Pearson, the multi-billion British publisher, plans to launch a new PR offensive to push back against the anti-testing and anti-Common Core groundswell. Pearson has been steadily buying up every aspect of American education: it recently won the contract to adminster the Common Core test called PARCC, which is worth at least $1 billion; states using Pearson tests buy Pearson textbooks; Pearson bought the GED; Pearson owns the online EdTPA, to evaluate teachers as they finish their training; Pearson owns virtual charter schools called Connections Academy; Pearson owns a curriculum aligned with Common Core.
This interview appeared on politico.com:
PEARSON TO PUMP UP THE P.R.: Pearson CEO John Fallon came by the POLITICO office to talk about a whole range of issues – and to make a pledge: His team is going to be more active, he said, in fighting back against the anti-testing, anti-Common Core movement that has swept through a number of states. Rather than see the opposition “as threats to our traditional business,” Fallon said, the company is trying to forge common ground.”We’re all in the business of trying to improve educational outcomes,” he said.
– Fallon said Pearson will step up its social media presence and will also make more of an effort to engage with teachers unions, talk to parents and generally “be very transparent about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it … We’re willing to be held accountable.”
– Asked how he would grade Pearson’s public outreach so far, Fallon demurred. “You probably wouldn’t grade us very highly at the moment – which is probably fair,” he said. “We’re going to try to be more proactive.”
– Don Kilburn, President of Pearson North America, also weighed in. He said he expected Pearson’s sales to pick up after a couple of rough years crimped by tight state budgets for both K-12 and higher education. The company has reorganized and now has a “much cleaner mission and structure” which is expected to propel faster growth, he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So basically the Enron Ballet …
His team is going to be more active, he said, in fighting back against the anti-testing, anti-Common Core movement that has swept through a number of states. Rather than see the opposition “as threats to our traditional business,” Fallon said, the company is trying to forge common ground.”
Their PR could start by trying to explain to their CEO that “fighting back” is the exact opposite of – and incompatible with – “forging common ground”.
Another problem right off the bat is conflating being against Common Core and standardized testing as being against testing. I am all for tests that my elementary school colleagues and I prepare based directly on our instruction, and I think the research bears out that, while this is still a blunt instrument, it yields a bit more reliable information on how children are progressing than do most McTests.
Suggesting that opposing standardization is the same as opposing testing I consider a part of what Bob Shepherd so accurately labels THE BIG LIE. I have read other people in the self-styled education reform movement accusing dissidents of being anti-testing. It’s difficult to believe this conflation is accidental.
Yes, that’s part of their confusion between “fighting back” and “finding common ground”. They are so arrogant that they just assume that anyone who opposes CCSS/standardized testing is either a fringe lunatic or simply misguided. They figure they can win over the latter by “educating” us on the “facts” of standardized testing.
Remember if you oppose the Iraq war you didn’t support the troops? Now if you oppose privatization of classroom funds , you are against high standards.
But their side is still not showing how changing the standards affects performance.
Lipstick on a pig…
Please please please fix the spelling and grammatical errors in the introductory paragraph. This makes the argument look like it’s coming from someone without the knowledge and expertise of Diane Ravitch.
Matt, fixed. Remember I am writing from a hospital bed. Cut some slack.
I hope you’re feeling okay, Diane!
For transparency purposes:
1) Release all students’ tests in every subject every year to parents and teachers. Then, parents and educators will decide if high-stakes testing has value for students and schools.
2) Post all state and local contracts on the Pearson website including costs for Pearson’s subcontractors. Then, taxpayers will decide if Pearson provides cost effective educational value and if high-stakes testing is worth the price.
3) Disclose Pearson’s lobbying activities on Pearson’s website. Then, taxpayers will decide if Pearson truly wants transparency or if the PR campaign is a smokescreen.
well said
Or, you can dig in and continue to pay off union officials and local bureaucrats and make a lot of “And then God gave us the Common Core” videos and flood the news outlets with pieces by “real teachers” paid to say that they just love being stack ranked and having their students be stack ranked and having David Coleman do their thinking for them and are just SOOOOOO GRATEFUL that Pearson has made all this possible.
Thumbs up.
Pearson is an ENORMOUS company. There are many who work for Pearson who are extraordinarily bright, caring, dedicated educators.
But the thing has grown into a monster–hierarchical, top-down, incapable of brooking divergence of opinion or dissent, dependent upon revenue from highly destructive and low-quality products. I would love to see this company thrive. It could be an enormous force for good in the world. Ironically, by reversing its course on its most destructive policies and dumping its most destructive products, it could actually make itself a lot MORE profitable.
I think of Pearson and it reminds me of Xerox back in the day. They had built a huge business based on screwing their customers. They made huge, complex copy machines that failed ALL THE TIME, but their really big source of revenue was in maintenance contracts for those machines. SO, they needed to have crappy, overly complex products so that they could a) sell the bigger, more complicated, new version; and b) sell the really lucrative contract to fix the piece of crap when it broke down.
And, of course, what happened to this company when it built its revenue streams on screwing its customers? Japanese manufacturers created smaller, cheap, reliable, replaceable units and TOOK ALMOST ALL THE BUSINESS FROM THEM OVERNIGHT. Almost overnight, they went from owning the market to the verge of bankruptcy.
Well, many, many people at Pearson know the problems with NCLB and Son of NCLB better than almost anyone, but those people live in fear and don’t point out what is so obvious to so many.
And so, Pearson suffers from the myopia that often prevails when a company grows too big, too hierarchical, with management that is too distant and out of touch, managment that lives in an echo chamber surrounded by sycophants and toadies.
Pearson could, for example, dump the curriculum-and-pedagogy distorting summative standardized testing business and take a principled stand against that utter nonsense and develop varied, alternative assessments of enormous range–diagnostic assessments, formative assessments, and performative assessments geared to particular parts of particular subjects and for particular kinds of kids and teachers pursuing varied goals. It could become the amanuensis for open source and crowd sourced variety and richness in pedagogy and curricula.
Or, it can continue to try to make itself into the monopolistic instrument of the invariant policies of an educational Thought Police, to bash and mistreat and stack rank the very people who are on the receiving end of its products.
Since the bottom line is profits, you will have to show them the advantages of your suggestions. I don’t think they have to make themselves into “the monopolistic instrument of the invariant policies of an educational Thought Police.” They have already achieved that status.
These policies are TERRIBLE FOR PROFITS IN THE NOT TOO LONG TERM. By clinging to this backward vision, Pearson is setting itself up for failure.
We recently had the 50th anniversary of the S&P Index. Well, guess what? 70 percent of the companies that were on that index when it started were no longer in existence.
Pearson is following policies that will make it the Smith Corona of the 2020s.
Can they just please say Ministry of Propaganda?
Texas Tax Dollars Paid to Pearson, 2000-2015: $1,178,723,689.00
$2.00 every second of every day for fifteen years
$50,400.00 every seven hours
Souce: TAMSA Slide Share, pgs. 10 and 11
http://www.tamsatx.org
If the trillion dollars had found its way into the pockets of Texans and multiplied, instead of lining the pockets of investors and executives in far off places, Texas might really be a success story.
When the people who use your products speak of you in the same tones that they typically reserve for speaking of colorectal cancer and pedophiles, you’ve got a problem.
What do they expect? If you make it a POLICY to stack rank and micromanage and otherwise ABUSE your end user, you are asking for disaster over the not-so-long term. You can only keep the fix in so long by manipulating the system and the venal politicians and bureaucrats running it.
You keep that kind of thing up, and pretty soon, every pretty picture that your marketing department churns out of smiling children in a classroom becomes for your users but another reminder of the disparity between the hype and the practice, another reminder of THE BIG LIE.
“We’re all in the business of trying to improve educational outcomes,” he said.
Really? Then why doesn’t Pearson “help” for free?
Better yet, just leave public education alone.
It’s that thing about “in the *business* of….” What real educator speaks like that? It directly translates to “we’re in education to make money.”
They [Pearson] are in business to make trillions by monetizing every child across the US. They are not in education or care about students. Research Pearson’s chief lobbyist in Texas, Sandy Kress who was unleashed on the US by GWB. His BFFs include Margaret Spellings and Beth Ann Bryan.
No Child Left Unmonetized –
Race to Monetization –
The NY Pearson math and ELA are under lock and key. They can’t inform instruction so how can they “improve educational outcomes”?
What a bunch of BS. You’d think they would want to restore a shred of credibility. Their image is past the point of no return.
Pearson reminds me of K-Mart. Faced with flat out bankruptcy, they hired Spike Lee to direct commercials. And…still faced bankruptcy and only survived in any form by merging with Sears…with whom they continue to face extinction.
It’s hard for companies to tell the difference between bad “PR” and fundamental flaws in product or service idea.
indeed
London is a sinkhole of corrupt finance.
…and they are BRITISH? The money isn’t even staying in America??? Wow.
Taxpayers, parents and students are held hostage by UK Pearson. We need volunteers with cameras to post pictures of the delivery trucks that are filled with hundreds of boxes of high-stakes testing nonsense labeled in blue with Pearson on the box. I’m curious to know how much time is required to deliver the tests, check-in the tests, attend training on how to administer the secretive tests, and then administer the hush-hush tests to students.
Via No Child Left Untested and Race to the Cash, Pearson has harnessed a de facto work force of millions of teachers and administrators across the US.
Gather as much “data” on Pearson as possible. Photos of Pearson’s test boxes will tell a story that Pearson’s PR campaign can’t defend.
This is priceless.
“Fallon said Pearson will step up its social media presence and will also make more of an effort to engage with teachers unions, talk to parents and generally “be very transparent about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it … We’re willing to be held accountable.””
Stepping up a social media presence is a slippery slope. This very likely (99.999% positively) is a marketing ploy, not a plan for genuine dialogue. Facebook and Twitter will be waiting to pounce on them, to say nothing of the bat-storm that awaits.
I’m excited to hear about the engagement of Randi, Dennis and Pearson! Wonder where they will register for gifts?
Pearson’s marketing department is gearing up now for their parent campaign. They’re probably printing t-shirts, pencils (no. 2 of course) and bumper stickers. I want a Pearson stress ball!
Bumper sticker mock-up: Our tests are smarter than your honor student! Pearson LLC.
And this transparency thing? Oh, good! Maybe they’ll FINALLY release test items. But I’m not holding my breath.
I bet they’ve already booked a convention center somewhere for PEARSONx. It will be ever, so much trendier than TEDx.
Accountable? Only when it comes to their shareholders’ and executive board’s bank accounts.
Snake oil. All of it.
very will said, and funny!
Your comments are priceless. Peas one should hire you to do a triage on their PR, thereby ensuring truth and transparency and who knows, maybe big profits as well.
The increased PR is very likely to backfire, to have precisely the opposite of its intended result.
Poor Pearson……That are so misunderstood. Imagine if there was transparency and teachers and parents could examine these tests? Funny, Cuomo backed their privacy for a man who believes in transparency in government (NOT)
Now that his Moreland Commission is under federal investigation maybe some light will be shed on Cuomo’s shenanigans.
Get ready for the troll armies.
no doubt
This is the real British Invasion. I thought we won the Revolutionary war. Guess we need to win it again.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I look forward to paying for Pearson’s expanded PR program in my taxes. (Not.)
Should be interesting. Truth in advertising laws apply.
This is just what The GOP said when they lost the 2012 elections, that they need better PR and messaging, never once considering it was their policies that people rejected.
Here we see Pearson refusing to see that the US woke up to find that money meant for classrooms is being diverted to vendors who are delivered flawed products and services.
Pearson, if you’re listening, the point of the backlash is that you should not be privatizing our kids public education. We get that you bought the politicians of both parties for over a decade, but the model of off site middlemen cheats us out of teachers, repairs, counselors and other real in-classroom help for our kids.
More insidious that the privatizing is the centralizing and regimentation. This is about absolute command and control.
yeah, that was hilarious, wasn’t it? all that hand-wringing about not getting the message out properly. exactly parallel situation here
In May of last year, Pearson promoted the head of its assessment division to the position of head of its School Division. So, it’s pretty clear how this company views the future.
You cannot have enough of the tail wagging the dog in U.S. education.
You cannot have enough standardization and centralization and authoritarian, top-down command and control.
More tests for tots!
More tests for teachers!
More test-driven curricula!
All testing all the time!
Test them until they scream!
Because tests are very, very, very, very lucrative. You have no idea how lucrative. I mean, really, you have no idea.
And because lucre is how you measure success in life.
Life is one great test, and there’s one big leaderboard, and all that matters is how close to the top of it you are. How much money you made by whatever means.
And if you want to make the really big bucks–hell, if you want to make a living at all–you better do what we say.
Otherwise, you will probably find yourself unemployed.
We say jump. You say, how high? And we say, as high as we tell you to.
And if you don’t happen to be a jumper, if you happen to be, say, a dancer instead, too bad for you. You lose.
Because we make the rules, and we make the tests, and if you don’t like it, too bad.
Because we OWN U.S. education. We own the Obama administration. We own your state legislators. We own your state commissioners of education. We own your governors. We own the tests that determine whether you will be allowed to teach. We own most of the market for textbooks and online materials.
And most of the time, when you don’t even realize it, we’re there. If there’s a startup, we’ve invested in it. If there’s a plutocrat, we’re that plutocrat’s business partner.
And what we don’t own, our partners do.
All your base belong to us.
So, repeat after me:
Pearson over persons.
Pearson over persons.
Pearson over persons.
Because it is not enough that you agree with us that 2 + 2 = 5. We shall keep at you–we shall bury you under dictates and evaluations and data and public relations until you believe it. How many fingers am I holding up? What if I tell you that it’s not two but three? It is not enough that you tell me that there are three. You must see that there are three because that’s how many we say there are.
Why? Why would we want to do this? I mean, besides the obvious reason–all that lucre?
Because of the sheer pleasure of the exercise of power over you.
Because power, being at the top of that leaderboard, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
And to a certain kind of very, very sick person, of course, it is.
The most common media trope, today, is simulated nonsimulation. This is the real thing. Honest. This is straight talk. This is natural. This is change you can believe in. Pure mountain streams. Warm light streaming through the kitchen window. Freshness. Authenticity. Simplicity. People doing the right thing. Old men playing checkers. Grandpa and the boy. The fellow with his sleeves rolled up, walking across the field, looking you in the eye. Laughing babies. Happy schoolchildren. All natural ingredients. Genuine. Fresh. No additives. The slow pan of the green field. The contented cow. The fly-over of the waterfall. The green logo. The real thing. Really.
In the 1960s, Vance Packard wrote books about how advertisers and marketers lied to us, using sex to sell dish soap and laundry detergent (The Hidden Persuaders) and appealing to our desire for status (The Status Seekers). PR and advertising and media generally, today, is all about marshaling the unreal to simulate the genuine. Marketers and advertisers have discovered that we are all sick of the lies, so they are giving us the lie about not lying to us. If Packard were alive today, he would be writing about how reality and truth, rather than sex and status, have become the primary product sold, incidentally, along with the fabric softener for that clean, fresh feel and the eye liner and lip gloss for that all-natural “look.” The truth itself has become the lie.
PR firms, advertisers, Hollywood film-makers, political campaigns—all are now in the reality and truth simulation business. And what wonderful tools are now available for the purpose! Don’t you want to just reach out and HUG that oil company? that oh-so-genuine celluloid heroine with her hair mussed up just perfectly as she wakes in the morning to face those terrible odds with her spunk and spirit?
The advertisers and marketers have learned that no one believes any of the crap they see or hear from them. That’s why people now have this longing for the real, the simple, the actual, the true. So, as always, they sell us those things we long for. Currently, they give us untruth about the truth itself, which is worse, far worse, than untruth about other matters, for untruth about truth itself creates a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop creating an exponential increase in unreality.
In such an environment, the most watched news programs become those that say, in effect, we don’t believe a word of it either. The news becomes comedy. Of course, it’s all just a joke. So, more people watch The John Stuart Show, The Colbert Report, and Bill Mahr than watch the nightly news, and as many read The Onion asread The New York Times.
So, what is the consequence of this? What effect does all of this have on us? We expect that we are going to be lied to ALL THE TIME and, increasingly, that the less something seems like lying the more a lie it will be. What does it mean that we expect the politician not to fulfill the campaign promise, the product not to have the characteristics advertised, the box to be two-thirds empty, the new easy-grip bottle to have 3 oz. less liquid in it, the “news” program to be all histrionics and theater to promote an agenda, the all-natural ingredients to have been synthesized in a chemical plant in Bhopal or Bangalore? Does that mean that we are all wiser, more hip, more cool, less gullible, less conditioned, less susceptible? Perhaps. But what is the spiritual cost of never being able to take anything on face value, of being always on guard, of never being able to believe in anything, of the increasing artifice of the real and reality of the artifice?
We pause now, for a commercial break:
[God light shining through clouds on a young mom, sitting with her kid and her laptop on the grass in the park] We care. We’re on your side. That’s why we created our new customer self-service portal. So you can get what you need when you need it. (NB: Our doing this didn’t have anything to do with automating so that we could fire the people who used to answer our phones. Honest.)
[Young mom finds note in her husband’s coat pocket. Close up of the note from “Mandi.” Close up of the young mom’s face.] Anxious? Troubled? Feeling out of sorts? Ask your doctor about Erase-all thought eliminator. [Footage of young mom playing tennis, riding on the beach, kayaking, laughing with friends as voice-voice over runs, rapidly and quietly] May cause anal leakage, blindness, dementia, and death. Use only as directed. [Young mom holding aloft laughing baby] New Erase-all. Relief, finally. Because we care just LIKE you do. [Note the folksy bad grammar; nice touch, huh?]
What is the spiritual cost of this? I think it incalculably high.
NB: The philosopher of language Paul Grice once noted that a precondition of all communication is our expectation that the other person believes what he or she is saying to be true. So what happens when that precondition is routinely, typically violated?
And now for a word from some of the millions of teachers who just, well, grateful, to Bill and Pearson for these needed reforms. Expect lots and lots and lots of heartfelt letters from REAL TEACHERS telling everyone how wonderful it is that their kindergarteners are now on track for their colleges and careers because of testing and the Common Core. Why, in the old days, we had no idea where they stood and how to move them to the next level. But now, they are racing to the top and leaving those Singaporeans in the dust. It just all makes so much sense. Why didn’t we do this decades ago? Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Pearson. Thanks, Arne. And thank you, Common Core!
Kinda gets you all choked up, doesn’t it?
And the teachers’ unions will be enlisted, have already been enlisted, to produce this swill.
The lie about the truth itself is the final level to which manipulation via public relations can be taken. After that, when that fails, the only resort is to raw power. But the mechanisms for the exercise of that are currently being put into place. Orwell was right. He was just off by a few decades.
And against all that, all that ugliness, all that exercise of power, fights one seventy-five-year-old woman from a laptop in her hospital bed where she is recovering from knee surgery.
And, in time, she will win.
As Atrios says: “Griftrs gonna grift.”
Here is one way Pearson skirts the law in Florida:
http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/critics-rap-actions-jeb-bushs-education-foundation
Well, then we better counter act the attack and come up with a bumper sticker slogan real soon.
This is a very interesting situation. This company has created an extraordinarily lucrative product that abuses, egregiously, those who are forced to use the product. It depends upon ignorant legislators to force this abuse on users. And so people are widely starting to speak of the company in the same tones that they normally reserve for speaking of, say, colorectal cancer or pedophiles. And the response of the company to this is that it needs to do more PR.
So, what are they thinking? I suspect that it’s this: In the past, the public didn’t know anything about any of this. We could make a deal with a politician or a state department educrat, and the teachers and students would hate it, but the public, by and large, wouldn’t know a thing about it. But now the opposition has grown so great, and so many people are talking, that ordinary citizens are starting to notice. So, we have to reach them–ordinary citizens–with a load of baloney, so let’s crank up the propaganda machine.
But that’s not going to save them. When the new Common Core Curriculum Commissariat College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) tests hit nationwide, Joe and Jane Sixpack will become quite interested in all this. And then there will be hell to pay.
But here’s a sickening prospect:
And at that point Pearson will make a deal with the politicians for a six-year, 2-billion-dollar contract to write the “next generation assessments” to replace the CCCCCCRAP assessments. NCLB. Son of NCLB. Son of Son of NCLB.
We pay millions and millions of dollars to this company and now they are going to spend OUR money to feed us lies. It’s the ultimate gotcha . (I want to use a stronger term,but I respect Diane’s posting guidelines). We cannot allow the American public to fall for this scam. Their campaign will be slick and believable. Pearson will present itself as the savior of education, an education superhero. Once again — lipstick on a pig. And I apologize to pigs for the analogy.
There already have been massive PR campaigns to brainwash us to accept common core and so called “high standards”.
NBC was in the forefront pushing Common Core onto us two years ago without a true debate. See http://www.opednews.com/populum/pagem.php?f=CONFLICTED-A-Look-at-MSNB-by-Gustav-Wynn-Accountability_Al-Sharpton_Alec_Charter-Schools-140505-22.html
Notice how Diane Ravitch has had to make her own platform that so many “news” programs wouldn’t give her air time.
In the public interest we need a live head to head debate between Ravitch and Arne Duncan. We see which side is citing evidence. The USDOE uses suppression and propaganda instead of presenting research and data.
What an ironic example of hypocrisy because common core is a federal mandate forcing every kid to cite evidence.
This is how you can be sure rheeform is all about contract$ and killing unions. Nowhere will they refute the articles by Ravitch or Carol Burris.
And this corruption is nothing new — remember the Bush II administration’s sweetheart deals for Reading First companies that made millions for those officials, their political operatives, and their cronies. None of it was supported by valid research so they simply manufactured their own “research” by quoting each other endlessly.
Those grifters are long gone but many of their “ideas” and policies became conventional wisdom, leaving long-lasting damage in their wake.
We need to clean house in the DOE (and all of Washington) and find a way to close the money spigots off to the corrupt grifters who gravitate to “service” in order to cash in.
Chris in Florida:
I’m very familiar with Texas and the Texas Reading Initiative that morphed into Reading First/Early Reading First with GWB via UT System, University of Oregon, Wireless Generation (TPRI and DIBELS) Barbara Foorman, Doug Carnine, Roland Good, Susan Landry, Sandy Kress, Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings and Beth Ann Bryan pushing their for-profit reading last program across the nation.
In Reading for Profit: How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind, Chapter Two, Scientific Flimflam: A Who’s Who of Entrepreneurial Research by Elaine Garan, readers will connect the dots.
pg. 29 –
“The bottom line is that we have a handful of researchers with financial links to their own research. They do the research that supports their programs (for-profit in the box kits or in the box assessments) that supports their own professional development enterprises that matches the assessments they designed that supports their own learning programs that align with government mandates that are based on their own scientific research. And so on and so on and so on -”
The excerpt above reminds me of Pearson’s mission.