Mercedes Schneider here reviews the transcript of a board meeting of Pearson in April 2014. Anyone can read the transcript but is allowed to quote only 400 words. That was Mercedes’ challenge.
What struck her was that Pearson’s business plan is heavily tied to adoption of CCSS. In this case, contrary to the assurances of Bill Gates, national standardization promotes monopolization, not competition.
What struck me was that the leaders of this behemoth, now taking control of large sectors of American education, had nothing to say about education. The discussion, not surprisingly, was all about profits and business strategy. Who decided to outsource American education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shouldn’t be surprising that the only plan is a business plan. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to in educational publishing who has worked for one or more of the big ones says the same thing: no educational philosophy is at work. Only a business philosophy of making maximum profit.
LikeLike
Think of the most vile printed material that you can imagine.
Picturing that in your mind?
Good.
If one of these companies thought that it could increase its profits by half a dollar this quarter by putting THAT into a textbook, it would do so.
I have attended countless hours of meetings in these places. At one time, these companies were run by editors who were, for the most part, once teachers themselves. At one time, people in these companies seriously discussed pedagogical strategies and curricula and how kids learn. They innovated. They gave a @#@&&*#@&*!!! Now the companies are almost exclusively run by finance and marketing types who have no clue about anything related to learning and no concern whatsoever that there are CHILDREN on the other end of what they do.
Now, the meetings in these companies are all about what slogans are being used by the market leader and what slogans are hot on the education midway this carnival season and what the numbers were last quarter and how one can repurpose existing material more automatically and so reduce the cost in editorial and writing time and where in the world one can outsource the proofreading and the typesetting even more cheaply.
Oh, and about how to fix adoptions and online curriculum portals and computer tablets to make it very, very difficult for and costly for an existing customer to switch to another company’s product or even to know that an alternative exists.
LikeLike
Julie again…
There’s a great comment in the article
criticizing Board Member Galatzan’s
canning of Stuart Magruder. It’s
written by one Rene Diedrich:
RENE DIETRICH:
“It is frightening to me that (Galatzan)’s bullying is permitted to derail Socratic discourse. The fact that Ms. Galatzan is a prosecutor unwilling to hear other opinions is one thing but to be a member of the BOE is by definition a Democratic concession to the people .
Mr. Magruder is one of ‘them’ as a citizen, a politically active father and a righteous member of that committee.
“Why shouldn’t someone be allowed to criticize the iPad roll out? That is the freaking point. Looking at things from many angles is what makes ‘community’ and collaboration viable. Moreover, a lot what Magruder says is accurate.
“Btw, It is encouraging to see this reported so clearly and objectively, thanks.”
LikeLike
This is interesting and on point.
The re-appointment of Stuart Magruder—the one person on the LAUSD Bond Committee opposing the use of voter-passed construction bond (building & builidng repair) money for I-pads and accompanying software that deliver Common Core testing and nothing else—was just blocked by corporate-funded LAUSD Board Member Tamar Galatzan.
(If not the only person on the Bond Committee who objects to the use of bond money going to pay for I-pads / software, Magruder is the one Bond Committee Member who’s most vocal opposed to Common Core… so vocal, in fact, that his being vocal just got him canned.):
http://laschoolreport.com/school-board-blocks-appointee-critical-of-ipads-lausd/
Magruder is also a parent of a LAUSD public school student, and is underwhelmed, to say the least, by what the insanely expensive ($ 1 billion TOTAL ???!!!) I-pads are actually delivering… apart from the idea that money raised by a voter bond to build new schools /repair repair existing schools was misused to pay for I-pads and software.
Note that Galatzan’s rationale for blocking and silencing Magruder is that he’s not “open-minded” about I-pads / software being purchased with bond money, and that the LAUSD Board needs to get someone else to serve on the committee who’s more “open-minded.” The fact is that, in silencing him, Galatzan is carrying out the marching orders of her “corporate reform” masters.
“Open-minded” is Galatzan’s euphemism for someone who just shuts the-Hell up and doesn’t make waves, or who does not dare attempt to block the corporate agenda pushed by Galatzan and her masters. Galatzan did this to shut up anyone else on the Committee who dared object the way Magruder
BELOW is the testimony that cost Magruder his job / position on the Bond Oversight Committee: :
(after he’s done, stick with this video to hear LAUSD teacher Julie Carson speak after Magruder about the same issue)
LikeLike
It’s Julie again… I would amend my
above comment also to call Ms. Galatzan
a “Pearson-backed” LAUSD Board
Member… so as to connect to the
topic of this article.
Thanks… Julie T.
LikeLike
Julie again…
One more thing…
There’s a great comment, critical of Galatzan, in the article about Pearson-backed Board Member Galatzan’s canning of Stuart Magruder.
http://laschoolreport.com/school-board-blocks-appointee-critical-of-ipads-lausd/
It’s written by one Rene Diedrich:
RENE DIETRICH:
“It is frightening to me that (Galatzan)’s bullying is permitted to derail Socratic discourse. The fact that Ms. Galatzan is a prosecutor unwilling to hear other opinions is one thing but to be a member of the BOE is by definition a Democratic concession to the people . Mr. Magruder is one of ‘them’ as a citizen, a politically active father and a righteous member of that committee.
“Why shouldn’t someone be allowed to criticize the iPad roll out? That is the freaking point. Looking at things from many angles is what makes ‘community’ and collaboration viable. Moreover, a lot what Magruder says is accurate.
“Btw, It is encouraging to see this reported so clearly and objectively, thanks.”
LikeLike
“Anyone can read the transcript but is allowed to quote only 400 words.”
How many words are there—4,000 words? Then all you need is ten bloggers and each blogger quotes 400 words with a link to the next blogger.
:o)
LikeLike
Ooo! Pass on the link and get 10+ people to sign up for 2-3 paragraphs each.
LikeLike
To work, it must be organized.
LikeLike
Pearson isn’t imposing any restrictions on quoting the conference call. These calls are not secretive or private, they’re live streamed across the world. It’s public information — at least the audio is.
So a simpler approach would be to just go to Pearson’s investor relations web site, listen to the actual conference call, and then quote away.
LikeLike
I corrected this in my post. However, it is not “simpler” to listen and “quote away.” Transcription takes hours. It took me a several hours to compose the Pearson post, and that was after spending a couple of hours reading and analyzing the transcript.
LikeLike
It seems simpler than organizing a group of bloggers to construct a charm bracelet of 400-word excerpts. 😉
LikeLike
“Who decided to outsource American education?”
Follow the money. The money is the puppet master’s strings. Who spent billions promoting Common Core? Bill Gates is puppet master #1
How many more are there?
The puppet master’s strings are connected to the arms, legs and lips of President Obama and Arne Duncan.
LikeLike
Who? The same minds that want (see) profit at every opportunity. The same who want to privatize toll roads, prisons, etc. It seems that certain people feel that when something us done for “the public good” that it is “socialism”, and, thetefore , ” evil”. I don’t understand their thinking or lack of ability to care about “The Commons”.
Oh, and I am not asking for a ” lecture” from certain people.
LikeLike
What is amazing and fascinating to me is that all the monies being spent to buy politicians, and school boards, and lawsuits in the name of better education could outright be given to fund education. Period.
Instead, the billionaires’ true end game is to 1) reap the profits of the policies they seek to have enacted; 2) continue and enlarge the divide between themselves, the 1% and the rest of us, 3) destroy neighborhoods and force them into poverty or worse poverty, and 4) create the future’s low wage workforce.
Scary stuff.
LikeLike
Can you remind me why Bill Gates wants to destroy neighborhoods?
LikeLike
Firing teachers, closing schools….whats left in the neighborhood? Kids have no schools, teachers who may have lived local have lost their jobs, etc. It destroys neighborhoods. Why Bill Gates wants to, I don’t know, but maybe you could look up what him and his ilk wreak on the neighborhoods where ed reform happens, and why he’s killing children in Africa too.
LikeLike
With all the simultaneous gentrification taking place in cities across America, it looks to me like Gates and his ilk want to reverse the trend of white flight to the suburbs and take back the cities from low income minorities. All the better for them if those folks would just move to rural locations, where elites would not have to see poverty.
LikeLike
This looks fiercely urgent:
“It seems no one wants to listen to Hite’s earnest – and increasingly frantic – calls for help, certainly not among the political class, which controls the purse strings.
For months, Hite has sought to make the case that the district needs a minimum of $216 million more for the next school year – just to maintain the bare-bones operation left after the previous year’s cuts.
This year, he says he’ll have to lay off up to another 1,500 employees and turn schools into empty shells – his words, not ours – unless the district gets the money it needs to operate.
Still, no action has been taken.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20140520_DN_Editorial__Nightmare_and_fog.html#WecHFuW08kra6zzc.99
LikeLike
The Onion continues to do the best political reporting in the country 🙂
“According to a study released Tuesday by the Department of Education, a majority of American high school graduates are critically unprepared for the rigors of high school, lacking the skills and knowledge necessary to meet the basic academic requirements of secondary education.
“Upon graduation from high school, most American students are simply not ready to enter a ninth-grade classroom,” said Deputy Education Secretary Anthony Miller, noting that tens of thousands of 18-year-olds now completing their compulsory public educations “would have no idea what was going on” if they were to take even one high-school-level course in English, algebra, or physical science. “Across all subjects, our findings indicate that very few graduating seniors have developed the proficiencies needed to succeed in high school.”
“If we want our nation to be competitive in the 21st-century global marketplace, we must invest enough resources to ensure our high school graduates can hack it in high school,” Immelman continued. “Frankly, it’s a good thing these grads aren’t in high school anymore, because in all honesty, they wouldn’t be able to cope with it.”
The study went on to stress that students should not be faulted for their situation, as most of the blame lies with high school teachers and parents who are largely unqualified for teaching and parenthood.”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-most-high-school-graduates-woefully-unprepar,36074/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=Default:1:Default
LikeLike
actually I think this would be an interesting experiment. What percentage of high school graduates could go back to ninth grade at a top traditional public high school like New Trier High School and graduate from New Trier? Would it be close to 100%?
LikeLike
Better question: how many Congressmen and state legislators and governors and cabinet makers would do well?
LikeLike
I suppose that you could ask that as well, but it would be less informative about what graduation from high school means in different jurisdictions.
LikeLike
Of course, but quite informative as to the intelligence of our elected officials whose policies have allowed Citizens United via the Supremw Ct.and other assinine decisions to come to fruition allowing corporations to take over every facet of pur lived, drive down wages, and head to the Caymans with their tax evading and conscienceless privatization schemes.
LikeLike
MathVale and deb,
Any thoughts about the percentage of high school graduates who could start ninth grade at a school like New Trier High School?
LikeLike
deb. My thoughts exactly. Before any legislator or governor mandates a high school high stakes test, they must first pass that test. Seems reasonable.
LikeLike
I give you credit for being a master avoider and prevaricator in your responses TE. I would like to hear from the person in your life that loves you best. Is there such a person?
LikeLike
Any thoughts about my post?
LikeLike
No.
LikeLike
Any thoughts on what the percentage might be?
LikeLike
No one could possibly “know”.
LikeLike
How about a guess? After all, I am only asking about students who have already earned a high school diploma and asking if they could subsequently earn a high school diploma at different traditional public high school.
Are the high school graduation requirements so incomparable that The Onion might have been accidentally correct with its satire?
LikeLike
No. Why guess? It serves no purpose, can’t be verified, and is speculative.
LikeLike
I think that one reason behind the push for standardization is to make this kind of question less speculative. It is important to understand what graduating from high school means.
I have to say that The Onion’s satire losses some bite if it turns out to be true.
LikeLike
The meaning of graduating high school depends on your point of view. Businesses, universities, parents, students all want different outcomes with a diploma, with some overlap. But the irony is that by trying to standardize a diploma with flawed tests and questionable metrics, we ultimately undermine the meaning. A novel idea might be if we want to understand the meaning of a diploma, ask the graduate.
LikeLike
Ha! MathVale!
LikeLike
This is not a question about standardizing a diploma, but understanding what, if anything, a diploma from school A has in common with school B.
One way to understand something like an exit exam is that it is asking a graduate what it means. Does it mean that you can read? Does it mean that you can use arithmetic?
LikeLike
Does the Bar Exam guarantee uniformly good attorneys? Are exit exams trying to measure what a student knows or do they predict how a student will perform in the future?
LikeLike
It seems to me that exit exams are trying to answer a question posed by The Onion: does graduating from one high school in the country prepare you to enter another high school in the country? The closest to an answer on this thread so far is that not all high school graduates are prepared for ninth grade at a school like New Trier High School.
LikeLike
You avoided MY question. My point is uniformity is a myth. If exit exams like PARCC and the Bar measure what a student knows at that point in time, they have limited relevance as a predictor of future success. So if they can’t reliable predict future success, why have them? They are not serving a formative purpose. They have less to do with learning than demographics, primarily wealth, when sampled in large numbers.
If you could perform a double blind, controlled experiment, you might find the variables you are looking for. But that pesky arrow of time vector moves forward only. Just throwing out a random high school as a benchmark ignores the lurking variables and confounding that makes your example just a thought exercise over a few beers.
LikeLike
If you view standardized tests as asking the graduate about his/her high school experience, it has nothing to do with the future, just the past. In my state, for example, all high school graduates must have taken 4 Carnegie Units of ELA . We might well ask how that requirement impacted the student’s comprehension and reading ability. We might ask the graduate if he/she could add two fractions if they have a different denominator.
As for questions, I did ask mine first.
LikeLike
Is this a joke? With credit recovery and pressure to pass students so that schools show high graduation rates a diploma from many high schools doesn’t say much about a students’ academic ability.
LikeLike
te–First off, the students would have to be well PREPARED for New Trier High School, & the best preparation would come from the feeder schools in the included suburbs, as well as any private schools. My daughter attended New Trier, & she (as well as many of her friends) have stated that it was HARDER than college. FYI–please don’t assume that our family (or every family) in NTHS’
district is rich/1%–not so. That having been said, when I was in high school in a Chicago area north suburban school district, I had one or two friends who’d transferred in from Chgo. Public Schools.
They’d mention–on more than one occasion–that they felt unprepared for certain classes–say, biology–as they’d attended schools w/o labs or the equipment that we’d had in middle school, so they lacked experience, & had difficulty in the new school.
Especially now, when city schools (in many cities) are having their funds sucked out (money, instead, being spent on Pear$on tests & being allocated, instead, to charters), leaving them w/o materials, supplies, classrooms & programs that are automatically included in most north suburban Chicago schools. It has to start in the elementary schools–in CPS, these students deserve–no, are ENTITLED/HAVE A RIGHT TO–get everything that our students get in the NTHS feeders. Unless they do, I’d wager a guess that, no, the graduation rate would not be close to 100%.
In terms of making these opportunities available to ALL children, you’ll get no argument from me. As it’s been said on this blog time & again, I want for EVERY child what I wanted for my child (now adult).
That’s why I continue to help in the never-ending battle to STOP all this ALEC nonsense, banish the testing monster, Pear$on, abolish Race to the Top, & START PROPERLY FUNDING PUBLIC EDUCATION w/ OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS!!
LikeLike
Retired,
I take it that you think the percentage of high school graduates who are well prepared for New Trier High School is rather low. Would you say 50% of high school graduates are well prepared for New Trier high school?
LikeLike
Every feeder school for New Trier in Winnetka is a Progressive school. Same with the University of Chicago Lab Schools. So much for the myth that constructivism does not encourage children to learn facts.
LikeLike
VV,
Any thoughts on the percentage of high school graduates that are well prepared for New Trier High School? I am beginning to think that The Onion piece was very poor satire.
LikeLike
What study id Ted Mitchell quoting from? I could not find anything on the study. This guy has been in office for a couple of weeks. I looked all the press releases at USDE…the Onion said he was talking to reporters. If anyone has a clue let me know—or is this pure satire from the Onion? Arne spoke on May 20 on the “civil rights issue of our time” but no study path is there.
LikeLike
It’s troubling that TE thinks that these standardized summative actually tell us anything. I’m afraid that there are quite a few who think that. Disturbing.
LikeLike
Why would we want to produce clone-like graduates? It makes no sense. Asking if all can do well on any test is bizarre. Why do we care? I have met many people…parents, teachers, students, community members, etc in my lifetime. Each is an individual. Are they equally “smart”? Would taking a test level the playing field? Do they have the same personalities? Do they care about the same things? Do they have skills that can’t be evaluated via a standardized test? Sure, there are basic things everyone needs to know, but they aren’t necessarily complex.
Questions pushing for some discussion that is going to go nowhere is a waste of brainpower and a drag.
LikeLike
Such questions are, indeed, an enormous waste of time, but they reflect an extraordinarily low level of thinking about these matters that is quite common and that helps explain why so many legislators have bought into the all-standardized, summative-testing-all-the-time approach. I notice that a lot of the people who support this crap are from fields in which they use a lot of mathematics, and I suspect that these people assume that EVERYTHING is just like basic math–one can make a simple list of what everyone should have learned and test people for having learned that. Such people have NO CLUE how completely invalid these standardized tests of ELA are and how much they distort curricula and pedagogy and so lead to mediocrity, not improvement.
LikeLike
You get what you measure.
Precisely.
Measure crap and you get crap.
LikeLike
This stuff also appeals to authoritarian types who see everything as a competition, to people to whom “am I beating the other guy?” is always the most significant question.
Well, how does he compare to that kid from New Trier? Is he outgriting the Singaporeans?
Sometimes I think that I belong to an entirely different species from the people who think like that.
LikeLike
You may enjoy this from Forbes: Why (some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs
“Are we really to understand that there’s some connection between what makes people psychopaths and what makes them CEO material?”
“I think my book offers really good evidence that the way that capitalism is structured really is a physical manifestation of the brain anomaly known as psychopathy. However, I wouldn’t say every Fortune 500 chief is a psychopath. That would turn me into an ideologue and I abhor ideologues.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/
LikeLike
I think that some standardized results are supported by most people. We would like all high school graduates to be literate for example. Does that make them clone-like?
Are you against the sort of standard curriculum my school district has for primary school?
LikeLike
Sure they tell us things. One important thing that they tell is is that poverty matters. Another is that there is that boys systematically get lower grades than test results would predict. Are these unimportant things to know?
LikeLike
We know that poverty matters. We do not need to distort our entire K-12 educational system bizarrely in order to learn what we all know there. We also know this business about boys and could do so with tests given to small sample groups.
LikeLike
I am pleased, however, TE, that you keep mentioning this issue with regard to boys. Boys are being killed by the system that has emerged since NCLB. They now make up only about 40 % of the college population. The emphasis on one-size-fits-all, academically oriented instruction is also leaving a lot of them behind. I think that this has reached crisis proportions.
LikeLike
Again, TE, the language arts tests are NOT tests of basic literacy. The purport to be tests of proficiency at a level that is on track for readiness for college and a career. Of course, they aren’t. They are COMPLETELY INVALID as tests of either of those.
LikeLike
In fact, there is exactly ZERO research showing validity of these tests as predictors of college or career success.
ZERO
NONE WHATSOEVER
And there can’t be, be cause they are not valid for those purposes.
LikeLike
Any teacher worth his/her salt knows that without spending millions of dollars on testing to prove that. And the major function of these current tests seems to be to slam teachers and blame them for these things. Hence the idiocy of all of this.
LikeLike
Teachers routinely give boys lower grades on their academic work than tests suggest they should receive. Are teachers aware that this is what they are doing?
LikeLike
Geez. I never did that. I am not others. Ask them. No one can speak for individual differences. I suggest you ask your questions locally. That would make sense.
LikeLike
The data set is national data. Here is a link to the working paper version: http://people.terry.uga.edu/cornwl/research/cmvp.genderdiffs.pdf
LikeLike
TE, these are not tests of basic literacy. I would support such tests, if well constructed. These are not such tests.
LikeLike
So your concern is not with standardized tests per say, but with particular standardized tests?
LikeLike
TE, I build guitars as a hobby. When I want to hammer in a fret, I don’t use a $400 micrometer to do that. I use a small, rubber, dead weight hammer. One chooses the right tool for the job.
LikeLike
Any school that has a one-size-fits-all approach but does not prescreen to ensure that students all fit a particular mold is not doing it’s job. Kids come into school with VASTLY differing internalized grammars for their native tongue, for example, and schooling must be vastly different based on the sophistication of that experience.
LikeLike
I am not advocating for such screening and such narrowed schools, of course. Schools should have many tracks and programs for differing kids. There are no standardized kids, and we shouldn’t have that as a GOAL.
LikeLike
You seem to leave schools with a dilemma. If, using their building level autonomy, the curriculum in the school evolves to be unusually well suited to some students and ill suited to other students, you first suggest they have a duty to ensure that the students the school enrolls are the sort that would thrive in the school’s chosen curriculum. Now you suggest that schools not actually do the screening, so we are left with 1) having students in a school that is ill suited for their strengths or 2) not allowing the school to evolve into one that might prove ill suited for some kind of students no matter the possible gains to other students.
I think most school boards would choose the latter option.
LikeLike
I Pledge allegiance to the Core, of the Common States of America;
and to Pearson, from which it profits, one nation, under Arne,
standardized, with testing and punishment for all.
My have we lost our way.
LikeLike
Love it NY teacher!
Is Pearson hiring?
I think I could bang out some test questions.
Hmm.. which products should I place?
LikeLike
Check out craigslist for Pearson scorer jobs:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/16/pearson-criticized-for-finding-test-essay-scorers-on-craigslist/
LikeLike
Almost fell out of my chair laughing…!!!
LikeLike
well said, NY!
LikeLike
TAGO!
LikeLike
holy cow – I just read the entire post via the link. This really is some scary stuff. A conglomerate of a monopoly between the big banks, microsoft, pearson, gates, broad, bloomberg, Waltons, Koch. They think they are unstoppable, and perhaps, to an extent, they are. There should be no moneymaking of this scale in education. I had no idea it was this big. No wonder these scumbags all want “in”. I guess tho, that the teachers get in the way, and must be “dealt” with. Why so slimy tho, I don’t know. Their tactics are disgusting. Collusion. How do we stop these scum?
LikeLike
Parents are the key.
LikeLike
That is one bone chilling post. Collusion anyone?
LikeLike
Did Pearson ever pay this, and why don’t we ever actually prosecute powerful people or entities anymore? I seem to recall some actual prosecutions, back in the day. I don’t know what kind of a message this sends to The Children, that these nonprofit/for profit entities make a donation and then carry on their merry way, with hundreds of millions in government contracts:
“The Pearson Foundation, the charitable arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, will pay $7.7 million to settle accusations that it repeatedly broke New York State law by assisting in for-profit ventures.
An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software. The investigation also showed that the foundation had helped woo clients to Pearson’s business side by paying their way to education conferences that were attended by its employees.
Under the terms of the agreement to be announced on Friday, the money, aside from $200,000 in legal expenses, will be directed to 100Kin10, a national effort led by a foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, to train more teachers in high-demand areas, including science, technology, engineering and math.”
LikeLike
DOJ just got a guilty plea from Credit Suisse in a pretty high-profile case. Story in the Times today or yesterday.
LikeLike
I saw it. I’m not satisfied with that. I don’t understand why they’re taking pleas and assessing fees and then everyone just rolls on as before. That’s not how it works for ordinary people.
I mean, come on:
“Switzerland’s second-largest bank escaped more dramatic outcomes for its business – the New York state bank regulator decided not to revoke the bank’s license in the state. Also, its top management stayed in place and it will not have to hand over specific client data, protected by Swiss secrecy laws, though it will turn over some account information.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/20/us-creditsuisse-investigation-idUSBREA4I0E620140520
LikeLike
One general issue is that it is not easy to prove criminal fraud in complex financial cases, and the cases require large resource commitments by prosecutors. So taking these cases to trial is a big deal and the odds of losing range from “not unlikely” to “likely.” Prosecutors are highly averse to losing cases like that.
There’s also a conventional wisdom that a criminal conviction is a death sentence for a company. That stems mainly from the Arthur Andersen case in the early 2000s. I don’t know whether it’s actually true that a criminal conviction dramatically increases the risk that a company will bust. Arguably, Andersen was unusual in the sense that so much of its business, its value, its brand was tied up in its reputation. Arguably, financial institutions are similar to Andersen in that respect. (The financial institutions themselves certainly argue that.) Anyway, whether or not the conventional wisdom is true, it’s the conventional wisdom that banks are “too big to jail,” and this belief seems to be held especially true by the DOJ and the SEC, which have been very reluctant to pursue criminal convictions against banks going back to at least 2000, maybe earlier. Instead, prosecutors seek to extract large fines (which is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back only two or three decades).
Then there’s the phenomenon we’re seeing with Credit Suisse (and RBS before it, and others), where a bank will plead guilty to a crime in exchange for a waiver of a severe statutory/regulatory penalty that would automatically kick in if there were a conviction, such as a revocation of a securities broker’s license, or a bank’s license to do business. Banks get these waivers all the time, probably more than any other type of company, presumably based on “too big to fail.”
LikeLike
“But, as Credit Suisse noted prominently in the release describing the settlement, there is no expectation of lost “licenses, nor any material impact on its operational or business capabilities.” There also appears to be at least a tacit understanding between regulators and other financial institutions that relationships with Credit Suisse should continue. Presumably not just the bank itself has an interest in its ongoing viability.
Two aspects of the agreement will surely prove controversial. One is the survival of current senior management. Only five lower-level employees, who had been indicted for their involvement in the tax scheme but were still being paid, will be terminated—although Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services, said that the activity at Credit Suisse was “decidedly not the result of the conduct of just a few bad apples.” The bank’s leaders presumably were able to argue that they had not been around when the tax-evasion scheme was launched. ”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/20/us-creditsuisse-investigation-idUSBREA4I0E620140520
LikeLike
“There also appears to be at least a tacit understanding between regulators and other financial institutions that relationships with Credit Suisse should continue. Presumably not just the bank itself has an interest in its ongoing viability.”
Yes, that’s absolutely correct.
LikeLike
“Only five lower-level employees, who had been indicted for their involvement in the tax scheme but were still being paid, will be terminated”
This is what government investigations almost always end up looking like. Representing companies that are under investigation by a regulator or prosecutor is very depressing work. The goal is to review a ton of documents, interview the employees who may have been involved in the conduct at issue, find the bad apples and fire them, and display their heads to the government, which then nods its head and names a fine. The AG gets to issue his press release announcing victory. The company gets to move forward with its share price intact. The middle-management employees get their lives utterly destroyed.
Eliot Spitzer, the “Steamroller,” was the master at this.
LikeLike
Bush, Spellings, Gates, Obama and Duncan have made us into subordinates as Pearson’s de facto high-stakes testing workforce. Stand up and say NO!
LikeLike
It used to be that school textbook publishers aligned their materials with the content and standards set by schools or states. Now it seems the reverse is true.
Pearson to the American education system: Align, or you will be assimilated!
LikeLike
By states, do you mean Texas?
LikeLike
It started in Texas with Sandy Kress, chief cheerleader and lobbyist for Pearson.
LikeLike
This is more what I had in mind:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/03/14/t-is-for-texas-textbooks.html
LikeLike
Stand up by demanding compensation from Pearson to administer Pearson’s testing nonsense. Do teachers have a contract with Pearson? Public school teahers are not Pearson’s de facto workforce!
LikeLike
That’s not how Pearson sees things, clearly. They now write the tests that teachers have to take to become teachers. Those tests are now love songs to standards-based accountability.
All Pearson, all the time.
Pearson, not Persons.
LikeLike
From the beginning, the Common Core State Standards were NOT
let me repeat that
NOT
about education.
The organizations that created these “standards”–the CCSSO and the NGA–were supported financially by Pearson and Gates. Gates paid for the “standards.”
And they did this because THEY WANTED A SINGLE NATIONAL LIST TO TAG THEIR ASSESSMENTS AND COMPUTER-ADAPTIVE SOFTWARE TO.
As this investor call makes ABUNDANTLY CLEAR, these people believe that we are in the middle of a switch from print to digital educational materials.
THEY KNOW THAT IF THERE IS ONE LIST, that ONE LIST CREATES A NATIONAL SCALE at which they can CRUSH ANY POTENTIAL COMPETITORS.
The Common Core was a business play from Day 1.
And that’s why NO CARE WHATSOEVER WAS TAKEN IN THE CREATION OF THIS PUERILE LIST. The CCSS in ELA are a childish joke. The CCSS in math are simply a mashup of what was to an enormous degree a previously existing consensus because almost all the previously existing state math standards were variations on the NCTM standards.
But the quality of the standards meant NOTHING to the people who paid to have these created. All that mattered, for the business plan, was that there be
ONE LIST
and that it be
CREATED AND ADOPTED QUICKLY.
A lot of politicians and well-known education consultants and pundits, as well as a couple of union leaders, were ENTIRELY PLAYED by the plutocrats who engineered this takeover of US education.
And Arne Duncan was the windup toy who made it all possible. His technology blueprint, issued at the beginning of his tenure, was basically the whole game plan for this takeover.
LikeLike
Bob Shepherd: to put it more succinctly—
The self-styled “education reformers” who are leading the “new civil rights movement of our time” have a business plan. Those of us who want a “better education for all” base ourselves on an education model.
They are bilingual—one set of words for themselves, another for the rest of us. We need to constantly translate from Bizglish to English so that people can understand what they are really saying.
But no surprise. So it is, and so it has been. You have read that epic of long ago—yes?—that rivals the ILLIAD and the ODYSSEY called THE LORD OF THE BLINGRING? There is a famous inscription on that fabled piece of finger decoration that was used by the Snark Lord of the Board Room when he tried to create a two-tiered education system:
“Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”
Oddly, up to now this classic of closet, er, ‘close’ reading has yet to appear on a CCSS/Pearson standardized test. However, according to the usual unconfirmed rumors it will make its debut soon on a College-and-Career-Readiness test to be administered to all kindergarten recipients of approved eduproducts doled out by eduproduct delivery specialists at public schools and Centres of EduExcellence [aka charters].
Strangely, said hazing ritual of labeling, sorting and ranking will not be applied to a select few, born to the naturally and divinely graced offspring of the edupreneurs, educrats, edbullies, edufrauds and accountabully underlings. THEIR OWN CHILDREN get an automatic pass to schools and careers/colleges where genuine teaching and learning are not only permitted but required and supported.
At any rate, I suppose you might feign ignorance of that immortal line uttered by the chief villain, Bauron [he had the power to bore people to death]: “Unfettered greed will answer every need.”
C’mon. Without the goal of $tudent $ucce$$ to guide our every action and thought, where oh where would we be in education today? Don’t you know extrinsic motivation beats intrinsic motivation every time?
Sheesh. Where is your critical stinking…
😎
LikeLike
I hope that all are grateful to that that gritful scholar, KrazyTA, for bringing this selection from THE LORD OF THE BLINGRING to light.
But, if I may, a little philology.
As Krazy rightly points out, Rheeformish, the tongue spoken by Ed Deformers and by their toadies and sycophants in the Rheeformation, is known to be a member of the Bizlish language group.
It is less well understood, but increasingly clearly established, that Bizlish itself derives from Goblish.
So, for example, the Rheeformish term for “numerological obfuscation for coercive and/or deceptive purposes,”
data-driven decision making,
derives from Bizlish this is data, damnit, so do what I say which in turn derives from proto-Goblish abacadabara hocus pocus the spirits are about to speak.
What I want to know, Krazy, is where you got your hands on the actual text of the rumored prophetic song “Three bling for the educrats under the sky,” from the Blingringelungenlied, which has been so long, so closely held among the Rheeformish???!!! This is astonishing!
Did you actually infiltrate that most secret and sacred of places in Rheeformdom, an education investors’ coven meeting?
You are a brave soul, if that be the case. It’s a wonder you made it back with your sanity intact.
LikeLike
Krazy props, KrazyTA!
LikeLike
BTW, Krazy, you have a great gift. Few can compose so well. You have an excellent ear and command of the connotation. Well, well done.
LikeLike
Who benefits?
Not kids. Not teachers.
The new national tests have NO EDUCATIONAL VALUE WHATSOEVER.
They are of NO BENEFIT WHATSOEVER TO STUDENTS, PARENTS, or TEACHERS.
But they are of ENORMOUS BENEFIT to a few plutocrats who will make many, many BILLIONS on the assessments themselves; on associated software and data systems to be sold to schools, districts, and state departments; and on new computer-adaptive learning software keyed to the tests and the “standards.”
K-12 education in the US has been bought.
And a lot of ignorant “leaders” in this country have been played.
LikeLike
Thanks for this link, Mercedes. A couple of business-types retweeted my advice to short Pearson, the most hated name in Education products and services. Their profits are indeed down.
Meanwhile, twitter is broken and I’m having withdrawal symptoms. The Newark Students who occupied the NPS boardroom tonight, after Cami fled, had finally gotten their pizza through the police cordon, and then Twitter went dead.
LikeLike
“the most hated name in Education products and services”
When people start saying your company name in the same tone that they use when referring to, say, colorectal cancer or pedophilia, then you have a problem.
Pearson has a problem.
LikeLike
I would say that in the past two months, I have heard people practically SPIT the name Pearson almost as often as I have heard the word “data.”
LikeLike
An entire class now can be taught without text books. Pearson sees the writing on the wall. Sites that assemble material from multiple sources. For math, problem generators like Kuta, some assessment engines like IXL, direct and group instruction from a variety of sites with virtual manipulatives. All on a tablet to rescue students from future chiropractors due to 100lb backpacks. Do we really need textbooks anymore?
LikeLike
I use textbooks for some classes, not for others.
LikeLike
Probably obsolete. Kids just don’t seem to get their information in a linear fashion. My son has 10 tabs open on a browser and timeslices to each. My students respond better to short visual/aural lessons only augmented with twitter sized text. No more than 10-15 minutes each and arranged so they can jump around to topics. My other kid is reading 5 books in an alternating progression. How many students really read textbooks anymore?
LikeLike
One of my colleagues talks about the traditional just in case teaching that is done in contrast to the just in time learning practices of students.
LikeLike
If we are meeting the needs of the “customer”, traditional textbooks do not seem a part of the future. I’m sure that topic was brought up at some Pearson executive strategy retreats between the lobster buffet and team building trust falls.
LikeLike
I think textbook publishers already see themselves as more like a multimedia software company. Books were static because that was the best we could do at the time.
LikeLike
And they are playing catch up.
LikeLike
There were many years I taught entire classes without textbooks. I was told there was no money for them.
LikeLike
That was often the case. No money was available for textbooks. Teachers spent a ton of money themselves.
Just look at the much more expensive computers and the constant updates and changes in hardware and software. Upgrades won’t be cheap. So they will save by paying teachers less and firing them.
But the money will not circulate back into the school community. It will go to Pearson, Gates, etc.
LikeLike
Same here. Or books so bad and out of date, I gave them to the students as a formality. Instead of spending money on useless testing, we need better content I can choose from. We can spend $30,000,000 or more on a hollywood movie to make spiderman fly, but our country can’t produce math videos any better than some guy scribbling on a an electronic whiteboard.
LikeLike
Let me be clear about this: I am a HUGE FAN of technology in education.
But I want it to be an instrument for liberation and learning, not an instrument for indoctrination, command, and control.
LikeLike
Or the converse, “An entire class can now be taught with text books.”
I use a good text book series from Vista Higher Learning that includes access to their “supersite”. But I don’t use the supersite as not all our students have internet access and I have access equity concerns about those with the most getting more and those with the least (for example no internet access) getting less.
LikeLike
Louisiana public schools borrow 50 million to buy computers for the Common Core tests:
“In November, mindful of the state’s deadline of implementing the computerized exam by May 2015, the Jefferson School Board voted to borrow $50 million via a bond issue.”
They’re going to make so much on the testing and endless updates and CC products associated with testing, you’d think they’d provide schools with the computers to take the tests rather than have strapped schools do long-term borrowing for equipment that will have to be constantly replaced.
http://ht.ly/x0tBd
LikeLike
Absolutely! Chiara!
LikeLike
I feel like we get such bad deals from the contractors. It’s like insult to injury.
Good God, they’re going to be raking in CC bucks for decades. The least they could do is give schools the machines. How about this? “We’re not buying the tests or the the programs until you provide the testing equipment”
How long is Lousiana going to be paying on these computers?
LikeLike
And look at LAUSD!!!!
LikeLike
“When the federal government created the Race to the Top program five years ago, the program generated excitement in schools nationwide.
In New York, school districts would get federal money to help implement the state’s Regents Reform Agenda, which includes the Common Core.
But, five years later, many districts say they had no idea they would have to pay big bucks to actually implement the new learning standards.
Race to the Top is a $4.3 billion federal program. The money was given to states over four years to then give to local school districts — Ellicottville Central is one of those districts.
“We really haven’t received any money until this year, this is the last year,” said Ellicottville superintendent Mark Ward.
Ward says a measly $17,490 — during the last year of the program was received.
What has Ellicottville spent to implement new learning standards?
20 times what it received from the government.”
http://www.wgrz.com/story/news/education/2014/05/19/race-to-the-top-school-districts/9277183/
LikeLike
Long before entering the field of education, I did a lot of work for a copyright attorney. Although it’s been a while, the “fair use” doctrine allows for excerpts to be quoted for the purpose of criticism, among other things. Parodies also constitute fair use! The fair use doctrine does not specifically provide for a number of words, nor does it specify that the copyright holder my specify such. It wouldn’t surprise me if Pearson listed this 400 word specification in an attempt to limit critical reviews (perhaps they didn’t consider the creation of separate writings that quote 400 words from separate sections… lol).
Of course Pearson could pursue legal action regardless of whether or not their amount specification is legally viable, and that would be a major pain. Kudos to Dr. Schneider for keeping it to 400 words.
LikeLike
Of course Pearson is going to push this crap. That’s why they and their business partner, Bill Gates, made the national “standards” happen. This was all a business plan from Day 1.
What disturbs me more is that many of our putative education “leaders” have gone all in to assist in foisting the puerile new “standards” and the associated tests on the country.
But this is nothing new. A little history lesson:
In 1880, the Second International Congress for the Education of the Deaf met in Milan, Italy. Many “education experts” from around the world attended. There, they voted to BAN the use of sign language in the education of deaf persons.
The decision was a terrible tragedy for the deaf community. Today, it is universally understood what a tragedy that decision was. Today, it is universally understood that the decision was based in ignorance and prejudice. Today, it is universally understood that the decision had profoundly negative effects on the lives of many generations of deaf kids.
And even at the time when the decision was made, there was plenty of scientific evidence that it was wrong, but the “renowned education experts” at the Milan conference were clueless about the relevant science. They insisted that their “higher” approach–teaching lip reading–was superior.
Well, the same sort of horror is happening, right now, with the CCSS in ELA. The new “standards” are incredibly backward and prescientific. They instantiate many, many folk mythologies about the teaching and learning of grammar, vocabulary, thinking, reading, and writing. They will set back the English language arts by DECADES. They will do a LOT of damage.
And yet we have education “leaders” trumpeting this crap, just like the education “leaders” who tried to kill sign and did so because they were profoundly ignorant, because they did not understand that sign is a unique, authentic, robust language in itself, like any other language–like French or English or Swahili or Hindi or Greek, and not simply a means for transcribing other languages.
It’s entirely understandable when someone like David Coleman trumpets the “new, higher standards.” He has no experience and no education in the relevant disciplines. And he hasn’t even a clue how much he doesn’t know.
But when our education “leaders” try to force these “standards” on us, that’s another matter altogether. They should know better. That they do not is SHOCKING.
Shame on them.
Shame on them for not learning more about the disciplines in which they practice.
Shame on them for the deep, irreparable damage that they are doing and will do over the coming years to millions of kids.
LikeLike
I just received a marketing email from SIMBA, which sells market research information to people in the educational publishing industry.
Guess what the headline of the email is?
“More Rigorous PreK Standards Require Focus on Core Curriculum at Younger Age”
$@#&*$@&*^$@!^*!(&^(*!!!!!!!!!!!
LikeLike
As a public school teacher, I tell friends to send their kids private, if they can afford it. I predict a huge amount of kids going to private schools. Those who can afford to flee will leave. Everyone wants what is best for their children. Soon, no one will keep their kids in public schools, unless they have to. Sending your kids to private schools is the best “opt out” I can think of. Public schools can then focus solely on testing and running sports training facilities.
LikeLike
This bears repeating. Thank you, again, Krazy, for bringing this to light:
“Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”
LikeLike
Song from “The Lord of the Blingring,” book DCLXVI of the Blingringelungenlied.
For more on classic Rheeformish songs and spells, see “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry” in “Grimoires and Other Rheeformish Literature,” Appendix 10 of the Rheeformish Lexicon.
LikeLike
http://teacherblog.typepad.com/newteacher/2012/11/on-the-rise-of-pearson-oh-and-following-the-money.html
LikeLike
“Who decided to outsource American education?”
ARAMARK
LikeLike
Is Bill Gates going to fire the Doctors who treat poor people because their health results/ outcomes do not match that of the privileged? Are these prop,e dense, mean or as they say in Ireland – ” poor creatures.”
LikeLike