Continuing his review of Pearson’s 88-page manifesto for a revolution in educatiion (led by Pearson), Peter Greene here reviews the claim that assessment should drive instruction.
To summarize,
“In other words, we need to teacher-proof classrooms. Teachers are human and variable and not reliable cogs in the educational machine. If we could get them all bound to assessments, that would tie them into a system that would be smooth and elegant. And profitable.
“Assessment is the new Missing Link for transforming education into a teacher-proof, school-proof, techno-driven, highly profitable process.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is Pearson as pervasive in England as it is here? Why do so many American educrats buy wholesale a non- American domination of our educational values and economy?
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Beats me.
I don’t know why so many Americans accept that their lawmakers are allowing contractors to dictate public education policy.
Contractors aren’t supposed to have this huge, outsize role. Contractors are driving policy. They’re doing that because lawmakers are allowing them do it.
Pearson has an obvious financial interest in directing public policy in a way that funnels public dollars to Pearson. That isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s fact and it’s ALWAYS been true of government contractors.
Would politicians give defense contractors this huge amount of deference and idiotic assumption of good faith? Why then do they give that to education contractors? I don’t know why education contractors are such special snowflakes that taking a hard look at the obvious tension between their bottom line and sound public policy may not be mentioned. It’s ridiculous.
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The obvious reason that contractors get control of policy, whether federal or state, is campaign contributions.
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Rule 1: FOLLOW THE MONEY
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Pearson started its own college in England
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Rather than assessment being the “missing link,”I prefer to think of assessment as another tool that informs rather than dictates instruction. When the assessment interferes with valuable instructional time, it ceases to be useful. Instead it becomes a distraction. When an assessment tool with an arbitrary cut score is being used as a weapon against children of poverty and teachers, it becomes a destructive force and serves no useful purpose. Pearson has the audacity to announce that their goal is to make the process profitable. There is no reason that American school children should participate in a testing regime that is of no use and serves to enrich a corporation with an anti-public education agenda.
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I tried to find an e-mail address for Peter, as I found an unusual intersection of two significant women in the field of education….touching upon issues of charter schools, wealthy foundations, ruthless public school takeovers, racial matters, Pearson and several other things….I run into google roadblocks, twitter impracticality…..nothing gives me a way to send him an e-mail. Perhaps that is a practical matter, done on purpose in self defense. I would respect a slightly larger than twitter word limit.
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Joe, go to Peter’s website or blog to contact him
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perhaps the fifth time will be the charm. I am misunderstanding something basic.
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Reading your summary of the Pearson manifesto, I am once again drawn back to Mario Savio’s prescient 1964 speech to the UCAL, Berkeley students assembled in Sproul Plaza:
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
We know that Pearson views that education as a ‘machine. Pearson’s ideology’ is “odious”and makes us makes us feel “sick at heart. We – educators, parents, members of the community – are left as the only groups left to “prevent the machine from working at all”.
What we, as educators, parents and members of the community must do is stop the “gears”, “wheels” and levers” of the Pearson machine, by attacking its core pedagogy and ideology.
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The linchpin is testing, so parental opt outs are critical for making this house of cards fall. That should not be very difficult to do since student information will be stored in data warehouses that companies can access without parental permission, and scores will be used to rank and place students in education and jobs from birth til death.
What caring parent would want their child’s opportunities in life to be determined by multi-national conglomerates like Pearson? Reach out to parents.
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Because of course, teachers are not doing their own assessments! *sigh* The problem I have with the statement that Pearson’s assessments are the be-all, end-all for instruction is that we don’t even get their scores back for months and when we do, there is no explanation of what was right or wrong, just a pass/fail score.The students will even ask-how will we know what we got wrong? You won’t. How would that possibly help drive instruction?
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Exactly, Texas Teacher– it won’help. And to make matters worse, comparisons are not made scores for identical cohorts. One year’s grade 11 scores will be compared to next year’s grade 11 scores– those of an entirely different cohort. And those scores will be, as you say revealed months after the testing has occurred. It is all, IMO, intended to undermine public schools, whose duty is to create an educated citizenry. Educated citizens are bad for the powers that be and are determined to keep being.
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