Lace to the Top, an activist group of educators and parents in New York opposed to high-stakes testing, became curious about the appearance of certain commercial products on the state’s mandated exams.
Edith Balthazar, a New York City public school parent and freelance editor, thought the product placements were too blatant to be an accident.
The exams were created by Pearson, the giant British publishing company.
Imagine! An American Girl doll with a Pearson textbook in her backpack!
Typically, publishers’ guidelines for test development prohibit any mention of commercial products.
Members of Lace to the Top did some research and found ties between Pearson and the products placed in its exams.
Were the references to these products mere coincidence or advertising?
If their research is wrong, I hope that representatives of Pearson will contact me so I can correct the record.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s hear a cheer for the new American girl doll: Opt Out Olivia.
She comes with a paint brush/palette, a violin and a school bag filled with free choice reading books, mostly fiction.
The slogan on her bag reads: “People do give a 💩 what I think.”
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Bravo!
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Linda, you owe me a new keyboard! 😀
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Love it Linda: we need “Off The Grid” Barbie instead of “Townhouse” Barbie too lol.
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wonderful!
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Perfection!
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How about the year in Indiana when the ISTEP writing prompt asked students to voice their opinion about “school choice”? Thanks so much, Tony Bennett!
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This is fuzzy. Brand names do become part of our language and going generic can appear hokey.
But it could be paid and purposeful by Pearson.
This is why we need to see the questions.
We do need not to let this distract from greater issues. It won’t take down the tests.
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At first, this appears to be a silly distraction. Compared to their major crimes of illegal lobbying and subborning public officials to impose “accountability” to their toxic products on American children by force of law … what’s a little product placement? It’s hard to believe anybody would even want their products associated with the most hated brand in education
However, this is a way to emphasize the profit-grubbing of the all-powerful entities that have somehow come to dominate American public education policy. Some important stalwarts have objected to nitpicking Pearson’s products (Norm Scott, for instance, is exasperated by Randi and Diane’s complaint that Pearson tests are scored too late to be “useful” to teachers, as though they could EVER be any use). I’m thinking, at this point, that all noise is good noise because it highlights the Pearson.
The beast lives by profits. Can we kill it if we cut them off? Evidence is emerging that Pearson has overextended its bet on the Gates/Pearson Common Core juggernaut, its data-driven product delivery systems, and digital platforms to orchestrate its own crumbling empire.
Alan Singer’s little blog is echoing like a thunderclap across business news outlets. As the unstoppable Common Core collapses, Pearson deflates. Can we drown it before it gets its feet back under it? This is an urgent question, because it’s got its teeth on our necks. Read this delightful story, anyway.
Is Pearson Education in Serious Financial Trouble?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/is-pearson-education-in-s_b_5212784.html
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It highlights the Pearson profit motive, of course. You knew that.
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Just a point — I didn’t write that piece but a teacher from Newark who is exasperated did. (I publish a variety of points of views). I actually do think Edith’s work on this is very important – we are both members of Change the Stakes based here in NYC and we are loaded with anti-Pearson info — and will go after them on all fronts.
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Thanks, Norm. Let’s bring them down.
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American Girl, Barbie, Mug Root Beer, Ipod, NIKE and more. No, we don’t need to see any of the questions anymore. We get the picture and the product. Pearson’s rep said they did not “pay” for the product placement but did just happen to select test selections that already contained product placement. Once again, the call goes out. It is time to go camping at Lake Placid with the Corporate Common Core-ist. Camp Philos here we come. Whiteface Lodge here we come. Comfort Inn here we come. All motels, B&B’s, RV Parks, tent camping areas here we come. Calling all American Girls and Boys to get your flashlights ready for a hike into some hearts of darkness.
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Go, Kathy! We who can’t get there will be hanging on your every tweet today at #CampPhilos and #PicketinThePines
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Time for an investigative education reporter to expose American Doll’s connection to Pearson. I have a feeling all roads lead to MONEY! Children should start making list of all products they read about during their tests! They are still following the rules perhaps and not divulging the questions (barf on that one too) but helping the public know which companies are profitting at the expense of kids. NO WONDER WHY NON FICTION is stressed under common core. Advertising comes under this realm as real people buy real things. UGHHHHHH!
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I surprised no one has mentioned the product placement of ‘Charter schools’ in the TV show Parenthood this season. I don’t, and now will never, watch the show but every commercial they ran about the episode where ‘they finally get their charter school’ they mentioned ‘they FINALLY get their CHARTER SCHOOL’. I can’t imagine who paid for that product placement…or can I????
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That actually scares me a little.
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this just continues to get uglier by the minute… these companies have no moral compass whatsoever!
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This strikes me as one of the (many) reasons for the gag order about the tests. I’d be surprised if Pearson didn’t receive payment.
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Just when I think it can’t get worse…
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It is out of place for specific products to be named at all in publisher’s exams. It feels like everything in education is now about money and profits for large corporations, especially Pearson
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This would be difficult for some things. Kleenex comes to mind first, but here are a list of commercial trademarks that are often used generically, including Magic Marker, Dxie Cup, Scotch Tape, Thermos, Vaseline, Wiffle Ball, and Xerox.
The link: http://www.rinkworks.com/words/eponyms.shtml
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TE, for many, many decades now, I have worked on products from educational publishers. Every set of specifications I ever saw for creating one of these products, and every set of specs I ever made up for other writers and editors, contained an injunction against using brand names. For decades, we have written of markers, disposable cups, adhesive tape, petroleum jelly, plastic balls, and tissues. <Thermos was declared generic in the U.S. in 1963. It’s not difficult at all to stay away from brand names. Publishers have done it for years. Many state adoption guidelines require that one do so.
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My experience matches that of Robert. California had strict guidelines on mentioning brand names and the use on images with any commercial content.
This was a big problem for developers of “media literacy” content, and for me in treating graphic and product design as well developed branches of art. Non-profit examples could be found, but a critical understanding of the surround of advertising was being compromised by inflexible rules. Of course there is a difference between an explicit study of ads and marketing, past and present, and the placement of ads as if these are totally innocent.
For a time this was an active source of information on the commercialization of schooling. Annual reports tracked the varieties and extent of ads, blatent and subtle.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/Schoolhouse-commercialism-2010.
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The more thoughtful product development guidelines typically contain exceptions for materials specifically related to brands. So, for example, those guidelines, for a grammar and composition program, might contain an exception for using brand names in exercises dealing with capitalization of product names. Unfortunately, as Laura mentions, legal concerns lead educational publishers to err on the side of not mentioning brand names at all, so even inane topics like that often get skipped over, and the publishers tend not to use actual examples with actual brand names when treating critiques manipulation techniques (logical fallacies, rhetorical tropes) used in advertising.
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Reblogged this on CNY Teacher and commented:
Product placements on New York’s 3-8 ELA exams represent “inexperienced, shoddy work on the part of Pearson and NYSED.” It seems John King and his minions at SED see nothing wrong with this. Who knows what will appear on the math tests this week, maybe a reference to the Lego Movie’s theme song ‘Everything is Awesome.’
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This doesn’t surprise me at all, and it’s really nothing new…I recall a few years ago getting a labor curriculum sponsored by McDonald’s and one of my science colleagues getting an environmental curriculum sponsored by…wait for it…Exxon! In some ways, this is a logical extension of that inanity.
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Connected to Pearson testing, there is a petition promoted by NYSUT and AFT, calling on Pearson to remove gag orders on educators administering those tests. The petition goes to the attention of Glen Moreno, Chairman, Pearson, John Fallon, CEO, Pearson, and six others.
Here is the link to sign that petition:
http://petitions.moveon.org/aft/sign/pearson-stop-gagging?source=s.em.mt&r_by=10250534
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Pearson is taking a huge gamble on the transition to online delivery, but this is very likely to pay off handsomely, for the big items in the costs on the profit and loss statement for most products are related to the physical nature of the products–paper, printing, binding, sampling, warehousing, and shipping cost. Pixels are much cheaper than is paper.
If I were in the leadership of this company, I would be concerned about the hit that the product name is taking because of the positions that the company has taken on standardized testing. Many companies have fallen into a similar trap in the past: they have become dependent upon a cash cow at the same time that customer attitudes toward that cash cow have been shifting. The classic example is Xerox, which was making enormous profits on maintenance contracts for large office photocopiers and had short-term incentives to make their copiers as large, as complex, as expensive, and even prone to breaking down (and requiring maintenance and thus the maintenance contracts). The Japanese stepped in with smaller, cheaper, disposable copiers and just about took that business away from Xerox.
Similarly, Pearson has gone all-out in the standardized testing world because that business has been extraordinarily lucrative, but its brand is taking an enormous hit as people come to associate the company with policies that they loathe (excessive testing, invariant testing, invalid testing, test prep, VAM, letter grading of schools). There is a groundswell of disgust about testing, and much of that disgust is being directed at the makers of these tests and is starting to spill over into evaluations of the company and its products in general. When large numbers of your customers start using your product name with the same intonations that they use when referring to, say, colorectal cancer, you have a problem. Quantifying the level of this disgust and how it affects educators’ adoption decisions is worth doing.
And, of course, the basal products have gotten to be monstrous in size and complexity, making them increasingly difficult to explain and difficult for customers to use. For a long time, the complexity of state adoption criteria worked to the advantage of the large companies. Smaller companies could not meet the state demands for a long, long, long list of product features (e.g., ancillary study guides and parental involvement materials in six languages), and such demands effectively shut out smaller competitors. However, those demands and the product complexity resulting from those demands have grown to such an extent that now, almost none of the features and components of a basal product ever actually get used by a given classroom teacher, and that teacher finds the product difficult to use and extremely cumbersome and confusing. The typical basal textbook product, these days, has become self-parodying. It’s not uncommon for an eight-line poem to be buried in the middle of 40 pages of ancillary study material related to it–so buried that in the online versions of the literature textbooks, simply finding the literary works has become a difficult undertaking–the works themselves are often buried in five or six levels of nested folders. Shortly before his death, Senator Robert Byrd stood on the Senate floor, held up a basal textbook, and commented that there as no wonder that kids were suffering from attention deficit disorder given the distracting, disorganized textbook designs in which every spread has twenty separate special features and NO FOCUS WHATSOEVER.
However, none of that will be fixed as long as states continue micromanaging education and issuing their lists of insanely complex adoption criteria. If they backed off and let local educators make their own decisions, newer, smaller, leaner, clearer, more focused products would emerge from smaller educational publishing houses, and teachers and kids would be much better served.
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