Stephanie Simon reports in Politico.com on a major investigation of Pearson and its extraordinary ability to profit from its activities, whether or not they are successful.
She writes:
A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson’s contracts set forth specific performance targets — but don’t penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used.
POLITICO examined hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports and marketing materials, in the first comprehensive look at Pearson’s business practices in the United States.
The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for instance, declined to seek competitive bids for a new student data system on the grounds that it would be “in the best interest of the public” to simply hire Pearson, which had done similar work for the state in the past. The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.
Administrators at the University of Florida also skipped competitive bids on a huge project to build an online college from scratch. They were in a hurry. And they knew Pearson’s team from a previous collaboration. That project hadn’t been terribly successful, but no matter: UF dug up the old contract and rewrote it to give Pearson the new job — a job projected to be worth $186 million over the next decade.
And two public colleges in Texas not only gave Pearson a no-bid contract to build online classes, they agreed to pay the company to support 40,000 enrollments, no matter how many students actually signed up.
Pearson has aggressive lobbyists, top-notch marketing and a highly skilled sales team. Until the New York attorney general cracked down in late 2013, Pearson’s charitable foundation made a practice of treating school officials from across the nation to trips abroad, to conferences where the only education company represented was Pearson.
The story of Pearson’s rise is very much a story about America’s obsession with education reform over the past few decades.
Ever since a federal commission published “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 — warning that public education was being eroded by “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people” — American schools have been enveloped in a sense of crisis. Politicians have raced to tout one fix after the next: new tests, new standards, new classroom technology, new partnerships with the private sector.
K-12 superintendents and college administrators alike struggle to boost enrollment, raise graduation rates, improve academic outcomes — and to do it all while cutting costs.
In this atmosphere of crisis, Pearson promises solutions. It sells the latest and greatest, and it’s no fly-by-night startup; it calls itself the world’s leading learning company. Public officials have seized it as a lifeline.
“Pearson has been the most creative and the most aggressive at [taking over] all those things we used to take as part of the public sector’s responsibility,” said Michael Apple, a professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And that is only a sampling of the contents of this explosive report. Read it to find out where your taxpayer dollars are going.
As an added bonus, Simon also wrote about how Pearson used its foundation to bolster its profits.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html#ixzz3RLxhh6ub
“The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.”
How does that happen? If I buy a car and it’s a “disaster” from the day I drive it off the lot, I don’t have to pay any extra to have it fixed – they damn well better fix it if they don’t want to get sued into next Tuesday. How is it that governments have to pay Pearson to “fix” their own “mistakes”?
Four possibilities- (1) The states don’t have lemon laws or, (2) the laws don’t cover Pearson products. (3) The school systems lack effective representation, in the writing of contracts. (4) School decision makers want to pay Pearson, big bucks.
I pick the fourth.
I would pick 3 and/or 4.
I think local people are at a huge disadvantage when contracting with giant entities. It’s not a slam on them (us). It’s just true.
They’re dealing with very sophisticated parties and there’s this crazy illusion that it is all even-steven at the table, and it is not.
The best thing they could do is admit that going in because then they can plan for it and try to even it up a little.
Linda…you left out the biggest problem of all…payola….which infects not only our school systems, but all government entities through lobbyists giftings paid for by the Kochs and their assorted fellow greed mongers.
You would be surprised at the lack of contracts on multimillion dollar deals. Sometimes no contract exist at all.
Ellen,
Payola is imbedded in # 4.
Regards.
Software has no warranty, expressed or implied. It;s one of the few products you can sell all day long that does not have to work and there are few legal ramifications. Plus, school districts seldom sue, there is really no incentive for them to sue.
It would be interesting to trace the tentacles of Pearson’s reach into our legislators. I would like to know who got paid to clear the way for Pearson to get such sweet deals, especially where there was no competitive bid. Isn’t the government required to get competitive bids for services?
Retired teacher,
I believe that every state and the Feds have a list of registered lobbyists. I wish an enterprising journalist would collate those lists to see who is being paid to take care of Pearson business.
Great opportunity for our resident statistician, Mercedes, who keeps us up to date on all things that border on the illegal and immoral.
In New Mexico the Pearson tentacles are very, very short and only two in number. One leads to Governor Martinez — a person who knows little to nothing about education. The other leads to Secretary of Education Designee Skandera — very person who received a free right to visited the Pearson Headquarters in England, who is deeply involved in the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Jeb Bush’s Chiefs of Change. Both organizations are deeply involved with Pearson and the very organizations that Skandera wants to keep happy so she has as financial and/or political future after New Mexico. I have no problem believing that Martinez and Skandera did everything they can to insure Pearson was “given” the contacts for Common Core and PARCC without much, if any, oversight by the Legislature or Public Education Department.
“The public trust is vital in everything we do.”
Is the “we”, the Libyan government, which Mother Jones identified as the 3rd largest Pearson shareholder?
Capital in the form of money knows no loyalty nor is it patriotic.
Come on Linda, that’s a stretch. Pearson cannot control who buys their stock.
NRN.
Corporate obligation is to shareholders. There is no structural basis for altruistic motives. Even the minimum ethical standard, adherence to the law, is an assessment about the effect of potential punishment, on the firms’ bottom line. Current examples include Wall Street financial firms and automotive companies, aware of fatal design flaws, who chose potential punishment, over avoidance of driver and passenger, maiming and death.
At the Ravitch blog, you had a predecessor who sounded very similar.
He called himself “Teachingeconomist”. Any relation?
Diane –
Stephanie Simon has done wonderful research, but without you and your blog, so many of us would never have said, “Well, duh!” upon reading it. Thank you for helping us win this for our kids, be they our own, biological, ones, or those who come through the doors of our classrooms every day.
Ditto, Diane!
This info needs to get out in a Big Way. Add the list of lobbyists?Twitterstorm?
It’s a great piece and thanks to Ms. Simon for great work, but I hope she does a follow-up where we see the revolving door aspect of these “public-private partnerships”.
It’s something I know politicians don’t want to talk about (I’ve asked) but we really have to look at how people go from government to private entities that contract with government.
This is the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s how K12 got a contract in NC:
“Cabarrus’ superintendent first heard from K12 and NC Learns by way of a lobbyist named Jeff Barnhart, a five-term state representative of Cabarrus County who had left the state House just two months earlier. The deal, he proposed, was that Cabarrus would approve the virtual school’s application — and share in a fraction of the school’s revenue, which K12 projected to top $34 million by the end of its fifth year. The lawyer K12 paid to represent its interests was the current state senator from Cabarrus.”
This is an ethical collapse. It’s systemic. It doesn’t matter what regulatory frame you build on top of it, because the foundation is rotted out.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/online-charter-schools-winning?utm_term=.odYAVNdvB#.bteaboX6p
Forwarded this to four list-serves in education.
As our colleagues here, and now the world, all know, the FBI recently took dozens of boxes of files on the fiduciary activities of ex Supt. of LAUSD, John Deasy, which include the distorted bids of Apple and Pearson for the hugely costly iPad fiasco in LA. We await news of the results of their investigation. However, Deasy was able to cut a deal with the BoE to NOT prosecute him or even investigate him for all his alleged financial misdeeds.
And we also see how Fetullah Gulen, through his vast array of also alleged paid off supporters, can avoid his misdeeds and theft of American taxpayers money to run his questionable charter schools, The FBI is also on his case not only with LA’s Magnolia charters and their financial cooking of the books, but in other states as well. Seems as though when you have Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino king of the world, as your friend, then you don’t fear the authorities…and you hire a well known charter entrepreneur, Mdm. Young, to run your discredited charter schools
So no bid contracts to Pearson, and others, become the norm for this den of alleged thieves.
We should call on every contract let to Pearson to be investigated at every level. It is an outrage that the FBI has not been knocking on every Pearson and every business office door. WE should call on Senator Alexander for a joint congressional investigation of Pearson Education!
“The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.” Isn’t that what they’ve been doing with Microsoft for years? Once you’ve bought into a lousy system, it’s hard to get out. Kickbacks are just ancillary benefit.
I would love to know how the various edTPA (teacher certification/licensure assessment) deals were “negotiated” by Pearson. One of their many tentacles.
Here is the edTPA participation map:
http://edtpa.aacte.org/state-policy
The edTPA website:
http://www.pearsonassessments.com/teacherlicensure/edtpa.html
An edTPA review:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/27_04/27_04_au.shtml
Interesting side note; the Pearson owned, high-stakes edTPA is causing schools of education to teach to the test! Test pep for future teachers. Here are some quotes fro the article from former high school teacher, Wayne Au, who is now an associate professor in the education program at the University of Washington, Bothell, and an editor for Rethinking Schools:
“The edTPA is shaping our program in some not-so-healthy ways. Instead of focusing on good teaching, our conversations are quickly turning to how to prepare our students for the edTPA. Our student teaching seminars increasingly emphasize the test’s logistics, choosing the right kind of video segment for the test, choosing the right kind of unit for the test, making sure everyone is using the same language as the test.
Without a doubt, the edTPA is standardizing our teacher education program, and I’m not sure it has been for the better. In our teacher education program, an explicit politics of social justice is woven throughout most of our credential coursework. However, when we began looking at our students’ edTPAs last spring, one thing was striking: The political commitments of our teacher credential program were almost nowhere to be found within our students’ work. Students who demonstrated explicit commitments to teaching for social justice in coursework and during student teaching, who saw curriculum and instruction as an important place to ask students to critically consider inequality and power, simply left their politics out of their edTPAs.
Several of my current students felt a professional split from the edTPA, too. Three have told me directly that they did not feel that the edTPA accurately reflected their teaching, and so they “taught to the test” by developing materials specifically and only for the edTPA. In an email to me, recent graduate Bethany Rickard said:
The edTPA forced me to address historical content in a specific, scripted way. It was difficult to teach authentically while adhering to the edTPA guidelines. Instead of planning my lessons as I would normally do, I had to repeatedly consult a 54-page handbook to make sure that I was following the script. . . . The prompts provided by Pearson did not allow me to fully express my teaching philosophy. In the three days I taught my edTPA learning segment, I lost a little of the joy that I find in teaching.
The edTPA effectively sanitized much of our students’ work by limiting what they thought would be “acceptable” within the confines of the standardized test. In the process, many of my students felt they couldn’t demonstrate what they were capable of and who they were as teachers.
Standardization is a double-edged sword. It may (or may not) signal to the world outside of teacher education that we do have high standards, that teaching is a profession and not just a simple, technical task that any warm body off the street can easily do.
On the flip side, as a high-stakes, standardized test, regardless of the design, the edTPA falls prey to the same problems with other high-stakes, standardized tests: the negative impact on teaching and curriculum, and the reliance on distant assessors to make sense of a sample of student work and then pass final judgment. Given the severe lack of teachers of color and teachers from working-class backgrounds, I wonder if the edTPA will systematically reproduce race and class inequalities, like every other high-stakes, standardized test.
Consequently, the edTPA raises a fundamental question: What happens when a thoughtfully designed performance assessment becomes a high-stakes, standardized test? Based on my own experience thus far, the implementation of the edTPA feels very much like what we already know about such tests. Someone outside of and far away from my classes and students is taking control of my curriculum and teaching, and the end result is the distortion of teaching and learning—at both the university and K–12 levels.”
PEARSON:
Teaching & Learning Distortion R Us!
No one cares!!!! You can write blogs all day & all night. It just doesn’t matter. Good luck!!!
We shall overcome!!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Cross- posted athttp://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/A-MUST-READ-Stephanie-Sim-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Data_Investigation_Marketing_Money-150212-744.html#comment533223 with this comment taken fro other blogs here… which say it all about the testing mania unleaded by bush as a “weapon of mass instruction” the title of John Taylor Gatto’s new book.
To link to the “Top 25” suggested research articles about testing research click here. To link to all suggested research articles published in American Educational Research Association (AERA) journals, click here.
James Harvey, director of the National Superintendents Roundtable, wrote a terrific article : One of the details about education research that was underscored in my doctoral studies was how little can be learned from horse races in education and how inappropriate they are for children, since there is always just one winner and everyone else is labeled a loser. How ironic that the main component of legislation entitled, “No Child Left Behind” (and it’s evil spawn, “Race to the Top”) is horse racing.
“Fifty years of research in the United States and abroad documents a powerful correlation between low student achievement and poverty and disadvantagement.”
Since American teachers are scapegoated for the achievement gap between low income and higher income students virtually every single day in the US, but no one ever mentions this critical global data, it can never be emphasized enough that poor children perform worse than wealthier kids EVERYWHERE: “International Tests Show Achievement Gaps in All Countries” http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/