Peter Greene continues his analysis of Barber and Hill’s projection of a test-dominated future.
Come the Pearson Renaissance, testing will be the linchpin of education.
As Greene writes:
“How do we tie curriculum and teaching together? How do we fix the achievement ceiling an finally make students smarter? How do we make learning really “professional” and not just something filled with human frailty? How do we collect and crunch more data than God? How do we create an ungameable system?
All assessing, all the time.
This is assessment with a new purpose– not to give a grade, but to determine whether Pat and Chris are ready to move on to the next stage of the curriculum. I once posited that Common Core standards were not so much standards as they are data tags for marking, storing, cataloging and crunching everything students do.”
Human judgment is replaced by the Pearson matrix.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Does anybody have the energy to respond to this one?http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/26/charter-schools-high-scores-performance-mistakes-discipline-column/20831537/
Thanks!
I say we start a revolution against the British.
Again.
I know I should not always connect the dots (it’s hard not to), but it makes me sick to see Kate Middleton and her useless husband traipsing around the globe with baby blue blood playing global diplomat (to cover up all the horrors of the British empire) while the British parliament allows this enfant terrible known as Pearson to roam our American education system and bite down hard upon the teat of our federal government, which nurses this Rosemary’s baby.
It’s disgusting. Plain disgusting.
Of course, our own Congress and Senate are to blame as well, but I want to know what’s going on across the pond.
Mercedes, are you up to a WHO’s WHO in the Pearson labyrinth? Maybe you have done this already? If so, do you have a link. Name some British names.
While testing has its place, I have never read that testing makes students smarter. To make students smarter, we have to reduce poverty, provide quality prenatal service and daycare, work with parents on the importance of reading to their children. We have to improve the socioeconomic levels of the families by offering good paying rather than minimum wage jobs,
As far as making instruction “teacher proof,” I think Pearson has another profitable agenda., computer instruction that supplants traditional instruction. The huge flaw is that the results of this type of instruction fails for children of poverty, and bright children often find it tedious and uninspiring. Young children do best in a constructivist environment with hands on experiences. Computer instruction has its limitations and does nothing to develop the whole child unless we want American children to be like the feral Romanian children left in their cribs without human interaction. A textbook company does not have the best interests of children at heart; their goal is to make a profit.
Pearson running amok here is the polar opposite example of how individualist crony capitalism trumps the kind of collectivism that would do all those wonderful things you stated that help people and families be and stay strong.
This, I think, is the single hardest lesson Americans have had to learn, are learning, and will continue to learn. They still have very far to go in learning this lesson.
Pearson does not care if instruction works, just whether it can be sold, and a near monopoly on the whole architecture, from teacher education to the efficiencies of kids staring at screens with some occasional prompts from a low wage tech will make all the folks who think this saves money smile.