Now begins the struggle for billions of dollars for Common Core testing. Bear in mind that this is public money that should be spent on reducing class sizes, providing arts programs, hiring librarians and counselors, and supplying other necessary services to students and schools. The next time you hear some politician or pundit complain about the cost of public education, remind them of the billions of dollars that Pearson and its rivals will collect to administer and score Common Core tests. This is the national marketplace that Race to the Top was designed to create. It succeeded beyond Arne Duncan’s wildest dreams–in enriching testing corporations and impoverishing schools.
Is this a crime in plain sight? The victims are our students, educators, and schools. Who will be held liable for this massive diversion of taxpayer dollars into the testing industry?
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Politico reports this morning:
RIVAL PROTESTS PEARSON CONTRACT: The contract to administer and score Common Core tests for states in the PARCC consortium was expected to be worth several billion dollars through the end of the decade. So it surprised some in the industry that Pearson was the only bidder, in a consortium with a handful of subcontractors. Now a rival, the American Institutes for Research, is claiming it was no coincidence: It’s pressing a lawsuit alleging the bid was rigged. (h/t EdWeek: http://bit.ly/1s0Ksap).
– The PARCC bidding process was run through the state of New Mexico, which put out a request for proposals last year. The request bundled development and delivery of the first year of testing – which Pearson was already working on – with administration of the test in subsequent years. AIR, a nonprofit that administers tests in several states, claims Pearson got an automatic, insurmountable advantage because of the bid’s set up. AIR filed a protest with New Mexico last December, claiming the bidding process unfairly and unlawfully restricted competition. It sent its complaint to the individual identified by the state as the only person testing companies could contact about the process. But some time later – after the deadline for filing a complaint passed – New Mexico told AIR the protest was sent to the wrong office and it missed the deadline. Then it declined to hear AIR’s claim of an illegal bid process. AIR appealed in district court; a hearing is scheduled for later this month.
– “The RFP looked designed to go to Pearson, and it seems that every other firm in the industry must have drawn the same conclusion,” Jon Cohen, AIR’s president of assessment, told Morning Education. “To make a multi-billion-dollar decision based on an anti-competitive RFP won’t serve PARCC, New Mexico or all the other PARCC states well in the long run.’ For more, dive into the (very lengthy) AIR complaints: http://politico.pro/SyehVG and http://politico.pro/1uxz2PE.
– Pearson declined to comment. PARCC also declined to talk, referring questions to New Mexico officials, who could not be reached.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Restriction of competition was and is the entire motivating force behind the creation of a single set of national standards. Doing so creates enormous economies of scale for a few very large players.
This is an old, old story with RFPs. It is very, very easy to write an RFP in such a manner that only one’s previously chosen bidder will be able to meet its requirements. The open bidding process, as a result, becomes a complete sham.
Suppose that I am writing an RFP for a project to design a new light rail system. Suppose that I want the contract to go to your company. Suppose, further, that your CEO has an Master’s degree in economics and that there are no people with advanced degrees degrees in economics in C-level positions in the companies that will be competing for the contract. All I have to do is write the RFP so that the long list of requirements includes the following:
“The successful bidder will have C-level leadership with professional training in economics.”
Not a great example, but it illustrates the process by which the legal requirement for open-bidding can be quite easily subverted.
I worked for a time for a management consulting firm. This firm had me do a lot of research to identify government-issued RFPs for it to submit bids under. Again and again, I encountered this–requirements built into the RFP that were descriptions of the bidder that had already been chosen before the open bidding began.
Can we assume that this practice is legal?
Well, these things get challenged all the time. I defer to the lawyers on that one. It’s clearly unethical.
Not surprised a bit here in New Mexico. We have a governor who continually violates state law with her secretary of education designee who is an unqualified bully. Both are cozy with ALEC. They are bent on wrecking public education and giving away our education and environment to capitalist cronies. Makes me cry for our kids, many who live in poverty.
While we’re on the Pearson subject: wasn’t the National Boards the start of Pearson having absolute power over our classrooms? And when you consider the supplements NC has paid for that certification, does anyone else see a bit of a problem? We paid out all that money (and still are tomthosecwhonretored with those stipends figured in), and those still in the teaching force (in NC) have been frozen for five plus years. Has anyone tackled that subject objectively? National Bpards are considered a badge of honor (generally), but have they actually helped education in NC? Seems to me they’ve contributed to our problems more than to our solutions.
As always, I would love to hear thoughts (objective ones—not defensive ones).
To those who retired
The PARCC website says that there are 15 million public school kids in the PARCC states. So, under this contract, at $24 a kid–what the contractor is to be paid–that’s $360 million a year. Over three years, that’s 15 million x $24 x 3, or $1,080,000,000.00.
That’s a lot of zeros. Over a billion dollars.
So, how much is that in terms of opportunity cost–what the money might have been spent for instead? That $1,080,000,000 would buy any of the following:
1. Beginning teacher salaries at $35,672 per year (the national average): 30,275.85
2. Tablet computers for poor students, at $300 apiece: 3,600,000
3. Laptop computers for poor students, at $650 apiece: 1,661,538
4. Textbooks at $120 apiece: 9,000,000
5. Library books at $24 apiece: 45,000,000
So, you can have, for your taxpayer dollar, thirty thousand teachers, three and a half million tablets, more than a million and a half laptops, nine million textbooks, or forty-five million library books.
Or you can have a crappy, invalid test prepared by an unelected body, a test with no supporting research to confirm its validity or reliability that turns schooling into test prep and that leads to a dramatic narrowing and distortion of curricula and pedagogy.
And those figures are just for the payments to the contractor. They don’t include the billions and billions more (far more than will be paid to the contractor) that will be spent on upgrading computers and networks so kids can all take these tests online, on administrative and teacher salaries for time spent proctoring, doing data chats, doing reports, doing test prep, training kids to answer online test questions, and doing crappy activities in basal texts modeled on the test formats.
Any wonder, now, why this particular contractor heavily supported the CCSSO and went into partnership with Bill Gates? And that’s just the beginning of the Cash Cow that Common Core will be for the contractor.
The Cash Cow Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program.
Holy C.C.C.C.C.C.R.A,P.
“. . . a test with no supporting research to confirm its validity or reliability. . .”
And there never can be as the complete invalidity of these tests has been proven by Noel Wilson in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Saw it and put it up I use the info you supply when I link to articles, and I often add links back to your site, and try to use quotes when I quote you directly.
My object, as you know, is to get non-teachers at the Oped site — which is the #1 progressive news site,–to think about education (got over one million hits) . Sometimes, I get discouraged, but then suddenly comments appear that show me that people are reading.
I have nothing invested in doing this, Diane. I am not publicizing some book, or getting any renumeration. I am 72 years old, married 51 years, have 4 grandkids and I am a photographer.
I am just speaking once again, as a teacher because I CAN. The silenced me, and I am not one to take that lying down.
They knocked me out, BUT when I arose from the shock of discovering that the union actively worked with the administration to utterly destroy my credibility, (and, after several years of therapy) I began to follow the teacher-abuse movement, and finally moved on to the larger movement, thanks to your books.
YOU are my inspiration, and I hope you will come to grasp on thing… until the people I meet –the public as I travel, know how they removed the professional staff, nothing will change. NO one knows! They bought the bad teacher narrative, and have no idea that educators do not shape the policy. The greatest assault on Americans and the Constitution was this one, and people shake their heads when I tell my story… as if it is a fantasy!
That assault on due process is ongoing in NYC 16 years after it worked to remove me. I meet the victims all the time… now that veterans are gone, the new teachers are biting the dust. I met one woman this week, and I wept at he story, and what she said, “Susan, you should see what they are doing to good teachers at my school.”
Accountability, Diane. Look at LAUSD, I mean spend some time reading what is happening there, and ask yourself HOW this could happen if the union was doing its job.
I Hear YOU! We need the unions. I like Randi, and know who she is… I mean –I really KNOW her, and admire her, and understand her, and we have corresponded for years.
But, my dear, the unions are corrupt to the core in most places, and if you saw my evidence (Randi did, the UFT attorney Adam Ross, saw what I had documented on the complicity of the UFT reps including the head honcho in Manhattan) you would weep.
Just think about it! Because as you must realize by the commentary on your blog about that ‘wonderful’ contract, you cannot address the solution until those who enable the assault stop their political posturing and stand up for the LAW of the land in the educational workplace… so we professionals can actually speak out against anti-learning policies without losing our reputations and our careers.
Yours, Susan
Interesting. I hope New York residents who oppose Common Core are astute enough to grasp that Governor Cuomo’s support of a $2B Technology Bond Issue is a requisite to make many districts PARCC ready. If you want to stop Common Core you need to recognize the underlying reason that Cuomo is willing to go into debt to fund a technology bond issue–PARCC! Strange how Cuomo prefers Tax Cuts for the wealthy over aid to local school districts–but promotes a bond issue to support technology. Mr. Tax Cap–and Mr. Tax Freeze is out there promoting $2B for Gates and Google–don’t believe for a second that he does not have ulterior motives that are not good for NY kids!
“Pearson declined to comment. PARCC also declined to talk, referring questions to New Mexico officials, who could not be reached.”
My favorite lines in the entire post.
No surprise, this unfair practice mimics the contracts that went on with our State Fair. Our governor is heartless, with no regard for regulation or rule. Our beautiful state, with its beautiful people sees this kind of thing again and again. It is unjust at best, criminal in reality. There is absolutely no evidence that anything done here us really in the best interest of students. It’s all about $$$ for those at the top. In our poor state the PED even failed to submit the necessary items for federal dollars directed at free and reduced lunch. It makes my heart cry that a woman who claims to be so much for Hispanic families is the first to harm their children with repeated unfair evaluation. We may even lose our Title 1 funding here in Albuquerque.
Can someone identify exactly who in New Mexico was supposed to receive the RFPs? I know that Hanna Skandera is on the PARCC board, but I assume a lesser individual was the point person for the PARCC RFP. I could like to follow this up.