Jason Stanford is a trustworthy guide to the politics of education in Texas.
He keeps close watch on who is paid to lobby for Pearson and notes how hard they work to convince the Legislature that more testing is needed. It is a neat circle. They say the schools are failing. The Legislature slashes the budget for everything but testing. The lobbyists say the test prove the schools are failing and need more testing.
Can’t they ever figure out that students need more time for learning, more arts, more libraries, more foreign language, more civics, more history, more time to make things and do things other than picking the right bubble?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My personal opinion is: the corporations have been able to slash wages for middleclass workers who are not unionized. They also can just lay them off. No protection. Cut benefits. Leave them hanging.
There is a resentment from those whose wages have been frozen so long or who have lost jobs or benefits. To level the playing field they feel they need to bust unions and where that doesn’t work, VAM will help get rid of many since few if any public schools have been teaching the developmentally inappropriate standards long enough, if at all, to bring about success. I am not quite sure how states can use previous state created test scores as baseline scores for creating VAM for the Pearson tests. It is inappropriate and invalid.
But I believe there is an attempt to create a preferred “class” of people and then “the rest of us”.
YES! It’s about CLASS. The wealthy have no CLASS. They are basically vampires.
As Elliott Eisner once said, “You don’t fatten cattle by weighing them on a scale.”
I read/hear a lot about “bubbles” on tests. Actually, imposed-from-outsideare taking more and more time away from instruction because of increased written portions. I cannot remember the last time such an assessment (in NH at least) was all multiple choice. These new tests are more, not less, likely to result in poor scores than those consisting solely of “bubbles”– and are thus a much more valuable tool for privatizers who want to point to “failing public schools.” The SAT is getting AWAY from lengthy writing passages, and I don’t know that the ACT has ever had them. Of course, we cannot just use these tests to assess progress–noooo, we have to do hours of “performance assessments.” Smarter? Balanced? Not seeing it.
*”from-outside”