Pearson conquers the world! It holds contracts for Commin Core testing, for textbooks and curriculum Ligned to the Common Core, it owns the GED and a program for assessing would-be teachers (the edTPA), and it owns online charters called Connections Academy. Students are likelier to get higher scores on Common Core tests created by Pearson if they use Pearson texts and curriculum. Have I forgotten anything?
In 2011, Pearson, the world’s largest education publishing company, won the contract to design the 2015 international assessment (PISA), the Program in International Student Assessment. This is the test that gives Secretary Duncan the opportunity to lambaste public schools and teachers every time the results are announced, without reference to the huge and growing income and wealth disparities that account for a large share of the test score gaps between haves and have-nots..
Pearson’s advisory panel includes Andreas Schleicher, the deputy director of the OECD in charge of PISA. It also includes Michael Barber (now chief education advisor to Pearson, formerly at McKinsey, also known as “Mr. Deliverology,” for his fervent belief in standards, testing and targets) and Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution, noted for his proposal that schools should use test scores to identify and “deselect” (fire) the bottom 5-10% of teachers on a regular basis to weed out “bad teachers.” These are the masters of the educational universe.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You forgot about how Pearson bought out lots of textbook companies, like Scott Foresman in K12, and more than I can count in higher ed, from Addison Wesley to Prentice Hall. And, while the cost of college textbooks has doubled since then, many colleges have gone to preferring Pearson and it’s a challenge to get approval to adopt books from other companies. (There must be an economic incentive for colleges but I’m not sure what it is.)
IMHO, this is an extremely important posting.
This is what is meant by bringing to scale. And it is a concrete manifestation of the charterite/privatizer drive to put into effect their version of the Golden Rule, i.e., “he who has the gold, makes the rules.”
Who decides what is success and what is failure? What words (and their associated connotations and denotations) do we use to describe what that looks like: genuine learning and teaching, or psychometric terms like “achievement” and “performance”? When evaluating our efforts, do we finally abandon even the pretense of employing terms like “assessment” and “judgment” in favor of “[numerical] measurement”—which, as Señor Swacker reminds us, just means putting a number on something regardless of how useful or accurate or trustworthy or empty of meaning those numbers are?
When you have $tudent $ucce$$ and outsize egos and a RheeWorld to win—Pearson is in it to win. For them, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
Just use your imaginations. In George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, we find out that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” And just who decides how to define “equal” and “more equal”?
Exactly the same crowd that goes by the mantra “you can’t control what you can’t measure”—and by that last word they mean “give me a number, any number.”
And you can find it fits the updated version of their hybrid free market/Marxist fundamentalist principles:
The standardized testing of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement employs “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Time to quit feeding the beast. Time for an international opt-out.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
WOW!!!
A particularly disturbing development, because it is not obvious to people, is that a number of states and school districts have adopted specific “online learning platforms,” and are requiring specific “interoperability standards,” and when you look at the ownership or boards of directors of the organizations producing these, you find–guess who?–Pearson and the Gates Foundation.
Of course, these requirements to use these platforms and follow these standards create barriers to entry for smaller publishers of educational materials and extraordinary advantages for a few very large players.
The same kind of thing happened for many decades with state textbook adoption criteria. The four big publishers operated rotating doors whereby former state and district officials would work for them as consultants or employees, and they employed high-powered lobbyists and PR firms to get adoption criteria passed that no small publisher could possibly meet.
In effect, we get private commercial entities controlling, often in subtle and less-than-obvious ways, the gateways though public funds are being spent.
Combine this with the creation of a single set of national standards in order to create “economies of scale,” and you get a scale at which smaller publishers simply cannot compete.
And for these reasons, we are seeing the Walmartization of educational publishing in this country–all the small vendors are being driven out of business and real innovation is grinding to an halt.
If this continues, the time will come when you will have a choice between Pearson and Pearson. Often you won’t even know that that’s the only choice you have because you won’t understand that those formerly separate imprints are all owned by this one company.
The world of BIG DATA is one in which only BIG COMPANIES can play.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Because pixels are a LOT cheaper than paper is, we could be seeing a Renaaissance in educational publishing–a lot of new, competing, innovative products from small producers–a couple of professors who get together and create a n inexpensive and innovative online high-school biology text, for example.
But suppose that in order to get an adoption of that text, its creators have to jump over lots and lots of hurdles created by district and state regulations that require this or that that only a company like Pearson can provide. Suppose that they have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to make the product meet the “interoperability standards” and do reporting in some particular way, and suppose that the product has to be accepted for delivery via a system owned by Pearson, and suppose that it has to be approved by people who are in Pearson’s pocket.
Then it becomes a waste of time and energy and money to create the new product.
We could be living in the age of the low-cost, extraordinarily innovative open source digital textbook.
But in the way that I have just described, the digital revolution in educational publishing has been commandeered, hijacked, to preserve and strengthen a monopoly.
cx: Renaissance
And this is what happens when you wrest the ability to make adoption and purchasing decisions away from individual schools and hand those decisions over to centralized entities.
The solution? Return to building-level, site-based school management.
There are already many completely free textbooks online.
And you are right that centralization and standardization (of which Common Core is part and parcel) will kill these in their crib – -and it will be no accident, because free books represent a direct threat to the bottom line of companies like Pearson.
Even now, without standardization, big companies can ‘convince’ professors to use their texts instead of the free ones by providing things like online (possibly auto-graded) homework and tests that may not be available with the free books.
Of course, standardization allows them to tap into a huge market with minimal investment and effort, which is precisely why folks like Bill Gates are so gung-ho on mandating a single national standard that is carved in stone (Common Core).
the latter makes it very easy for companies like Pearson and Microsoft to “plug themselves in” (to use Gates’ metaphor) and the fact that the standard can not be changed ensures that the “plugged in’ companies will have a continued source of revenue for years to come with minimal expense for development.
It is very exciting to me, SomeDAM, that there are people like you who understand these things, for very few whom I have met have any understanding, at all, of what is happening or of how serious it is.
Again, the first Renaissance resulted from the emergence of printing. Books were made much cheaper because they no longer had to be copied by hand. As a result of the emergence of inexpensive digital, online publication, we could be experiencing a second Renaissance. As you point out, there are, literally, hundreds of superb online open-source textbooks now. I recently sent a young person I know a list of several hundred FREE online courses.
But Pearson and Gates have KILLED the open source digital revolution in its cradle, strangling the emerging competition from these amazing products and from new products like them by creating centralized barriers to access, including onerous, stifling requirements to follow a single curriculum map and pedagogical approach, as laid out in the CCSS, paid for, of course, by Gates and facilitated by Pearson (both present from the beginning as funders of the CCSSO). Having failed to create a single national curriculum gateway and data repository via InBloom, Gates and Pearson are now working the same angle at the state and district levels.
I have argued in detail on these pages for a couple years now that the CCSS was part of a concerted strategic plan to kill the open source digital materials revolution in its cradle, a plan to ensure that this unprecedented pull technology would be usurped by centralized push technologies owned by them and by their partners.
You are absolutely right that digital presented an existential threat to the Pearson business model. But the large-scale, centralized alternative enables Pearson to hold onto its monopoly and Gates to enrich himself further by participating in this monopolization.
And, unfortunately, these mechanisms of monopoly are boring and complex. They don’t make for easy soundbites. And the media are owned by the big players. And so are the bureaucrats and politicians. And so, the promise of digital will not be delivered. Instead, the digital revolution will be hijacked to ensure centralized control and ownership by one or two large entities.
Also a big player in this mess is National Chamber of Commerce and local Chambers of Commerce who are afraid to stand up against the big corporations who are robbing us blind and who speak the speak but do not walk the walk when comes to supporting Public Education and our Teachers.
Whatever happened to antitrust laws?
Teddy Roosevelt is turning in his grave.
I would like to make a prediction: US performance on PISA will go down significantly on the 2015 test.
But that will be pure coincidence, of course.
SomeDAM Poet: really?
I mean, we couldn’t possibly find ourselves being set up for a sucker punch by the self-proclaimed “education reform” crowd, now could we?
They wouldn’t possibly sink that low, now would they? Even they have their limits, don’t they? Morality and character and honesty are among the most important things in life, right?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
We had better practice bobbing and weaving and ducking…
😎
..and hope-a-dope, in the
“Ring of Reform”
Möbius loop
Escher’s stair
Bottom is top
Cheat is fair
Up is down
Back is fore
Round and round
The Common Core
And when we fail, the British Pearson will be laughing at taking us Americans down a peg.
Laughing all the way to the bank.
Ellen T Klock
i agree with your prediction about 2015 PISA scores–they will show that American education is truly awful. This will be easy to do by selecting questions that don’t match totally with the CCSS curriculum standards/benchmarks. Then, I predict that in the next few years, American scores will miraculously rise steadily, “proving” that CCSS really “works.” That, too, can be easily done by selecting questions that closely align with CCSS.
Lisa, they won’t have to manipulate the questions, just drop the cut score. The amount of students who pass or fail is predetermined prior to the administration of the standardized test. And I agree. When they feel it is advantageous to their goals, the children will miraculously “improve”, but it will be the same test with the same results.
(If you have ever graded a NYS Regent’s Exam you know all about “scaled” results – or, “when is a fifty not a fifty – when it is a sixty five”. That’s our “new” math.)
Ellen T Klock
Gosh, This sure seems to add a wrinkle to the “democratic control of public education”
concept. How long has this been going on?
It’s been going on at least since Congress enacted No Child Left Behind in the early 2000s. Clinton’s neoliberal administration greased the path toward permitting robber baron rule over public education in this country though, even when those robbers are foreigners like the UK’s Pearson corporation.
Maybe earlier than that, if you happen to think the countless
“historians” offering a POV in conflict with “schooled” history, are NOT
all LIARS.
Yes, I definitely do think it was birthed earlier, in the 50s, by Milton Friedman, followed by the 1970s Powell Memo, and the 1980s Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. But those were the GOP parents and it took getting the leadership of the Democratic party to make a hard right turn for it to snowball, which it did with the 1990s Dear Hillary Letter from Marc Tucker and consolidated bipartisan support for rightwing policies like NCLB in the early 2000s, followed by RTTT under a black Democratic president.
So I think we can thank the neoliberal Clinton for not protecting the interests of working class people and the public good, and giving us a second Republican party, including deregulated big business, robber barons on this side of the aisle, jobs outsourced to slave labor in foreign countries, the trashing of US labor unions, a dwindling middle class, privatization of public services, federally controlled public education, etc.
And genuinely progressive Democrats should not even consider the possibility that Hillary would be any different from Bill, who she has stood by through thick and thin.
Nice analysis, otherspaces. And thanks for direction to the Powell Memo w/which I was not familiar. Your list is a series of dots which could only be connected and advanced with the ‘right turn’ of the Democrat Party, away from support of the middle classes, implemented y the ‘neoliberals’.
By 1990 Time, Inc. didn’t want to continue to invest in K-12 publishing and sold Scott, Foresman to Rupert Murdoch. Rather than funding many fine new programs, he may have used $ generated in North America to pay for Sky Cable in Europe, which hadn’t been as successful as anticipated. He sold to Pearson.
CBS didn’t value Holt school publishing, sold to HBJ in 1988, I think. Reed Elsevier later acquired Harcourt Holt, then sold to Houghton Mifflin.
U.S. companies used to see el-hi publishing as an endeavor that took responsibility rather than as a cash cow. Bob S knows it can be a massive undertaking to create a quality series.
Thanks S&F Freelancer. I appreciate your connecting the dots. I probably should have provided more details though, like the fact that GOP conservative economist Milton Friedman is considered to be the father of free market neoliberal economics in the US, and he was pushing for the privatization of public education through vouchers. He reiterated this in 1995 in his “Public Schools: Make Them Private.” http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html
As Diane has pointed out, vouchers have never been supported by the populous, but when Clinton became president, charters were just taking off and, by 1996, Clinton was pushing for school choice and charters a lot, including annually in his State of the Union Addresses. He also promoted national standards, high-stakes testing, shutting down low performing schools and firing teachers –blueprints for NCLB and RTTT. Clinton was a strong supporter of Teach for America, too, and he established AmeriCorps, which is a major source of funding for TFA.
Yes, IMHO, no one did more to make today’s economic and education debacles possible than the corporate loving neoliberal Clinton.
Pearson is also a “partner company” (whatever that means) to ACT Aspire, a company that sells a series of elementary and high school tests supposedly designed to make sure children (as young as 3rd grade) are being prepared for the ACT exam.
Here is a novel and equitable solution to the inequities are students and families suffer from. Let’s fire the upper 5-10% of the CEOs and CFOs, whose companies have unjust and fraudulent salary schedules (ones based on 90% of the profits being given to the upper 5% of the management [hah, the ones that do the least amount of work], and the remaining 10% being “shared” by the other 95% of the work staff [aka, “trickle down Reagonomics, aka, “begging for crumbs”]). Instead of seeking to fire the 5-10% of the “lowest teachers” (who can never see great learning gains when they teach the disenfranchised, neglected and oppressed), fire the greedy managers whose companies pay their employees way below and honest living wage; yet whose executives live like kings and queens (aka “pharaohs”). The issue of inequitable, unjust, fraudulent and sinful wages, that allow the few to “benefit” from unjust gains reaped via oppression, has plagued humanity since the beginning of time, and is one of the themes the Prophets have always decried against!!!
This means that Pearson will create money ball by high-jacking the international periodic table. Japan and South Korea will appear on TOP 5. But they will get nothing except for nudge-nudge, wink-wink to please gullible national politicians and conservative education ministry.
If I may correct the last sentence of the post:
“These are the masterbaiters of the educational universe.”
Here’s another Tweet for anyone who wants to copy and paste into their Twitter page:
Monopoly ALERT!
UK’s Pearson
Largest Ed-Bk Pub
Has US contracts CCSS tests
CCSS textbooks
Owns GED
+ online charters
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
UK based Pearson—largest education and book publisher in the world—hold US contracts for CCSS tests, publishes CCSS textbooks aligned with those tests, owns the GED, and has its own chain of virtual corporate Charter schools based in the U.S.
Jefferson believed the Bill of Rights needed to include freedom from monopolies and advocated limited patents, as well as charters forbidding corporate political advocacy. I with he had one that argument.
Pearson is also designing the assessments for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, NBPTS!!!
As I understand it, Ohio is not administering the Common Core tests to all students this year, but instead using some combination of the old and new tests.
My sense is they’re doing that because phasing in the tests makes more sense, particularly for 8th graders, but they’re doing ti quietly because no one can ever, ever admit it makes more sense, because that would be admitting a mistake.
If anyone knows for sure, I’d like to hear about it.
OK. Now I’m really scared. Can someone beam me up, please?
If you guys could look into the belly of the beast, Pearson that is, you all would die laughing. The place is in shambles. Marjorie Scardino left at the end of 2012. John Fallon, the new CEO, is driving the place into the ground as far as being a decent company to work for. The products are all broken, morale is at an all time low, revenue is down big time in North America. No one is allowed to actually visit a customer, that costs too much money. But hey, it’s Pearson, best in breed, indeed.
One shining star is Connections Academy, growing like gangbusters.
I guess the up side is, be glad Pearson is a clusterduck, otherwise they might be really dangerous.
All despotisms end up collapsing under their own stupid, dead weight. But in this case, mechanisms are being put into place that will survive the collapse of the Dark Tower and continue to ensure that the real open source digital revolution does not occur, and these mechanisms include privately owned district and state level curriculum portals and onerous adoption requirements that prevent small competitors from entering the market for online digital educational materials
They can kill us in their death throes! They are still dangerous to us.
Everywhere you look, you see the tentacles of the beast. Here in Florida, if you want to be licensed to teach, you have to pass a state professional licensing test owned and developed by Pearson, and that test is basically a love letter to centralized standards and standardized testing. In effect, the “right” answer is, “I love Big Brother.”
http://laschoolreport.com/just-in-fbi-seizes-ipad-documents-from-la-unified-offices/
from this article:
“Deasy cancelled the iPad program in August after emails surfaced showing he and a deputy had a close relationship with Apple and Pearson, a company that provided educational software for the iPads. To some it looked like the bid was rigged favor of Apple and Pearson.”
One click by land, two clicks by sea, three clicks by testing. And I’ll bet Paul Revere is up there dumbfounded.
LOL
Thanks for this post. It all makes sense now… Pearson owns Connections Academy… here is some background on the roots of ALEC legislation that Connections co-authored, pushed, and is now profiting from: http://sco.lt/75lwKP. I’ve re-shared your blogpost on http://bit.ly/testing_testing with a screenshot pic of the Pearson megalo-monopoly LLC. Thanks again.
What could possibly go wrong?
Leaders in high education positions, such as NM Secretary Duncan and NM Secretary of Education Designee Skandera, and people like Ex-Governor Jeb Bush and his Foundation for Educational Excellence (FEE), the Chiefs for Change, Bill Gates, and others are right there in total support of Pearson, Connections, K-12, Inc., etc. Regardless of the damage that the implementation of Common Core and PARCC will do to the public education system they will not backdown. Their employment and economic futures depend up satisfying the greed of such dangerous companies as Pearson. With the support of people of like Duncan and Skandera and other these companies are fleecing the American taxpayers from millions, no billions, of dollars that could be better spent on true education reform for our children. These people and companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Legislators in some states are starting to stand up and rejecting this theft of our states’ finances but I fear in large part it is too late. The hunger bear in England has it tentacles into the financial support of elected and appointed officials so deep that it is almost impossible to cut them off. These elected and appointed officials do not want to turn their backs on the Golden Goose that will lay the golden egg for their future lives. They will walk away and never look back at the damage they have done to our children and our children’s children