around and say like, oh, well, maybe we should be trying something else instead, you know, or does it just have to play out?
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Well, you know, interestingly, what we are seeing is the reaction from teachers in Texas and the response to our product has been very positive. And we're also seeing shorter duration contracts, which means that they're still in that experimentation mode. So we think that that market can turn around the next couple years. Fortunately, California still has 80% of the market to be called, so we still have opportunity to course correct. So we think those are two areas. But I do want to highlight the strength that we are seeing in open territory. We're gaining share and we're winning there as well as our supplemental intervention. So, you know, I really want us to have a balanced view there and then the short term opportunity to course correct in both Texas and California.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Ma, I would add in, you know, one of the interesting things, I would just add one minor thing, you know, that I think that some of the, some of the districts are starting to work with tools and very quickly realizing they've got diverse learning individuals inside of their, inside of their district. And the lack of accessibility in some cases, whether or not it's with OER materials or whether or not it's in particular tools, our investment in accessibility is becoming an increasing strength in how we deliver. And so we're seeing organizations that are turning around and saying we didn't realize this tool or this curriculum didn't have the accessibility that we required.
And so to Bob's point, you know, we see one to two year contracts that to us feels like experimentation. And we're going to, we're going to continue to deliver, you know, right materials for the right types of learners.
Tony Kaplan (Equity Analyst)
Great. And then Looking at slide 27, we've got our rulers out trying to do the estimates of the market for the coming years, just given no numbers there. So my main question is it looks like in 28, all other states outside of the big three, pretty flattish with 26 and 27 and maybe even 29, a little flattish as well, a little bit of improvement. But like, but I guess I think we were expecting before maybe a little bit of an improvement in those other states in 28, 29, and just wondering if there's a reset of expectation for those states as well.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks. No, there was no meaningful reset. Any meaningful change. The most notable change we highlighted was that the 100 million, primarily in California math, moved from 27 into 28. But no major change.
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, the only area that we're watching closely as we head into this buying season is the ELA market. As mentioned, literacy is a greater focus than ever in the United States. And so we're watching that and we'll convey that what we see.
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
And Tony, you know, just to, just to reiterate, we're in a growing market. We have clear visibility. This is a predictable market. We see that growth in the near and medium term and that really excites us.
Tony Kaplan (Equity Analyst)
Thank you.
Shlomo Rosenbaum (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Hey, Bob, I just want to start with the housekeeping one. I wasn't clear as to how to think about the levered free cash flow expectation for this year. I think you said something like unlevered 400 million. Should I take 400 minus 180 to get to 220? Which sounds a little bit light given the lack of one time items.
But then I thought there were a lot more like one time items due to the ipo that we should in theory see a better free cash flow than that in fiscal year 27. Am I not thinking about that properly?
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
So you are. That's consistent with how you should be thinking about it.
Shlomo Rosenbaum (Equity Analyst)
Okay, so 220 is a levered free cash flow that we should be thinking about? Yes. Correct. Okay, then just a little bit broader. I just wanted to ask in the context of AI and the protections that you have around your data, there's that article where the educational curriculum providers are suing Meta for training the LLM on, you know, on your data and copyright infringement. Is that like a longer term issue for you guys, in your opinion, in terms of the data actually being out there and it's actually accessible, so it's not like behind certain paywalls that other, you know, other information services providers have to, you know, have a little bit more protection on that side. How should we just think about that kind of lawsuit in the context of, you know, your ability to control your data?
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Great question. You know, I want to really be clear about this. Our position first and Foremost is that great AI and copyrights are not counter to each other. You can, you can enforce and support copyrights and respect copyrights and have great AI for the world. And you know, the Agentic technologies I talked about are really, really great examples technically of being able to do this now. Yes, our content has been and always will be behind paywalls and the cases where it's not, it's content that's been pirated, that was sitting out on pirate sites, you know, and we are very active in litigation against pirate websites. We really protect our content. And when the content gets out there, we expect that other organizations are not going to use our, use pirated content, basically illegal content.
And so part of that lawsuit that we were really clear about is that, you know, we, we intend to continue to protect our content. There are many, many, many ways for organizations, large AI companies, to license content. There's been great examples at Getty Images and New York Times. When I was at Vimeo, we were approached in the early days, potentially delights about using all of our content, the video content, 8 billion minutes of video we had. And we turned down the organizations originally. And then by the end of my tenure at Vimeo, people were coming back and asking just for videos of beach balls to make sure their video model bounced. The beach balls, right? Or the hands clapped properly. So there's a well established market for licensing content to train AI models. It's both technically very easy and financially well established business models for this.
You know, one of the things that we were stating in that meta lawsuit is that we really want AI companies to use these legal and technically simple ways of licensing content. The work we're doing with Agentic we're really excited about. And quite frankly, even if existing content might be out on pirate sites, humans, knowledge and the way to teach changes every single day. And so we intend to be this great place that takes human knowledge, turns it into a pedagogy, pedagogy and delivers it the way you need to. And with Agentic technologies, we can meter that we can secure it. We can build an interface, we can audit to make sure that we're charging the right way. We can actually explain, you know, to every student or every professor how much content is being used at any point in time.
And so the technology models are evolving quickly. We're going to be at the forefront of that in the knowledge economy. And we're going to be really, really, I'll say, aggressive about making sure we're protecting, ensuring that AI does that. AI companies, you know, are working with us and all publishers in the right way.
Henry Hayden (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Henry Hayden with Rothschild and co Redburn. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi everyone, thanks for having me on. I firstly wanted to continue the conversation around kind of agent curriculum, MCP integration and licensing. Agree this feels like a shift in kind of your philosophy around ownership of the user interface, content distribution. So just curious as to any incremental color you could give around that.
And then on the Agentix side, as we think about kind of the ramp up of additional partnerships, how should we think about what cost that would present to end customers and what the margin profile for McGraw Hill looks like?
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, we're really. Thanks very much for the question. So on the Agentix side, we live in a trusted position with professors, with students, with teachers and with administrations. You know, when we take something like Sharpen, our Sharpen tool not just takes content and delivers podcasts or quizzes, but we also are turning around and able to tell the professor what content's being, you know, engaged with. Professors are going to be able to deliver, I'll call it playlists of content. And so it's not just a one sided where we're serving to an AI agent. In some cases we are the AI agent the student trusts or that the professor trusts. And so we intend to really, really support that trust and be an agent that the student and the teacher from a first party perspective uses.
Now in some cases those students or those professors want us to join you know, chorus of agents or course of knowledge. And so this ability with to be MCP to provide our content via MCP is really exciting. You know, one of the organizations wants to use us with Notebook LM with Google Notebook lm, but they want a trusted source because today if you just use AI, it can hallucinate on all kinds of content or quite frankly it can hallucinate, it can come off, it can bring answers out that the professor hasn't even introduced into the class.
You know, there's a right time to introduce the chemistry behind photosynthesis and it's not the start of a class or give you the full answer before a student really to tries truly understands biology and the chemistry behind it. And so our ability to be able to do that in a pedagogical way is also part of mcp. And so this is an evolution. It's not a big shift from anything that we've already been doing. And what's exciting about it is again MCP gives us an ability to be able to monitor, to be able to interface. We're excited about the ability to be able to be a continuing source of education. You know, I, like many people, actually carried my textbooks with me throughout, you know, really early years as a computer scientist. I was referring back to them for a long time.
I think you'll hear that from, you know, legal scholars as well as accounting scholars, medical scholars. There's a lot of reference that you do, especially early in your career and quite frankly in some cases even beyond your early years. Now when I think about kind of where this goes longer term, you know, I do think that this is an exciting opportunity for us, as I mentioned, to expand TAM in the marketplace. And I do think that, you know, pricing is going to evolve pretty dramatically. The area that I'm really, really excited about. I think that there's a misnomer and I described this to a lot of people. We are in the era of big models. These are, I call this peak inefficiency in AI. I don't think in the history of computing I've ever seen that we need to literally use the United States GDP to train an algorithm.
It's not a good business model right now, I would tell you, and what we're able to do, you know, I'm a big believer that we're going to move into an era of smaller models, more purpose built models that are much more efficient, can be much more reactive, can actually hit the performance requirements that are necessary, and also lower cost. You know, as an example, we'll take our agentic technologies where we're creating vectorizations of our actual content coupled together with a small lightweight mock, and we'll get a fraction of the cost of having to run things through a large model. And that's where we expect it to move to. You know, I really encourage you to look at technologies like knowledge graphs where organizations are getting much better performance.
Especially, you know, there's one example in the financial services industry where it's literally 1% of the cost of a large model and it's achieving way higher than, you know, expertise level than the big models. And so, so this idea of cost, what we do inside of McGraw Hill is that we use the right model along with our vectorized content, and that we deliver the right question, the right content at the right time at a much lower cost than throwing all the content in with, I call it every one of Taylor Swift songs and all the F1 drivers and the predictions for the Knicks, you know, Burr series to have to wade through just to be able to describe what photosynthesis is.
So cost is high with big models, purpose built, lightweight models combined together with vectorized content I think is going to be a way more efficient delivery mechanism. And then we do the cost management on behalf of the student as well as the university. And our buying capacity for AI is much higher than univers, than most universities and certainly students. And so we also think we have an opportunity to be able to really be a, you know, I'll say a more effective, more cost effective and more pedagogically effective solution.
Henry Hayden (Equity Analyst)
That's very helpful, thank you. And then my follow up question was just a quick one on K through 12. Have you seen any kind of. You mentioned that your discussions around supplemental intervention, you think it's bottomed out? How is the tenor of those sales discussions going? Like as you move through the renewal cycle, are you seeing any pressure on funding kind of impacting you on a go forward basis?
Bob Salman (Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
We have not seen any pressure from funding. As we've highlighted. We know that learning loss is real. What we have experienced is the connected classroom that is resonating. There's too many tools, there's tool fatigue. And so as we're out in the market, being able to sell core and supplemental intervention solutions together has really resonated.
Henry Hayden (Equity Analyst)
Very helpful. Thank you.
Josh Chan (Equity Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Josh Chan with ubs. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. I'm just going to stick to one just for the sake of time. So I guess I know Texas is a completely different story, so maybe set that aside. But if you look at the California math dynamic, how do you think about that issue being strictly limited to California and strictly limited to math? I guess,
Philip Moyer (President and Chief Executive Officer)
you know, I think I would say the fragmentation is not limited to California or just to math. When you get into teaching social studies in the United States and on a global basis, you know, extraordinarily fragmented science as well. So there is fragmentation in the education industry. And I'll say again, you know, one of the most exciting things since I've arrived here is understanding that we're one of the few companies in the world that can respond to this fragmentation at scale. And to respond to it, you have to understand it.
First of all, you've got to understand down at the zip code level, the teacher level, even the professor level inside of the higher ed, you know, in the medical industry, you know, in some countries we teach body parts. In other cases we teach they, we teach symptoms. In some cases we're teaching full systems. So fragmentation in education is, I'LL say it's been around as long as I would say education has been around. What I would say, you know, is that as we look across the spectrum, our ability to be able to respond to that is unmatched. And so I look at this opportunity in California as another opportunity.
The same way that we've responded and, you know, demonstrated our ability to respond to the different ways of teaching science, you're seeing us in real time be able to respond to California with the strength of McGraw Hill's relationships, our tools, our variety of distribution means, and then also just our ability to be able to do different pedagogies for different students. So it's our strength.
Josh Chan (Equity Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you for that. Kyler.
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