Parents and Students March on Pearson Headquarters

Thanks to Lindsey Christ of NY1 for the video:



And here is a recent blog post from Diane Ravitch, with a link to her Tuesday commentary and a great comment by one of her readers:

On Tuesday, I posted a blog at Bridging Differences (Education Week) called “The Pearsonizing of the American Mind.”

The title was a reference to Allan Bloom’s bestselling book of the 1980s, The Closing of the American Mind. His book referred to the insidious ways that popular culture interferes with the goals of liberal education. My article described the ways in which one giant corporation was taking control of the education “industry,” through testing, online instruction, ownership of the GED program, online charter schools, and proprietary control of instructional materials for the Common Core. Truly, the reach of Pearson across all of American education is astonishing.

As often happens, I got many wonderful comments. This one came from a regular reader who (from the moniker) is a chemistry teacher:

Yes, our focus has to be on the “locus of control”. Pearson and Gates goal in testing isn’t to improve education outcomes; it’s to increase market control. For corporate reformers, holding districts, schools, teachers and children (yes, children!) “accountable” means having the legal power to take control of them, and run them for their own purposes. Yes, we’ve politically given actual legal authority over our children’s minds to the same monopolists who crashed our finance system. The price isn’t just the damage of the testing, though. Now that they own our public schools, the corporatists have removed many unprofitable costs. Brick and mortar buildings, breathing teachers, playgrounds and libraries, are now all hopelessly out of the reach of many children. With the advent of the common core and the “revolution” of online delivery of proprietary learning materials, our children can sit home in front of a screen, not even moving around the room, and be assessed by computer programs aligned to the one true Core. We’ll have Pearsonized their minds, their lives, and their bodies. Here is one true example of the cost we contemplate: “She’s pretty typical. She is a very sedentary child, has been for a long time, really has no experience with activity, no way to think about being active. She’s relatively socially isolated, doesn’t really have very many social opportunities. She’s homeschooled. She has a number of medical problems, in addition to her diabetes.” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june12/diabetes_06-06.html

We must worry about what we are doing to our children, our society and our future as we drift along into a world we did not make and do not want.

Join the National Boycott Against Pearson

Share widely.  From United Opt Out:

Pearson, ALEC, and the Brave New (Corporate) World:  Stand Up to Pearson Now!

Supporters of Public Education,

The curtain has been pulled aside recently from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), exposing the seedy underbelly of our democracy. Organizations like ALEC circumvent the democratic process in favor of corporations. Financial resources are used to influence public officials and provide model legislation meant to easily pass through state houses of governance. Recent examples include infamous “Stand Your Ground” laws and others that seek to limit the voting rights of marginalized populations. Education reform legislation is also part of ALEC’s agenda, with substantial sponsorship from corporate funds to divert the flow of valuable taxpayer dollars away from public schools.

ALEC-inspired advocacy for public education reform typically follows a path to privatization; that is, viewing educational practices vis-à-vis economic and capitalist principles. Strict school choice models, vouchers, private charter management organizations, and the erosion of collective bargaining rights are all examples of the economic management of public education. As opposed to a valuable public good, certain entities prevalent in the education reform debate are forcing schools to motivate themselves by profit and competition. What it means to be an educated person (e.g., college and career ready), what is important to teach (e.g., common standards), and how success is measured (e.g., standardized tests) are currently under significant transformation without the thorough vetting via democratic processes. And with the frustration and confusion ensuing from rapid developments occurring behind closed doors, outside the public spotlight of democracy, there are large corporations conveniently present to sell us products that will solve all of our problems.

Pearson is one such entity that as of late always seems to be at the right place and precisely at the right time. In other words, just as new legislation is passed, as new educational mandates are set, Pearson is suddenly able to provide the legions of educators and school systems clamoring for some kind of answer with just the right product. How can this be? In recent years, this once relatively small publishing house turned itself into a massive provider of a range of educational products, from traditional print materials for the K-12 sector, higher education resources and technology solutions for public school systems. It is one thing to have various products to sell and to allow the marketplace to judge their success or failure. It is another matter to reorganize the rules so that Pearson products are all one needs to buy to satisfy a range of emerging Federal and State education mandates.

For better or for worse, education reform in the United States is largely controlled by legislation. It appears then that Pearson is successfully implementing a two-pronged approach: grease the democratic process in their favor so that certain rules must be followed and from the other side perfectly match their own products so they have exactly what can be bought to satisfy those requirements. Pearson, through connections to ALEC, has become the dominant provider of education resources and services in the K-12 and post-secondary markets. The following are some of the affiliations that made this perfect alignment possible:

• Pearson acquired the Connections Academy, whose co-founder and executive VP is Mickey Revenaugh, also the co-chair of the ALEC Education Task Force. Both Connections and the for-profit University of Phoenix have been or are currently subsidiaries of the Apollo Management Group. The CEO of AMG, Charles (Chaz) Edelstein, was Managing Director of Credit Suisse and Head of the Global Services group within the Investment Banking division, based in Chicago. He is also on the Board of Directors for Teach for America, which is a provider of temporary and inexperienced teachers and also frequently associated with corporate education reform. One prominent name in this regard is TFA alum Michelle Rhee, the failed former Chancellor of DC public schools.

• According to Pearson’s website: “Pearson Education and the University of Phoenix, the largest private (for-profit) university in the United States announced a partnership which will accelerate the University’s move to convert its course materials to electronic delivery.” [emphasis added]. As such, Pearson will certainly provide the materials and the mode of transmission. It must also be stated here that many for-profit universities have been under investigation for student loan fraud and unethical recruitment practices.

• America’s Choice was also recently acquired by Pearson. This organization is directly associated with the Lumina, Broad, and Walton Foundations, all active members of ALEC. They each promote so-called “innovations” that appeal to the corporate and for-profit mindset.

• Bryan Cave, LLP is the lobbying firm for Pearson. Edward Koch is currently one of the partners at Bryan Cave. Edward Koch sits conveniently and comfortably on the board for StudentsFirst NY, a branch of the national initiative StudentsFirst, which is the brainchild of failed former Chancellor of DC public schools Michelle Rhee. It must also be stated that Rhee’s tenure is under a dark cloud of investigation for rampant test cheating and tampering in the district.

• Pearson is contracted with Stanford University to deliver the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) to more than 25 participating states. According to Pearson’s website, “TPA is led by Stanford University, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and Pearson.”Furthermore, “Pearson’s electronic portfolio management system will support candidates, institutions of higher education, and state educational agencies by providing registration and account management services,submission of the portfolio for scoring and results reporting.”[emphasis added]. Pearson provides the administrative management skills and broad-based technology and delivery systems that will support the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) and bring it to a national scale. Stanford University’s Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) selected Pearson to provide these needed services for the TPA. Let it be known that the U.S. Dept. of Ed. is currently considering teacher preparation programs to be evaluated based on accountability measures similar to public schools.

• Sir Michael Barber is the current Chief Education Advisor for Pearson. It is no secret that Mr. Barber is a powerful advocate for the free-market approach to education, including union busting, merit pay, and turning public schools into privately run charters.

• Pearson contracts with Achieve to manage the PARCC assessments. Achieve is funded by Lumina, State Farm (both members of ALEC) andThe Alliance for Excellence in Education (AEE). AEE chairman Bob Wise is a regular contributor to and participant with the ALEC educational agenda. Moreover, PARCC awarded Pearson a contract in January to develop a new Technology Readiness Tool, which will support state education agencies to evaluate and determine needed technology and infrastructure upgrades for the new online assessments. Pray tell, who will sell those upgrades?

• The Tucker Capital Corporation acted as exclusive advisor to The American Council on Education (ACE) and Pearson on the creation of a groundbreaking new business that will drive the future direction, design, and delivery of the GED testing program.

• The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) partners with a whole cast of other organizations that promote a corporate, anti-public education reform agenda. CCSSO Central “partners” include (among others) McGraw-Hill and Pearson. CCSSO Director Tom Luna works closely withJeb Bush, whose associations with ALEC and corporate-reform are too numerous to mention.

• GradNation is a special project of America’s Promise Alliance, sponsored by Alma and Gen. Colin Powell. Grad Nation sponsors include State Farm (ALEC), the Walton Foundation (ALEC), AT&T (on the corporate board of ALEC), The Boeing Company (ALEC), the Pearson Foundation and Philip Morris USA (ALEC). The GradNation Summit list of presenters reads like an ALEC yearbook.

• Gen. Colin Powell sits on the Board of Directors for The Council for Foreign Relations, which issued an “Education Reform and National Security” report (co-chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice, directed by Julia Levy). The report states, among other things, that: “The Task Force believes that though revamping expectations for students should be a state-led effort, a broader coalition … including the defense community, businesses leaders, the U.S. Department of Education, and others … also has a meaningful role to play in monitoring and supporting implementation and creating incentives to motivate states to adopt high expectations. The Defense Policy Board, which advises the secretary of defense, and other leaders from the public and private sectors should evaluate the learning standards of education in America and periodically assess whether what and how students are learning is sufficiently rigorous to protect the country’s national security interests.”[emphasis added].

• According to Susan Ohanian: “In the introduction to the Education Reform and National Security report, Julia Levy, Project Director, thanks ‘the several people who met with and briefed the Task Force group including the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mary Cullinane formerly of Microsoft [Philadelphia School of the Future] [now Vice President of Corporate and Social Responsibility for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], Sir Michael Barber of Pearson and David Coleman of Student Achievement Partners …’ They were briefed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, andPearson.”

• Pearson has partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a series of digital instructional resources. In November 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave ALEC $376,635 to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement (the Gates Foundation recently withdrew its support for ALEC under the heat of public pressure). However, their billions of dollars still flow to other far-reaching organizations dedicated to dismantling public education.

• The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards is a private-sector member of ALEC. Bob Wise (Chairman, of NBPTS) and Alliance for Excellent Education presented on “National Board’s Fund Initiative to Grow Great Schools” at the Education Task Force Meeting at the 2011 ALEC annual picnic. According to the NBPTS website, they “announced that it has awarded Pearson a five-year contract for the period 2009-2013 to develop, administer and score its National Board Certification program for accomplished teachers. Pearson will collaborate with NBPTS to manage its advanced teacher certification program in 25 certificate areas that span 16 subject areas.”

• Pearson has also acquired partnerships with companies to deliver PARCC, SAT testing, GED testing, and was the central player (through Achieve) in the design of the National Common Core Standards. The GED Testing Service, while wholly owned by the American Council for Education, entered into a joint venture with Pearson to transform the GED for some 40 million adult Americans (one in five adults) lacking a high school diploma. This is an entirely new market.

Even with all of Pearson’s efforts, they are not the only game in town. McGraw-Hill is another publisher forging similar connections and making money hand over fist due to NCLB-mandated reading programs like Open Court and SRA Reading Mastery. Of course, after billions spent on Reading First and the McGraw-Hill materials, the federally funded evaluation of the program showed no increase in reading comprehension by third grade. McGraw-Hill is also one of the biggest test publishers in the U.S. and publishes the CTBS, the central competitor to Pearson’s illustrious SAT-10.

The legislation forced upon states to adopt the curriculum (i.e., the Common Core) and its required testing measures (i.e., PARCC) essentially eliminates the possibility of consumer choice (supposedly a key concept in free market ideology) and requires that taxpayer dollars for education be handed over to Pearson and McGraw-Hill as the sole providers of nearly all educational resources available to the schools. It is frightening that Pearson, profiting billions from public education, is simultaneously operated by and sponsors organizations that promote the destruction of public education. It is essentially forcing the public to pay for the demise of its own education system.

It is possible that Pearson and its allies will deny and attempt to refute the information bulleted above. Perhaps the magnitude of their efforts will project the magnitude of their guilt. Whatever the semantics here, if a connection is really an association, if ownership is actually sponsorship, or if partnership actually means membership, it is interesting and coincidental that the above cast of characters constantly find themselves associated with each other. Additionally, the common friend to all seems to be Pearson.

If Pearson is truly interested in profit, as all corporations typically are, then consumer pressure is the best way to be heard. We at United Opt Out National are calling on everyone to take a stand against Pearson by doing any or all of the following:

• Refuse to buy their materials or adopt them in your courses or for personal use.
• Bring these concerns to local PTAs, school boards and libraries.
• If required to use Pearson products due to professional obligations, do so under public protest.
• Promote the use of ACT rather than SAT, as SAT is a Pearson product.
• Inform Pearson of your actions.
• If you are in higher education, discuss your concerns with your local Pearson representative, informing them that for these purposes you are not going to adopt their materials in any of your courses.

Raise public awareness so the brakes can be put on this madness. Please see our sample letter at the end of this research document, which you are encouraged to share so that others may refuse Pearson products.

Sincerely,

United Opt Out National

Pearson: The BP of Corporate Testing

When Pearson's CEO, Peter Jovanovich, had a look at Bush's NCLB plan early in 2001, he quipped: "This almost reads like our business plan." 


Actually, it was McGraw-Hill's business plan, but now with a new Administration, Pearson is in the driver's seat, even though how it got there is a subject of an emerging investigation in Florida.  


Now they are expressing grave concern and a willingness to pay for damage caused by the spill testing screw-up.  After all, the State needs these scores so they can tell how many economically-disadvantaged children will be repeating grades next year.  From the Palm Beach Post News:

Palm Beach County School District administrators will help school officials directly mail FCAT scores to more than 80,000 students' homes as soon as the results are released by the Florida Department of Education, the district said late today .

"We want to take the burden off the schools and get the test scores out as quickly and efficiently as possible," Marc Baron, chief of performance accountability, said in a statement.

The district said NCS Pearson, the state contractor responsible for the weeks-long delay in releasing the results, has agreed to pay the cost of the mailings in Palm Beach County and statewide.

The results should by out by June 28, according to a promise that Pearson President Doug Kubach made Tuesday at a State Board of Education meeting in Orlando. The state last summer awarded Pearson a four-year, $254 million contract to administer and score the test.

From McGraw-Hill's Kelly Girls to Pearson's No Girls at All

Four years ago today I posted on the developing scandal involving McGraw-Hill's hiring of Kelly part-timers and under-qualified scorers for Florida's FCAT.  Well, now that Pearson has the $254,000,000 contract with the State of Florida, they seem to cutting corners as well. 

Reading the memo that Valerie Strauss posted from Chancellor Haithcock to public school superintendents, it is clear that Pearson does not have enough people on the job, which is the reason for the unprecedented delays in the test scores that shape everything educational in Florida.  I have clipped the relevant section from Valerie's posting:

. . . despite confidence in this year’s results, I am sure you remain curious about the cause of the delays we have been experiencing. These difficulties are directly related to Pearson’s database technology, which handles student demographic information.

Florida’s assessment process involves a great number of validation procedures, beyond the validation of students’ scores, which are designed to ensure that information in each student’s assessment record is complete and accurate. During the scanning and scoring process, database files are created by the contractor from the tests received from school districts. These files are matched against a Pre-Identification file, which contains student information reported to the contractor directly from districts prior to the testing administration. The student information contained in the test results files must match up perfectly with each district’s Pre-Identification file so that you can seamlessly integrate the test results into your student information database. It is in this file matching that our delays are occurring. Each apparent mismatch must be researched, resolved and rechecked in order to ensure accuracy. While this checking and rechecking process is clearly outlined in Pearson’s scope of work, internal systems issues within their database are causing delays in the resolution of these matches.

Additionally, I realize that you may have particular concerns with this year’s FCAT Writing results as they have been delayed the longest. The extended delay on these scores is the result of the additional validation review by Buros and the database issues mentioned above. Again, we remain fully confident in the results of this FCAT Writing administration.

I am also aware that some of you remain apprehensive about how the FCAT writing results will translate into the school grading formula. Due to the testing administration change from two essay scorers to one, a score of 3.5 is no longer possible, which necessitates a slight change in grade calculations.. . .

Not enough staff to handle the mismatches and a reduction in force from two scorers to one.  That's what $254 million gets you from the corporate swindlers.

Pearson Turns Montgomery County Into Corporate Curriculum Showroom

There was good reason for educational publishing and testing corporations to celebrate Bush's arrival in Washington. After looking over the NCLB plan, Chief executive of Pearson Education, Peter Jovanovich, quipped to Education Week in February, 2001: "This almost reads like our business plan."  

Now some might think that Pearson would be nervous with a new Administration (D), but we know that money is entirely bipartisan, so there is nothing to worry about for Pearson stockholders.  In fact, one of the authors of NCLB, Sandy Kress, is an avowed "Democrat," and he now lobbies for Pearson.  The other connections between Pearson and the Obamaites await the investigative reporting that the education media is entirely immune to.

The connections to today's ED are already producing results.  Last year, for instance, Pearson's profits were up by 46 percent, and this year things will only get better for Pearson.  I have not seen the details, but I suspect the new deal that they have signed with the whores prostisuits who run Montgomery County Schools will include something like the "Bright Beginnings" curriculum and testing for PreK and K, which was developed by former Bush ED appointee, Dr. Susan Neuman.

And with the new curriculum aligned, somehow simultaneously, with the new national standards that have just been announced, too, this will make Pearson the frontrunner for developing the national test to go with the national curriculum, both of which will surely make all American children in the corporate welfare schools equally stupid prepared to compete in the global economy.

Some details here from Valerie Strauss on the new sweet deal between Pearson and MCPS:

Some may call Project North Star a pretty smart deal. I would use less flattering words to describe the deal into which Montgomery County Public Schools just entered with the world’s largest for-profit educational publishing company to nationally “brand” a newly created K-5 curriculum.

Under the arrangement, the school district will effectively turn its classrooms into Pearson Education Inc. showrooms, and sell to a private company the right to trade on the system’s high-achieving reputation, built over years with public funds, to enrich itself.

Other than that, there’s nothing wrong with the contract.

Oh, wait. Yes, there is.

Under the contract, Pearson will provide the county with up to $4.5 million in development funds -- one half of which will be “considered an advance against future royalties.” So the total is really something like $2.25 million to hire people to collaborate on a new curriculum to be aligned with the newly released Common Core standards for math and English language arts.

The school system, which has applied for a federal grant to obtain public money for this enterprise, would get a maximum 3 percent of royalties on domestic sales beyond that amount, my colleague Michael Birnbaum wrote in a Post news article.

The contract hails the arrangement as an easy way for the cash-strapped school system to make money, especially since it was already planning to revamp its curriculum and now will get outside funding.

With the enormous budget cuts school districts are facing, a desperate desire to find a funding source somewhere, anywhere, is understandable. Almost.

Selling its name and reputation to a for-profit company has serious, unfortunate consequences. It allows business concerns to dictate the two-year curriculum development schedule; being the first, or one of the first, to market a curriculum aligned with new standards adopted by many states could be quite a lucrative business move.

And it gives Pearson customers the right to come into MCPS classrooms to look at the product in action - effectively making staff and students salespeople. Lovely.

Meanwhile, the contract gives Pearson the right to change some of the materials for its national edition of the curriculum (the county is allowed to object, but only so long as its objections are not unreasonable, according to the contract). But it would still be marketed as a MCPS curriculum.

Nobody but Pearson and Montgomery County would know the difference, which is a problem only when you consider that buyers presumably want a curriculum used in one of the highest-achieving districts in the country, not a Pearson-altered strain. . . .

"We're at the mercy of the testing company."

For a bit of history on these corporate bloodsuckers, see this piece by Bloomberg News called How Testing Companies Fail Your Kids.

The most recent failure from the St. Augustine Record:

A month-long delay in getting test results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test will hold up everything from hiring teachers to placing students to determining courses offered in St. Johns County schools.

"There's nothing we can do. We're at the mercy of the testing company," Superintendent Joe Joyner said Monday. "We can't do anything until they provide us with results."

The testing company is NCS Pearson, which received a $254 million contract, good through 2013, from the Florida Department of Education. Pearson is administering and scoring the exams on paper and piloting the state's new computer-based testing.

According to an Associated Press story, the firm has had problems with exams in other states including South Carolina, Arkansas and Wyoming. They settled a class action lawsuit with the College Board after 4,400 students were underscored on the SAT in 2006.

Late Friday, Florida school districts were told there would be a delay in the delivery of the scores.

Scores were already running late, but until Friday districts expected them before the end of the school year. Now they won't get them until sometime around the end of June, according to state education officials. . . .

School Turnarounds in VA, DE

It was back in January of 2009 that Pearson announced they'd enter the "turnaround" business with a new branch, Pearson K-12 Solutions. Leading the way for this new outfit would be none other than Scott Drossos, a former Executive VP and Chief Development Officer for EdisonLearning.

When Virginia announced $59.8 million in federal funding for school turnarounds, both Pearson K-12 Solutions and EdisonLearning made the list of "turnaround providers" even though one company has been around for a little over a year and the other company has a rather spotty track record, to put it politely.

Over at Kilroy's Delaware, Nancy Willing reports that Pearson K-12 Solutions will be taking over a charter school, the Moyer Academy, within the next few months. No word yet if this is official - but it sure seems plausible given Delaware's participation is the Mass Insight experiment in turnarounds.