Mercedes Schneider reports the news: Pearson has won the contract for the Common Core test called PARCC.
Remember all the promises about how national standardization would clear the way for competition and innovation?
Why does it look instead like monopolization?
Why are we not surprised?
She writes:
“Here is the reality of “free market competition” in this time of unprecedented education profiteering: A few education/assessment giants will run American public education (and beyond, as some private and parochial schools sell their freedom for access to state or federal tax dollars).
“One of those few is the ubiquitous Pearson.
“CCSS was tailor-made for Pearson. It is quite the love story.
“Pearson is one-stop CCSS shopping, from curriculum, to assessments, to evaluation of teacher training… and Bill Gates has even paid Pearson’s nonprofit to assist with the endeavor.
“Gates’ assistance is apparently paying off; on May 2, 2014, Pearson “landed a major contract… of unprecedented scale” with another nonprofit (a popular way to set up reformer shop), the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Does this now meet the criteria for an ant-trust violation?
If this is not a monopoly, what is?
Those laws stopped being enforced under Ronald Reagan. last example was the Bell system under Nixon, I believe.
Totally agree NY teacher: I just asked someone that question the other day. In Texas every certification test I take, the certification tests my administrators take, the GRE that I took, the GED dropouts take to get back on track, all the students tests…ALL are Pearson. Nobody can get into education without taking a Pearson test… Even our FRENCH certs are Pearson tests!
If its testing or certification in Texas it is owned by Pearson. The ESOL calibration I have to take every spring is ridiculous.
And no one is worried that one company is running education?
He who has the monopoly on set scores can control the release of college and career ready humans around the world – like opening the flood gates at Hoover Dam to flood or keep dry the communities below. Another Wonder of the World? The 8th Wonder of the Industrial World?
It should warm our hearts to know that so many corporations are concerned whether Johnny can Read. Wait, there are Real Children connected to these $B? RealTeachers who make near poverty wages? Oh, well! La-dee-da!!
Thank you, Diane.
Just woke up and saw your post.
Hasn’t Pearson been the major item developer for PARCC up to now?
You mean you sleep???
I’d like to see a comparison of spending and planning and effort expended on Common Core testing versus spending and planning and effort on substantive Common Core development, “development” meaning that development which is exclusive of what Arne Duncan calls “the national tests”.
I’d like someone to divide those two things up and show us where the money and effort is going, because if it’s testing, then that’s one very good indicator of priorities in government. So if my concern is this will become all about the test (as every other ed reform of the last decade has become all about the test) I would see it heading in that direction before it gets there looking at funding priorities.
I have another question on the tests. I apologize if this a dumb question, but I read the PARCC site and I’m in a “PARCC state” and I can’t figure it out. Do the individual states set cut varying cut scores on the tests? That’s how it appears reading the site. So, for example, will Ohio have a different cut score than NY on the same test?
Not sure but I do know that PARCC is not using field tests to set cut scores. PARCC cut scores will be set in the summer of 2015, after all spring 2015 test results are collected. This may be the standard protocol but it sure is suspicious.
Here’s the sentence from the press release:
“and working with states to develop “cut scores,” or performance standards for the exams.”
Now, maybe that doesn’t matter. One could (I guess) take the raw student data and move the cut score up or down if one wanted a state to state comparison, no matter how the state measures “passing”.
So one could set a “national pass score” (in theory) and then use state data to get there. If a state like NY had a higher cut score and a state like Ohio had a lower one, Ohio would report based on their score, but if one wanted a national comparison of states one could take Ohio data and move the cut score to NY’s and then make a state to state comparison.
I know how this goes, after a decade of watching it. When the Ohio scores are reported the entire focus will be on the scores. I’m just curious if a state to state comparison will be at all valid.
Chiara, the states are supposed to set their own cutoff scores, but now Pearson is going to “help.”
The arbitrariness of cutoff setting will put all stakeholders at the mercy of the privatizing individuals setting cutoffs. You can believe Duncan will have his capricious hand in this.
This nonsense opens the door for “failing” entire states and unprecedented, statewide “takeover” ( i.e., privatization) of schools.
Thanks. I share your concern about politicians using the scores to beat up on public schools. I just watched it happen in Ohio with the Third Grade Reading Guarantee. The whole thing was purely political. It was completely driven by lawmakers who are anti-public schools (they hope to privatize, which they have all but announced) and they set the scores. They weren’t going to fail enough third graders with the original cut score so they just arbitrarily moved it up. It was ridiculous. It was about as “scientific” as a campaign ad.
However. I thought one of the goals of this thing was to do state to state comparisons? No? Or can they get there with state data regardless of whatever the state sets as the “cut off score”? Can they take the Ohio test scores and then move the cut score up and down to compare with NY?
Also, thanks, Mercedes Schneider for all your hard work. I know you’re a volunteer and I appreciate the information.
I posted that on Opt Out Long Island as a form of vertical integration, controlling both the materials and the testing, like Rockefeller, when he controlled oil and the rail charges to transport it. I suspect this lesson is not in the Common Core.
Bill Gates explained in an interview that we need “to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the Common Core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.”
More wisdom from Gates: “I think the next decade can be, based on these standards, the period of the most innovation in teaching we’ve seen in a long time.”
So, let me get this straight:
Empowering a monopoly to create curricula narrowed and distorted so that it prepares students to take
that same monopoly’s invariant, invalid tests
of a bullet list of invariant, inflexible, amateurishly prepared standards never vetted by scholars, researchers, or classroom practitioners
will lead to innovation.
Now, that’s some TRULY INNOVATIVE thinking, Bill.
In fact, I’ve rarely encountered thinking that, uh–how do I put this?–unique, exceptional, counterintuitive . . . [add your own adjectives here]
“Empowering a monopoly to create curricula narrowed and distorted so that it prepares students to take
that same monopoly’s invariant, invalid tests”
Right, but that isn’t what Gates was talking about. I’m fluent in this language because my eldest son works in that industry 🙂
Gates envisions a new national market for ed tech products. It’s that simple.
He didn’t predict competition in test contractors. He predicted competition in ed tech. They need to sell product across all 50 states or it’s not a good investment and the “powers” won’t be “unleashed” 🙂
He uses really colorful language for ordinary business fundamentals, I must say. I hope he doesn’t think he’s saying anything new. Requiring common national standards to spur investment and encourage product development is 150 years old in this country and one can apply that to everything from education to tires to machine tools.
I think he romanticizes his own industry, makes it more unique than it is, which is not uncommon among business people but may lead listeners to read more into what he says than an ordinary interpretation.
Gates knew precisely what we was engineering from the get go. A couple decades ago he articulated his vision for a computer-adaptive ed tech revolution. He and Pearson needed one national bullet list to tag their software and their assessments to. They are now in partnership. They just announced a slew of new Common Core ed tech products designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Word. And a couple years ago, his foundation put out an RFP for new computer-adaptive ed tech products. Both companies have various partnerships with and investments in new ed tech startups.
So, we’re not talking about innovation here. But we are talking about a business plan. Innovation happens when you have competition among smaller providers, not when you enable or create monopolies. And having one set of national standards serves the latter purpose because of the economies of scale created.
Adding my own adjective: fucked up
I think that that would be a past participle and a particle, Duane. 🙂
Isn’t it an adjectival phrase? After all we do use past participles as adjectives, eh!
yes, of course
Many thanks to that great philologist Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, for his discovery that PARCC is spelled backward as in the names appearing in the grimoires of antiquity.
Spelled forward, of course, it stands for the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.C.C.R.A.P.
And then if you take out the “Career Ready Assessment” part it becomes CCCP!
And, of course, to your point, my friend, there is one thing that ALL totalitarian states have in common–a single set of invariant national educational “standards” promulgated by a central committee
What amazes me is that people can’t see that connection even when it is pointed out to them.
Unfortunately, the elite, like Gates, Duncan, David Coleman, Rhee and others,don’t have any real emotion or understanding of the idealism of many career teachers. They assume that we are not competent and not really professional. Concepts related to teaching the whole child and ideas–from Montessori to Kozol and Mike Rose are
meaningless to them. I heard earlier about the Common Core starting as Year I.
The powers behind this have defined themselves by a lack of insight as to what
we have done year in, year out, 180 plus days a year–not just on test days
Something is wrong when the elite –and I would include Jeb Bush and conservatives as well–want public schools to fail.
This is very well said, Merek.
Some novelist–I forget which one–wrote a book about a future in which there is one company–FedEx–that controls everything.
In Education, that future is now.
teacher training
teacher certification exams
curricula
standardized tests
Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff said on the Harvard Business Review blog that the Common Core was devised “to create national markets . . . for products that can be brought to scale.”
This is scale, certainly.
One ring to rule them all.
The PARCC website says that there are 15 million public school kids in the PARCC states. So, under this contract, at $24 a kid–what Pearson is to be paid–that’s $360 million a year.
So, how much is that in terms of opportunity cost?
Well, that much money would pay 9,812 beginning teacher’s salaries EVERY YEAR.
It would buy 437,500 high-end laptop computers or 1.67 million high-end computer tablets for poor kids EVERY YEAR.
It would buy 5 million new basal textbooks EVERY YEAR.
It would buy 29.167 million library books EVERY YEAR.
Over three years, Pearson’s take on the PARCC tests alone will be more than a billion dollars.
Any wonder, now, why Pearson heavily supported the CCSSO and went into partnership with Bill Gates? And that’s just the beginning of the Cash Cow that Common Core will be for Pearson.
The Cash Cow Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program.
Holy C.C.C.C.C.C.R.A,P.
And if we eliminated these tests ENTIRELY, outcomes in K-12 education would not only not decrease but would doubtless IMPROVE because of the lost time spent taking the tests and preparing for them and because of the horrific narrowing and distortion of curricula and pedagogy that results from all that test prep.
…not to mention the lost time when networks crash and students wait to get back online or have to start over. It is ridiculous!
And remember that Pearson’s non-profit BROKE THE LAW on use of non-profit to benefit their for profit business. While they were slapped on the wrist, the fine as a speck compared to what they stand to reap. That abuse of non-profit status is absolutely despicable!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/pearson-pays-77-million-in-common-core-settlement/2013/12/13/77515bba-6423-11e3-aa81-e1dab1360323_story.html
And then there was $70 million or so in subsidies from Christie’s administration to build a new building in Hoboken. Imagine that–when the state is in massive budget crises, Pearson gets millions and millions to stay in the state in already operates in!
Who didn’t know that CCSS is an euphemism for million dollar gorilla cookies to feed 800 lbs. primate edu-corporation from the Planet of Ape?
CCSS=Crony Capitalism Sabotages Students
Here is an interesting read..http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/plato-to-plumbers/361373/
Excellent article.
It speaks to the need for an education that includes so much more. The affective domain is so important, yet these “test” manufacturers seem to think they have all the answers. It creates the very class distinctions that many of us wish to avoid.
I have heard locally that since Pearson took over the GED (now all on-line) that fewer people are taking the GED and fewer are passing it. Any data out there?
I just had a look at the General Knowledge teacher licensing exam in Florida–which is published and scored by Pearson, of course. It’s practically a love letter to standards and standardized testing. If anyone is worried about taking this exam just remember, answer every question as though standards and testing were the salvation of the world, and you’ll do just fine.
Here’s the problem with that. In a democracy, independent people should be free to hold and act upon their independent ideas, and these should sink or swim according to their merit. We should not have a Thought Police making these decisions for everyone else. When we place our public institution is centralized, private hands, we invite totalitarianism in.
Pearson is the required provider of the new EdTPA student teacher evaluations here in NY. Must pass for certification. Pearson is the King of All Strings!
Did you know that “resonant” means “intense?” Neither did the author of this blog post (published 5/5/14) about the PARCC English Language Arts practice test for 10th graders. The writer is way too kind, but she does point out some of the deficiencies built into these tests:
http://greatergreatereducation.org/post/22739/dc-students-may-find-themselves-stumped-by-common-core-tests-next-year/
I hope some courageous people will copy the actual tests and post them on the Internet.
Today we have begun a new chapter in the history of poverty. This system (nationalized education) is designed by the rich for the rich. We will face more unprecedented inequalities and that includes education. We need to do more to unplug the public from the Matrix.