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.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pearson is also wading in to the certification of teachers and evaluating teacher ed programs through the TPA. Somehow the material in Pearson published Teacher Ed texts magically appears ias questions in the Teacher Ed tests Pearson publishes. I wonder how that happened!
Read all about it! (Or–read it & weep/laugh.) A good beginning-of-summer book for y’all would be Todd Farley’s 2009 paperback, Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. Todd worked for several companies, & I’ve conversed w/him since I read the book. Yup, Pearson IS the worst–back then (after it purchased NCS), AND now. But–read for yourself: it’s a quick 242 page read, & the book is well-written &, in part, hilarious. (People who can’t speak English grading written responses! State administrators changing rubrics so kids will get higher scores! Scoring supervisors erasing scores on previously scored tests!) Read it while you still can.
We are talking about Public Education. High school graduation is a international event, welcoming students into the adult world. Those who are qualified to go into higher education pass into college. Those who for one reason or another head into the workforce are just as important to the national economy. We need mechanics, tailors, bakers and Indian chiefs. Emphasizing a college outcome to public education is like training a house cat to duck hunt.
Public Education is designed to give 99.97% of the population a basic understanding of information they should know to graduate into the adult world.
Every election the children are skillfully held hostage by both parties whose major contributors (Education Products Producers) can not afford to loss billions of dollars in textbook revenues. Private Education also suffers because they are no longer the focus of the textbook writers. Private Education was once the leader in textbook preparation. Individual manuscripts were offered into a free market economy. These textbooks to be evaluated by a free market educational system. As of this date [6/11/..12], herds of hack writers puzzle through unfamiliar materials, to assemble manuscripts more suitable for a magazine rack than a classroom. An avalanche of popular distractions floods into the classroom.
To drive this point home consider technical documents from earlier generations. Students did not need a backpack they often got by with a back pocket. A composition book held student notes, hand copied from bulkier encyclopedia. Today we cut and paste swill, which will be forgotten faster than it will be revised.