Pearson has good lobbyists in Texas. Really really good lobbyists. A reader sent this comment:
“See page 19 TAMSA presentation: $1,178,723,689.00 funneled to Pearson in Texas for high-stakes testing nonsense since 2000.
Source: Center for Education, Rice University
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s a reason to support individualizing children rather than standardizing them http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/. Testing is a big money business, Selling their soul to the devil isn’t the answer
Who benefits?
Big business does. That’s about it.
Great lobbyists has Pearson and even better, no oversight.
The lack of regulation on those TX Pearson dollars means that Pearson consultants do not have to succeed. In many deep-poverty Title I schools these non-experts have authored “remediation” plans that result in test scores going down. But not to worry, no one ever intended to educate those children anyway. It is like a well-endowed shelter-in-place strategy….nothing more. Don’t worry about voter rights because these creatures will insure that our young citizens don’t mature with enough sophistication to participate wisely in their democracy.
So when do these people get brought up on child endangerment charges and/or exploitation!
We need to petition the DOJ for an Anti-Trust action against Pearson: they are by far the biggest pig at the trough and they are sitting on anyone who gets in their way!
How can get this same figure for every State? We need an infographic to summarize the data and the any parent need only see that to see what a waste of $ this has all been. As a parent, I can tell that you that it makes me incredibly mad to see that $ in Texas and I don’t live there.
Context is important. The current Pearson contract is for approximately $90 million per year, which is clearly a lot of money. However, since there are roughly 5 million students in K-12 in Texas that amounts to roughly $18 per student. I assume that not all children are tested and that students receive multiple tests so I am not sure what the real per test cost is. The total K-12 budget in Texas is $47 billion. So this contract amounts to roughly 0.2% of the total K-12 spend in Texas.
Does this mean that the money should be spent on Pearson? No, that depends on the benefits derived by the teachers, the students, the schools and the districts. I don’t know how they use this information in Texas School Districts.
Companies do not decide, in a vacuum, to start making and selling high-stakes tests. Politicians write legislation calling for the tests. Get rid of that legislation, and you get rid of the tests.
Now, once a politician gets it into his or her tiny brain that summative testing is the philosopher’s stone to turn the base metal of children into the gold of productive “21st century” workers for their masters in the oligarchy, everyone starts seeing dollar signs.
The publishing companies do. And so do a LOT of educrats and edupundits–folks who make a living being education experts. I won’t name any names, but I am thinking of one quite famous edupundit who made a name for himself arguing that we should deemphasize summative testing and concentrate, instead, on diagnostic testing and formative testing. He was right about that, of course. But then he saw the dollar signs in the testing legislation. Now he makes big bucks pushing common standards and summative testing. He even redefined the basic terminology in his theory so that it would appear that he had been talking about the virtues of summative testing all along. In other words, he did just as the pigs did in Animal Farm: He turned “All animals are equal” into “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”
Ah, it’s a wicked world. Radix malorum cupiditas est.
At any rate, if we were to convince politicians to can the whole summative testing bit and, instead, to legislate good diagnostics and good formative testing, then the publishing companies would make those instead, and the educrats and edupundits would see that those are where the money is, and this COMPLETE AND UTTER DISASTER of high-stakes summative testing would end.
Better yet, we could pass a national law giving local schools site-based decision-making authority in all of this and calling for the boiling in hot oil of anyone, in the future, who suggests that we do otherwise.
But it’s going to be difficult to undo the summative testing disaster, now, because a lot of powerful and wealthy people in the edubiz have put a lot of investment into creating the high-stakes testing machinery that the legislation called for. And those guys, unlike you, have enough money to buy politicians outright. They have quite a nice collection of politician wind-up toys at the local, state, and federal levels.
Politicians write legislation that takes money from YOU and gives it to the testing companies and the educrats and the edupundits. If you want to change this, you have to get the politicians to change the legislation, and that takes political action. Unions are a good way to exert force on politicians, but alas. . . .
Don’t look for any assistance in that from your teachers’ unions, because they are collaborators with the standards-and-testing machine. Turning to them for help in this fight against the standards-and-testing machine is like turning to the Vichy collaborators for help dealing with the Nazis. Your union leaders will try to smooth things over a bit but won’t take any real action. They got where they are by being operators. They have the collaboration bit down pat.
After this is over, after the test-kids-till-they-scream era is over and everyone sees, clearly, how horrific it was, perhaps we shall hold the collaborators accountable for their actions.
But, a word of advice: scrutinize your edupundits and educrats carefully. It will become very clear which are the collaborators with the top-down, totalitarian standards-and-testing machine. And at every opportunity, resist.
The national standards, BTW, are a step in a strategic plan. They are, as Arne Duncan’s chief of staff has said, a vehicle for “creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.” That is, big box education products, as opposed to ones from small, competing companies. Here’s what the national standards do: They make for the Walmartization of educational materials because, when there is one big market, a few companies can attack that market at that scale and with the economies that scale brings, effectively shutting out new entrants who might compete with them.
Bob: How many standardized tests is the average student actually being asked to take in a school year? Given the numbers in Texas, I cannot see it being more than 1 for each of 4 or 5 subjects.
Bernie I work in Texas. My school has a scantron test every three weeks in all core subjects to keep us on track for “the test”.
Thus last year my kids took approximately48 tests. Each time we were made to go over tbe data and compared to each other publically in a staff meeting. One time we all literally had the same amount of answers right for the same grade (only ten questions on one test) and they were ranking teachers based on 1/100th deviations. It was a absurd. The data is often meaningless as there is one question per se.
All this pre testing wastes time and costs a lot of money in a title one district.
title1texasteacher:
Frankly the problem here is with whomsoever is driving the implementation of this crazy test schedule. Are these Pearson tests or are they designed within the school? Scantron is really rather old technology and hardly fits in with the computer based processes the publishers want to switch to.
It’s not just the standardized tests themselves, Bernie. Schools have been reorganized so that everything else that’s going on is geared toward the tests. So, in addition to the hours spent taking those tests, a third of the school year is spent doing, basically, test prep. And, the high-stakes standardized tests are not the only ones given. Most schools are giving a bunch of diagnostic and practice tests modeled on the standardized tests. A number of superintendents I know have said that they spend roughly a third of the school year, now, on the tests. A teacher friend of mine here in Florida told me, at the end of last year, “Well, FCAT season is starting. So, basically, the school year is over. For the next month and a half, that’s all we’ll be doing–preparing for taking tests, practicing taking tests, and taking tests. Funny, I used to spend this time teaching reading and writing, science and math.”
Bob:
You may well be right about the amount of time spent on test prep, but I would like to see some data on this.
Before this standards-and-testing madness, this St. Vitus’s dance we are all doing, infected U.S. education and turned our schools into institutions for test prep, there was a movement afoot to have testing DISAPPEAR ALTOGETHER into instruction–that is, to take the form of formative feedback as part of instruction. That’s a very, very wise approach, of course. And it’s an old idea. Robert Gagne was developing this idea this back during World War II.
You mean this St. Vitus Dance?
“. . . to have testing DISAPPEAR ALTOGETHER into instruction–that is, to take the form of formative feedback as part of instruction.”
Any teacher is isn’t currently doing that, well let’s just say is less than an ideal teacher.
My students take a vocabulary quiz and a chapter test for each chapter (except for the end of each semester when I’m mandated to give a final) and I say to them as they get started “Have at it and have fun, it’s only a little quiz” in order to let them know to lighten up on themselves and not get bent out of shape over an activity that is just small part of the instructional process.
That’s how it’s done in most private schools, I suspect. Don’t know about charters.
But there is a much bigger, much more insidious problem with the standards-and-high-stakes-testing approach than the amount of time spent on test prep. That problem is that the standards [sic] dramatically distort, narrow, and render incoherent both pedagogy and curricula. This is PARTICULARLY TRUE in ELA–much, much more so than in mathematics, where the standards are, roughly, a curriculum outline. What happens, basically, is that the ELA standards, which are not a curriculum outline, get treated as a de facto curriculum outline. And so one gets the “and now for something completely different” ELA curricula and lesson plans that are ubiquitous today. OK, we did standard CCCSS.ELA.RI.5.2a and L.3. Now for 5.3. So, kids get taught crap, organized incoherently, in no rational pedagogical progression and following the same sort of pedagogical methods for learnings that take place in VERY different ways.
cx: curricular progression, not pedagogical progression, of course
The standards [sic] become the real course outline, and if they are egregiously poorly conceived standards, and the new ones in ELA are, that’s disastrous.
“. . . that summative testing is the philosopher’s stone to turn the base metal of children into the gold of productive “21st century” workers for their masters in the oligarchy. . . ”
That’s a good one Robert!!
“Companies do not decide, in a vacuum, to start making and selling high-stakes tests. Politicians write legislation calling for the tests. Get rid of that legislation, and you get rid of the tests.” Well said!
Angela, you are overlooking the missing link. Politicians don’t demand tests because they think it makes schools better, although some mistakenly do. They respond to the well-paid lobbyists of the testing industry, who work the legislative halls of Congress and state legislatures.
Pear$on has also taken over Scott Foresman and, interestingly enough, we saw their name added to (above) the S.F. signage on the property. People have been talking about it, and I wrote comments to numerous bloggers, as well as tell my friends and colleagues. Funny, though…now it has reverted back to Scott Foresman alone–gone is the Pear$on moniker!
Do you think they don’t want us to know? (Quite possibly, we could be orchestrating a Leonie Haimson-type “Field Trip.”) Stay tuned–we’re smart enough to know that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.
This is very old news. The 50 or so competing educational publishers that existed 40 years ago have all been swallowed up, mostly by three companies. I worked for a while for one of those companies. In the course of four years’ time, I got my paycheck from six different parent groups that represented some new consolidation because of various mergers and acquisitions. All that was VERY BAD NEWS for schools, teachers, kids, parents, etc., for the result was the death of real innovation in educational publishing–the Walmartization of that industry. National standards are the final nail in the coffin of innovation in educational publishing. If you think you’ve seen BIG BOX education with all its associated mediocrity to date, all I can say is that you haven’t seen anything yet.
The key question is not who benefits but who does NOT benefit. The ones who do NOT benefit are the kids and the country at large. The kids do NOT learn more as a result of this testing. In fact, they learn less. The testing has enormous opportunity cost. And because of this, the country does not benefit either.
As Bernie points out, the per student cost is really not all that large. It would be a reasonable investment if we really got from this testing what the deformers think we are getting, if the testing did, indeed, create more skilled, capable graduates.
The standards-and-testing mania is an instantiation of the principle that you get what you measure. This is a simple idea. It seems intuitively obvious. But it’s very important to look at the actual consequences of that measurement. The gap between the intended consequence and the actual consequence can be very, very surprising.
Here’s why: You can’t envision everything beforehand. You may think that you know enough to imagine, beforehand, what are the important outcomes and what are not. But in the case of English language arts instruction, you would be wrong.
EVERY DAY, just about, of my working life, I look at some selection, some piece of literary text or informative text that some educational publisher has chosen for inclusion in a textbook or online program, and there are important things that a kid needs to understand in order to grok what’s going on in THIS PARTICULAR TEXT, but those are not treated in the publisher’s approach to the text because what they are treating are, instead, one pr more of the pre-existing standards. So, that’s what happens with the reading instruction at the upper grades–the proper focus of the instruction gets ignored. And, across selections, one gets no coherence in that instruction. Instead, one gets jumping to the next standard, whatever that happens to be. As Monty Python would say, “And now for something completely different.”
These are serious problems. But there’s one that is even more serious. Different areas, or domains, of what people refer to as the English language arts involve completely different cognitive and behavioral processes and require different ways of learning. One does not learn grammar the way that one learns vocabulary. One does not learn how to read a story the way one learns how to give a speech. But the standards are all written IN THE SAME WAY. They treat shoelaces and philosophical theories, inclinations and football teams–stuff that is completely different in KIND as though it were all the same sort of stuff. And this leads people away from developing curricula and pedagogical strategies appropriate to the VERY DIFFERENT KINDS OF LEARNING that are appropriate in the VERY DIFFERENT DOMAINS. As any linguist will explain to you, the term grammar has several very distinct meanings: Grammar 1, Grammar 2, Grammar 3. Grammar 1 is not learned as Grammar 2 is, and Grammar 3 is not learned as Grammar 1 and 2 are. But if you have one set of standards that just refers to “grammar,” you start not doing the ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL work of piecing out the differences in approach that you have to take in order to do these different kinds of teaching of what are very different kinds of learnings.
The CCSS in ELA were written by amateurs in almost complete obliviousness of best practices in the teaching of English and of what we have learned in the past 40 years or so about language acquisition. They treat moonshine and theodocies and toothbrushes and join pain and specifications for screw threads as though these all belonged to the same category of thing. And as a result, they lead to a grotesque distortion of English language arts curricula and pedagogical practice.
Once we’ve gotten over this standards-and-testing sickness, people will write histories of why we went so terribly wrong in our approach during that dark time. And the epigraph from the opening to one of those histories can be taken from T.S. Eliot:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Bob:
My wife is a linguist and one of her major complaints when she taught German and French was that most of her students knew no grammar which made teaching a foreign language doubly difficult. So I suspect that there are deep flaws in how K-12 English is taught starting from the late elementary years.
This seems to me to be a more trenchant critique, but it is one that is much harder to get people worked up about. Somebody needs to do a lot of hard work to put together a coherent multi-year ELA curriculum that teachers will buy into and will be able to teach effectively.
Yes, so your wife will understand what I am talking about.
One of the odd things about these new standards [sic] in ELA is that they were written in what appears to be nearly total obliviousness of existing practice. It’s not as though there wasn’t, already, a discipline out there–an enormously variable one, true, but one within which there was much, already, being done that was far beyond the mediocre imaginings of the authors of the CCSS. The superb curricula that you are talking about will not come from some body of educrats. It will come from competing practice and theory. We used to have that. ELA used to be a field where there was a lot of innovation and a lot of praxis–new application of theoretical understandings. But no more. The NCLB standards regime, and now this junk from the CCSSO, have killed that.
As Don Marquis’s Old Trouper says, “Come, my dear. Both of our professions are being ruined by amateurs.”
I can verify that many students have no clue as to grammatical concepts-don’t know what a noun is, the subject is, heaven forbid an indirect object pronoun. So, hopefully, they learn English grammar in Spanish class.
My candidate for the best book title ever is the one Robert Graves chose for a collection of this essays:
Difficult Questions, Easy Answers
His title was in keeping with the etymology of the term essay: an assay, a foray, a trial or attempt, an incomplete action. It’s a humorous title because it goes to the hubris of attempting to apply a simple solution (You get what you measure. Just give a guy a KPI) to EVERYTHING, ignoring the complexities of the situation.
Well, ignoring the complexities, applying overly simple ideas, is just what the CCSS in ELA have done. They are amateurish work.
We must make things as simple as possible BUT NOT SIMPLER said Einstein.
The various domains in ELA are completely different types of things. They have to be measured and taught in completely different sorts of ways, and the authors of the CCSS in ELA clearly did not understand that. That’s why it is shocking to me that these putative standards have not been met with a resounding chorus of derision from people who know better how learnings in the various domains occur.
KPI????
Reblogged this on The Modern Pencil and commented:
Education profiteering at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.