Jason Stanford, a Texas journalist, is appalled that President Obama and Arne Duncan met with Pearson to get advice about how to prepare low-income students for college. The White House refers to Pearson as “the world’s leading learning company,” instead of the world’s largest testing company.
What advice do you think Pearson offered? Stanford bets: more testing, better testing.
He notes that Texas has a contract with Pearson for nearly $500 million. Thanks to high-stakes testing, 76,000 students will not graduate. Testing did not make them smarter. Instead they have been effectively consigned to lifetime struggle and poverty.
The mind meld between Duncan and Pearson is alarming.
Even more alarming is Duncan’s contempt for America’s students, parents, and teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yet another example of corruption…government and corporations making decisions without any input from those affected. I’m disgusted, but not surprised. They should hang their heads in shame.
The short and obvious answer is that Pearson will tell him what he wants to hear.
The other short and obvious answer is that Pearson is most likely his future employer. (I mean his future official employer – they’re already his de facto employer.)
Another example that the so called “reform movement” is really a privatization movement. $$$$$$
Is isn’t so much that it’s “Pearson” to me, it’s that it’s a closed circle. Duncan promotes people who agree with him. It is almost comical at this point. How many times is he planning on talking about Huffman in TN and the ed reformer in DC? This is a big country. Why are we always talking about two people who work in education?
His circle is about 15 people, well, 16 since he added Amanda Ripley. I can recite the script by now.
Between the waivers they granted to surround themselves with people who came from Gates and the ridiculously close relationship with Michelle Rhee (where Duncan actually campaigned for her and sat on a panel with her WHILE the US DOE inspector general was conducting an inquiry into cheating) he only hears one view. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the view he hears validates his work.
To accept a lecture on “rigor” and “honesty” from this person who has set his agency up to validate his own views is just beyond me. I can’t do it. I think he should look in the mirror.
He could remedy what is really a management/leadership problem. It’s not too late. He could ADD some people and perhaps hear something different.
great comments
Don’t hold your breath, Chiara.
I agree completely.
And Duncan’s corruption runs even more deeply, particularly when it comes to the very sleazy and manipulative Michelle Rhee.
It appears that Arne Duncan also had a direct role in the firing of Michael Winerip—the former education reporter for the New York Times—now relegated to a “fun & interesting” section of the NY Times that whimsically looks at “The Baby Boomers” as they enter the grandparent years. (And some of the articles ARE fun to read. No doubt.)
In the spring of 2012, Winerip authored “The Piece” that NAILED IT—-more specifically it nailed Duncan and his cozy and highly suspect buddy, Michelle Rhee.
He had them and they were caught naked.
I remember reading it, fascinated and disgusted with the things Duncan and Rhee were doing but also thinking that NOW with Winerip’s devastating, Pulitzer Prize quality investigative journalism, there is absolutely no way for either Rhee or Duncan to survive this.
Apparently, I was wrong and it seems very likely that Arne Duncan also read Winerip’s piece, went into a rage and then called up his friends at the NYT; Winerip, a superb journalist isn’t a billionaire. He has to work for a living, like.most of us and so he’s been forced to accept what he’s been given.
I just hope that the story of the multiple corruptions and the Quid Pro Quo backroom deals eventually come to light anyway.
Either I am still asleep or I am in another world….Did I just read????
This month Pearson executives met with Barack Obama and Duncan at the White House to discuss ways to help low-income students get into college.??????
So………………………………..
The solution to our Testing Problem is to ask the Makers of the Tests how to Prepare for their Tests ?????????????????????????????
Arne and Obama are now officially scraping the bottom of the barrel …with taxpayers money to get better test results…
We buy the tests from Pearson…so now. give them more money for the Test-Prep material..
This is insane!!!
Interestingly, Gates is pushing ways to limit the number of kids getting into college as a way of stemming the very large noncompletion rates.
Jason Stanford, thank you for standing up for children. You are a breath of fresh air and applaud your honest and courageous writing.
The White House ignores parents and teachers continually. How many letters have been sent from parents and teachers and been ignored by the President? And yet, the President has the audacity, to openly engage Pearson, a testing company, while ignoring and dismissing the multitude of voices of educators, parents, and taxpayers gathering and growing in dissent across America. President Obama, your silence is growing louder and louder, and it is absolutely shameful. I weep for your legacy. I weep even more for our country’s children.
Excellent comment! Parents are being dismissed and ignored.
Has anyone read the book “Extortion” ?……..We are buying it today……
I also find Duncan’s wide-eyed denials of influence hard to take. That’s a real question. We have a huge problem in this country with industry capture of regulators, and the DOE has a broad regulatory role.
The public knows this. If they didn’t know it prior to the financial crash they know it now. Framing these questions as conspiracy theories or sniping is not a real response.
We know that the people at the DOE were lobbied on for-profit colleges and gutted regulations in response to that. That happened. It was widely reported. Warren in the Senate says his agency is a “lap dog” for lenders. He can’t just brush this off. He has to provide a serious, respectful, specific response and defense to those questions. They’re completely valid questions.
Please remember, Pearson doesn’t have a seat at the table.
K12 Inc. @K12Learn 50m
Wake up New York! @schoolchoicewk begins now & Newark Prep students are ready to ring NY Stock Exchange opening bell. pic.twitter.com/kiYu72SzuY
Bash public schools week begins on Wall Street! Public school kids won’t notice any difference between this week and any other, however. Every week is bash public schools week. Every week they watch political leaders, business and media celebrities join hands and bash their schools.
Can we drop the convenient fiction that Newark charter schools are non-profit? K12 is a for-profit company. Does anyone DENY they’re a for-profit company?
Arne Duncan probably cannot spell d-y-s-f-u-n-c-t-i-o-n-a-l, much less recognize it. The politically corrupt “education industrial complex” is a “closed” system that operates like a Nazi regime. Obama is caught up in the system and is helpless to change it, therefore his denial only perpetuates it.
Obama’s legacy will be that he brought a return to the culture of Jim Crow. Pearson’s legacy will be a tsunami of mental illness that will change the face of American culture
to Medieval proportions.
What a shame that Michelle Obama has not had more influence helping the children who are innocent victims of this educational dictatorship. It will take strong women working together to clean up this mess made by immature “little men”.
What you said, Amy: “Obama’s legacy will be that he brought a return to the culture of Jim Crow.” You’re looking right through the crap to the truth.
agreed
Pearson issued a press release after the White House endorsement of their company, of course. It’s valuable to them, that appearance.
Can someone translate this from “corporate marketing” to English? :
“Pearson’s new commitment builds upon the company’s successful work to improve achievement while increasing access and affordability. Through this work, Pearson has supported hundreds of colleges and universities in leveraging technology to redesign entire courses to achieve better learning outcomes at lower cost.”
Is this online courses? Is the DOE selling those, too? My son works for a Honda supplier and they were using online (distance) courses for employee training but they’re going back to live. They discovered the workers weren’t talking to one another (obviously, because they’re sitting alone) and they want them to share information, form relationships and collaborate.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/01/prweb11496855.htm
Not just online courses, but technology that monitors students during lectures.
http://www.pearsoned.com/beyond-clickers-teaching-resource-center-debuts-new-classroom-technology/#.UubFbN7Tn5p
“leveraging technology to redesign entire courses to achieve better learning outcomes at lower cost”. I’m going to try translate. I think this means: “adapting 19thC. teaching methods, i.e., the expert lectures to the passive listener, to 21stC learners, wherein the passive students watch expert lectures”… It’s so much cheaper than the interaction of teacher and student! And the “better learning outcomes” part is easily manipulated!
Chiara Duggan: notice how easily Pearson can claim to “improve achievement” instead of “improve learning and teaching.” Not many will understand what they are really saying…
The terms “achievement” and “performance” are psychometric terms that describe what standardized tests allegedly measure. To state in a very few words: by their very nature such tests measure very little, are inherently imprecise, and in practice have contributed to severely restricting genuine learning and teaching.
Once again, the leading charterites/privatizers use certain words and phrases to confuse, confound, and conceal.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Recently was assisting relative in a hospital and found my conversations with various medical personnel very close to the conversations we are having in education. I will paraphrase: Hospitals and care facilities have been taken over by corporations that employ MBA’s who know nothing about medicine or patient care and make decisions solely on bottom line metrics—sound familiar. As one nurse put it: there is a total disconnect between the decisions made in offices on the top floor and what we are dealing with in hospital rooms. The goal appears always to reduce medical personnel, increase use of technology, and the provision of services based on a number of calculations that have nothing to do with providing the best possible care for the patient. There are some services–education/health care—that a society decides should be provided as a required part of the common good. These services will not make money, they are offered as part of a social contract we all buy into and support. Tragically, the commons area is now being colonized by corporations who define the common good as what is good for their stockholders and administrators. Again, as one nurse put it, while big bonuses for this one hospital firm were handed out on the top floor, she had her case load doubled —something very wrong with this kind of thinking and behavior.
they see it as a simple equation: labor cost money, things make money (for the company selling them).
Since everything in our government is being run for the sake of big businesses, we can expect to see the first cut and the second showered with money.
The fallacy of privatization is the belief that you can run an organization more efficiently and at the same time provide the same quality. In production industries that is true, but in service industries the quality of service will always decline because the services they provide demand human interaction and judgement—which is not cheap.
You are touching now on a subject close to my heart. We have sadly lost our eldest of 3; he was long victim of autoimmune illnesses not well understood by medicine as yet. We were very fortunate thro my husband’s job to have access to any medical resources we could find, yet even these well-endowed hospitals were subject to such MBA-sourced restrictions. Suddenly he would be moved to another floor due to fine-tuned economics, & we would have to spend days with the new nurses to ensure that medical protocols were continued, as their economics-driven computer systems had not kept pace with the needs of their patients. We found the best hospitals were those endowed by Catholic [or other religious] endowments, where there was some sort of morale overriding the purely profit-driven aims of today’s corporate medical centers. This experience caused me to tremendously empathize with the usual middle-class person at the mercy of today’s healthcare realities– as I do with the usual middle-class person at the mercy of today’s educational realities.
I am very, very sorry to hear of your loss.
Excellent observation and comments. We need to craft the language to interpret and explain to the general public.
“Do You want a Corporate Takeover of our public schools?”
“Do you want them to do to education what they have done to health care?”
“Just as doctors are no longer allowed to provide the treatment they recommend, would you want your child’s teacher or principal to tell you that they can’t deliver what your daughter or son really requires because ‘our CEO and CEO won’t approve it.'”
What they are already saying in medical care and what they are working towards in education is a system where the FIRST PRIORITY is adding to the wealth of people and companies that are already extremely wealthy.
“And in the warped, twisted minds of The Privatizers, the only thing that counts is putting more money into the pockets of their executives and investors, almost all of whom are already multi-millionaires or billionaires.”
“To these people, absolutely no amount of money is enough; like a drug addict, the more they have, the more they want. There is no such thing as “enough money” no matter how much they have they’ll still want more.”
“And, in most cases, they get even meaner and more selfish as they accumulate more money. They constantly complain about paying taxes. Some of them think they shouldn’t have to pay any taxes no matter what. Some of them secretly hide their money in banks located in other countries so that they can cheat us out of paying their fair share.”
“Some of these people actually say that being greedy is good. They actually like to read books by people who say that being selfish and not sharing with anyone else is what everyone should do. Some of them actually hate poor people—even the poor people who have jobs and work almost every single day. They say that if you are poor it is 100% your own fault. Sometimes they even like to make fun of poor people and laugh behind their backs. Some of think that if you are rich, you deserve it and if you are poor than you ‘deserve’ that too.”
“Are these the people we should allow to take control of out schools and determine what is best for our children?”
“If you think the answer is ‘NO” then join us in fighting back against these people. We are the ones who pay for our schools. Not them. We should keep our school in the hands of the taxpaying public and not let them be seized by a small group of the very wealthy who just want the money we shell out; they don’t hate our children who attend our public schools; they just think of them as obstacles who, unfortunately can get in the way of their dream of making even more money by short changing our students. “Nothing personal”, they say, “it’s just business.”
So let’s join together and let them know that our schools and the education of our children are INDEED “personal”. And we’re not going to allow you to take them away from us just so you can further line your already bulging pockets.
We do need to use the term ASSESSMENTS rusher then tests. There is an important difference. Assessments rate the value of a product , our children, to their system .
No need to weep for Obama’s legacy – the man does not care about us never has, never will. His eye is on the Big Prize awaiting him when he walks out of the White House for the last time – a multi-million dollar annual income from speaking engagements, seats on corporate boards, etc. I believe he is only counting down the days to when he does not have to pay lip service to those pesky 99 percenters.
May Obama, for the rest of his days, be followed by the reproachful stares of all the people he let down – people who believed in “Hope” and “Change,” who were summarily ditched once he won the election.
I so agree.
agreed entirely
When one looks at Bill Clinton, who destroyed AFDC, did whatever the vile, criminal mentality of Dick Morris to him to do, for almost two years, signed laws that eliminated regulations on large media entities, banks and other financial sector firms, why do both those love him and hate him think of him as some sort of “progressive”?
Clinton gave us NAFTA and other odious trade agreements that are largely responsible for the economic decline of the middle class and the obscene degree of income inequality that has taken place over the past 20 plus years.
And now, despite all the harm he did while President, Clinton lives the life of a Plutocratic Prince, traveling in ultra luxury, all around the world, and still largely revered bye your average American liberal and Democrat. It’s awfully frustrating to get some of my best friends and family to grasp specifics and look at the details of Clinton’s actual policies while President.
And in many cases I’m describing Ivy League graduates—not your average person on the block.It’s amazing to me how even the most brilliant and educated people can be taken in by symbolism and grand rhetoric and overlook the actual policy is that will tell them what really went on in any particular administration.
Obviously, Barack Obama sees this as well.and he knows that he will probably receive very little if any flack for his policies after leaving office, just as Clinton has received very little flack—except of course, from the predictable right wing sources.
As much as I hate to say it, I think your average liberal Democrat will continue to think highly of Barack Obama as long as he’s alive, and will put all of the blame on the sociopathic Republican opposition in Congress.
Finally, while I will obviously agree that congressional Republicans are clearly sick, demented, vicious and even worse, how is anyone but Barack Obama responsible for Arne Duncan?
Because PEARSON HOLDS the Purse Strings…power and $$$$$. Beside Arne, the third stringer, NEEDS to rub elbows with the rich, makes him feel powerful and important, which he is not. Arne is a (fll in the blanks). I am so sick and tired of him, his tirades, his silliness, and his spins. Remember, he did say that he learned how to read in elemtnary school, learned how to play basketball in high school, and learned how to think critically in college. OMG…think critically in college! OY. He can’t even critically analyze his own speeches. Oh forgot, someone writes them for him. Duncan is NOT even a good script reader. Oh forgot, he learned how to think critically in college.
When Arne Duncan says:
“I think that’s a very important question of what role does philanthropy or the corporate side have, and anyone who thinks that those who are major donors to education, or those giving a lot, have a seat at the table in terms of policy making, nothing could be further from the truth.”
Arne is speaking the truth! It is Arne Duncan that has a seat at the Pearson table and following their directions!
Recent post from Pearson re their ” Big Bet on EFFICACY”, has a link to http://WWW.nesta.org.UK. They say ” We are an innovative Charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life”. They are nonprofit. A cute cartoon at the site explains what they do.
It would be interesting to see what kind of ” skills , people and funding” they will provide Pearson as they seek to achieve EFFICACY..
Has Duncan ever addressed this:
“That organization is the Educational Credit Management Corporation, which, since its founding in Minnesota nearly two decades ago, has been the main private entity hired by the Department of Education to fight student debtors who file for bankruptcy on federal loans.
Founded in 1994, just after the largest agency backstopping federal student loans collapsed, Educational Credit is now facing concerns that its tactics have grown ruthless. A review of hundreds of pages of court documents as well as interviews with consumer advocates, experts and bankruptcy lawyers suggest that Educational Credit’s pursuit of student borrowers has veered more than occasionally into dubious terrain. A law professor and critic of Educational Credit, Rafael Pardo of Emory University, estimates that the agency oversteps in dozens of cases per year.
Others have also been highly critical.
A panel of bankruptcy appeal judges in 2012 denounced what it called Educational Credit’s “waste of judicial resources,” and said that the agency’s collection activities “constituted an abuse of the bankruptcy process and defiance of the court’s authority.”
Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat who has introduced a bill to limit predatory tactics, said, “The government should hold its agents to the highest standards, and I don’t know that we’ve been doing that.”
Is there industry capture in his agency?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/us/loan-monitor-is-accused-of-ruthless-tactics-on-student-debt.html?_r=0
I wanted to share this great video of a high school senior defending his teachers and speaking out against the Common Core. This video deserves a blog post.
How scary to read this and especially when Obama plans to address education in his speech tomorrow night. Does he NOT GET that he is supposed to REPRESENT THE PEOPLE???? Tomorrow night I don’t want to hear about Pearson in the education part of his speech. I don’t want to hear “college and career ready” as it is framed in a corporate context not a humanistic one. I want to hear that he is either ending or putting a moratorium on all things common core and the tests that go with it! I want to hear that public education students once again can find joy and engagement in learning. That teachers are actually allowed to teach without top down punitive and nonsensical directives. Our nation’s neediest children need to find joy in their school and learning – their lives are hard enough. I want my title one students to be able to have a “Sidwell Friends” kind of experience (and believe me there are many teachers at my school who could share their passions in various endeavors with the students in ways done regularly at a school like Sidwell Friends! How can Obama address inequality and continue this test-driven “human capital” humiliating and degrading “learning experience (not for his kids of course). Is it not over-stepping ed policy to be meeting Pearson? Horrors!
love the outrage…. outrage is good…. outrage is better when it’s paried with ACTION…. as I asked Randi Weingarten about her little piece in politico – where’s the action?????
so, Diane said yesterday she’d had some absolutely whopping number of hits to the blog… cant remember precisely – something more than 67,000 springs to mind…
According to Mark Naison, 35,000 people have joined his BATS teachers movement and there are another 3,000+ parents on the sister page… Then there’s Parents Across America and a whole slew of other groups….
And each of these people know a handful of others who are outraged by ed reform and all of its seedy aspects…
What do you think would happen if we all got together, parents and teachers and community members, and pulled our kids out of school, and refused to teach classes that have been infected with CCSS, for example?
We could take our kids out of schools and congregate at and take over local community centres and teach them there; we could organise childcare for kids so parents dont have to miss work; we could form and maintain picket lines discouraging others from taking their kids into school buildings and we could support teachers in their actions…. we could do this nationally, en masse, on an agreed day of the month, or week, say…. one day a month, every month… or one day a week, every week…. or we could do this as a rolling wave, one week at a time, moving from state to state around the country so that by the end of the year, every state has seen this action….
Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”…
It’s time to stop whinging and preaching to the choir and to start DOING, to stop begging and pleading and to start demanding, and to back up our demands with ACTION….Do enough of us have the guts? What do you think?
Arne stinks! I’m mad as hell that Obama can’t seem to fix the “War on Teachers” in this country. Maybe he’s leading it.
Yuh, I think so. Obama put Duncan in there, & kept him on after re-election (a point at which many presidents have chosen to shake up the cabinet). Do I need to add that Obama’s chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel– do we need to add stats on Emanuel? Let’s face it, folks. Obama is a Chicago neo-liberal a la Milton Friedman. I have no illusions about the State of the Union address. I feel the same as I did when Nixon was president…
Does that mean you are ready to impeach him? I am.
Why is Duncan asking Pearson for advice? Here’s an answer:
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” –Benito Mussolini
Think: Banana Republic, think the United Fruit Company, but with education as the commodity instead of bananas.
Why bother with a doctor when you can got straight to the scalpel salesman to figure out how to treat your disease?