Somehow I missed this piece when it appeared several months ago. It is a Mercedes classic, where she shows her skill at reading tax returns and connecting the dots.
You may or may not recall that Attorney General of New York Eric Schneiderman fined the Pearson Foundation $7.7 million for engaging in activities related to its for-profit parent Pearson. In some regions, this fine would be referred to as “chump change” or “chicken feed” for a billion-dollar corporation.
Mercedes digs into this story and finds a golden goose. And the golden goose is the Common Core standards.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s another little item:
About three years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put out an RFP calling for proposals from edu-entrepreneurs interested in getting seed money for new computer-adaptive learning startups.
These guys wanted a single national bullet list to tag their new computerized assessments and learning systems to. That’s why they paid to have the Common Coring of our country done.
It was a business plan from the get-go.
And a lot of educrats and politicians have been totally PLAYED.
Bill has been thinking and writing about this for years, and now he’s put it into motion.
He believes, rightly, I think, that we are going to have a major transition from print to digital educational materials.
He sees a market.
He wants to address that market AT SCALE.
So does Pearson.
Neither wants to see the market for educational materials fragment into hundreds of thousands of innovative, competing products from small providers, which could happen because pixels are a lot cheaper than paper is.
And to keep that from happening, to create economies of scale that make possible monopoly positions, you have to have a single, invariant, national market.
And that’s what the Common Core makes possible.
Pearson and Gates paid to have the Common Core created.
That’s why.
The first time I ever heard of the CCSSO, I went onto their site. I saw that Pearson was a major funder.
And I knew, way back then, that the fix was going in.
Look at the ownership and sources of startup capital of the various new Common Core digital companies. This is all very, very incestuous. There are a few players bankrolling it all. Different companies, different names, but the same few folks with equity stakes, often working together in partnerships.
This is about securing monopoly control of a 600 billion-dollar-a-year market and about ensuring that the Internet will not allow a flowering of small competitors.
And the one thing that was absolutely necessary to make that happen was HAVING A SINGLE NATIONAL LIST TO TAG THE SOFTWARE TO. Because with a single national list, the big guys can throw all their resources at ONE PRODUCT and crush any potential actual small startup competitor with an innovative idea.
In the internet age, people can even create crowd-sourced and open-source educational materials. How is a monopolist to compete with THAT?
Here’s how: Get the fix in.
Create a single set of standards so that you can operate at scale and crush competitors.
Lobby the state departments to get lots of adoption criteria in place that crowd-sourced and open-sourced materials and new, smaller competitors can’t meet.
Control the national, state, and district curriculum and data-reporting portals and what can get to the devices sold to schools.
Control the assessments and tie your products to them.
And they tried, but did not succeed, to create a single national database of student responses and test scores, funded by . . . guess who?
And whoever controlled that database would control what companies could connect to student data nationwide.
And what curricula could be offered through that portal.
And now, since people nixed THAT Orwellian, monopolistic idea, they will try to do the same sort of thing at the state and district levels–control the data portal through which the curricula flows and control what products can be accessed with the devices that students are using.
Excellent anaysis of the Gates/Pearson businees model, Bob. And they probably promised top jobs to Obama and Duncan for their needed buy-in. Brilliant.
I wonder, Ellen, whether anyone except deformers paid to monitor Diane’s site, reads this stuff. I post and sometimes it seems that this stuff just goes down a black hole. Almost never, when I post about the business rationale for Deform, does anyone comment. This scares me. It makes me wonder whether people just don’t get how important this is. If people on Diane Ravitch’s site aren’t worked up about this, how can we expect the country as a whole to get there? These are the worries that I have in my darkest moments–that the fix will go completely in while the WHOLE FREAKING COUNTRY IS ASLEEP.
Meanwhile, in other news, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute let slip the other day in a piece by Chester Finn that “a group of foundations” was funding a new startup to review textbooks and online materials to make sure that they comply with the Common Core.
A centralized censorship office for educational materials. Funded by . . . ?
I was shocked at the time that Pearson’s abuse of their non-profit status didn’t receive larger national attention. Their fine was minuscule compared to the profit that stand to make from Common Core.
On a related note, Dave Sirota also has an interesting article up on the irony of Christie reneging on legally mandated payment to teachers pensions while having subsidized Pearson’s new building in the Hoboken to the tune of $82 million. One more piece in the highly politicized educational battle going on here in NJ.
http://pando.com/2014/05/27/chris-christie-cant-afford-to-pay-public-teacher-pensions-but-still-hands-education-megacorp-82m-in-subsidies.
The money from the fine went to ANOTHER FOUNDATION WORKING TO SUPPORT EDUCATION DEFORM!!!!
“Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”
–Redacted by Krazy TA from various recitations at eduinvestor coven meetings of “The Lord of the Blingring,” book DCLXVI of the Blingringelungenlied.
For more on classic Rheeformish songs and spells, see “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry” in “Rheeformish Literature: from Grim to Grimoire,” Appendix 10 of the Rheeformish Lexicon.
Bob Shepherd: did it strike you too that KrazyMathLady was a little tentative on the temperature scale?
Speaking just for myself, I was reminded of an old Johnny Cash song that is popular among the charterite/privatization crowd:
“I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down as my $tudent $ucce$$ went higher,
And it burns, burns, burns,
The ring of fire, the ring of fire.”
¿? Yeah, sure, I changed it slightly. NGA and CCSSO have the copyright on the new version. And your point is?
Can’t hear youuuuu… It’s hard to make out what you’re saying while I’m doing my closet reading…
😎
I thought that warm was just right. It suggests the completely comfy cozy nature of this relationship. There they are, all snuggled up together in that great big government bed bought with taxpayer dollars.
A reminder…at LAUSD, Supt. Deasy worked for Gates before being assigned to his job in LA by billionaire Eli Broad and former mayor Villaraigosa….yes, they mandated that the BoE hire him with no other candidates considered, and no search committee. He was also the face of the Apple iPad in their early commercials.
Deasy immediately chose as his Asst. Supt., Jaime Aquino, who was his classmate at the Broad Academy where they learned to be CEOs and run districts with a business model based on rapidly shutting down public schools and imbedding charters in their stead. Aquino came to LAUSD after working for Pearson.
What other state can compete with these kinds of sterling resumes?