Alan Singer pulls back the curtain to reveal the dirty little secret behind the high-stakes exams that determine the fate of teachers, students, administrators, and schools.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5922bf13e4b0b28a33f62dcd
Pearson hires minimally qualified people and pays them by the hour to determine whether you will be humiliated, fired, lose a promotion, or your school will be closed.
If you are a professional, your failure profits Pearson.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve seen the ADs for temorary workers to grade those awful tests. SICK.
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The ads for test scorers are often on Craig’s List
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An interview with the head of Democrats for Education that completely omits public schools:
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/05/21/head-of-democrats-for-education-reform-blasts-devos-calls-push-for-vouchers-a-sideshow/
I know I sound like a broken record but you really have to read ed reformers to see the extent of the echo chamber.
To claim to support “public education” without supporting 90% of schools is just ridiculous. It’s SUCH an echo chamber they don’t even see the omission.
All I want is truth in advertising. Be “Democrats for Charter Schools”, be “Democrats for Vouchers” but don’t use public school students in this way.
You’re not doing anything for them. Stop using them in your promotional materials. I get that it’s better politically to claim to be for “public schools” but it isn’t accurate.
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DFER is working really hard to claim that charter schools are public schools, which they are not. They are private schools under contract to public authorities. But DFER and similar groups don’t want to be tarnished by association with DeVos. I recall that she made a small contribution to DFER. They should return the money.
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This is the Center for Reinventing Education.
They decided to start offering “improvements” to rural public schools and you’ll never guess what they came up with!
Charter schools. Of course. Because there’s really only one idea in ed reform and it’s replacing existing public schools. They offer NOTHING else:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/05/22/in-a-changing-rural-america-what-can-charter-schools-offer/
Be The Center For Promoting Charter Schools. Stop pretending ANY of this is about kids in existing public schools. It isn’t.
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And for public school parents in rural areas, be aware. Ed reformers are interested in opening charters NO MATTER WHAT THAT DOES to kids in public schools.
As usual, public school kids are utterly and completely ignored in these grand experiments. No one even bothers to think about what might happen to a low population rural area school when a cherry-picking charter comes in. They don’t care. If they DID care they would spend some portion of all those research bucks on it.
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They want college graduates (or equivalency?), any degree, and they are willing to pay $13 an hour, almost as much as a customer associate earns at Walmart, but significantly less than our test grader would make at Costco or Home Depot. Their “highly qualified” graders, unable to find or hold jobs in low paying service industries will be expected to “put aside personal biases,” evaluate “student responses to subject-related open-ended questions,” and “apply scoring guide according to customer requirements.”
Why doesn’t it surprise me that Pearson is a lousy, low temp wage employer?
Let’s look at what the upper tier executives are making. Maybe they could push some of those profits down instead of grabbing every cent.
These kids are supposedly being made “college and career ready” and the people grading the tests make just above minimum wage?
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As an English teacher, over the years I was forced into grading test after test inside our test-money-greedy district where endless change was the word of the day. I can attest to one test-grading consistency: there was little if any consistency. But there was, always, more than enough administrative denial. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/drowning-in-the-river-of-denial
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“St. Paul’s School, the elite boarding school in New Hampshire, on Monday named 13 former faculty and staff members against whom investigators substantiated claims of sexual misconduct with students there decades ago.
“Put simply but starkly, several former faculty and staff sexually abused children in their care in a variety of ways, from clear boundary violations to repeated sexual relationships to rape,” read a 73-page report written by outside lawyers after a yearlong investigation.”
Does Campbell Brown have any explanation for this? I thought she told the country that labor unions caused sexual abuse in schools.
How does she explain the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church? Was that labor unions too? The “labor union cooties” from public schools somehow drifted over to private schools and infected teachers?
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I’ve seen these ads–and I think John Oliver did a feature on this as well. Pearson pays about ten bucks an hour for this.
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Let’s not neglect SBAC which hires AIR which subcontracts the hand scoring for the Summative assessments to AIR’s sub-contractor, Measurement Incorporate (MI).
I’m assuming each state using SBAC has a link. Here is Idaho’s:
https://www.appone.com/MainInfoReq.asp?R_ID=1492470%20
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Real easy for the test scoring agency to change the rubric if test scores are not showing the desired results.
Had a neighbor who scored tests a few years back. When I asked her about it she reminded me that she had signed a confidentiality agreement. But her tone of voice and body language strongly sugggested that it had been done.
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The book to read on this is Todd Farley and his book “Making The Grades”‘
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Howard,
You are right! I meant to mentionTodd Farley’s excellent book about scoring tests.
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Does anyone know where I can find information about who scores the SBAC here in California?
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Dennise. I did some poking around. If you go to this website, you will see that UCLA is the contracting authority for SMARTER tests. The names of the contracting officers are given for a variety of SMARTER tests that have been given. Tell them about your interest in knowing who received the contract and the payment plan for scoring.
Best I can do.
https://bids.sciquest.com/apps/Router/PublicEvent?CustomerOrg=UCOP&tab=PHX_NAV_SourcingClosed&tmstmp=1495564818035
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What strikes me even more than the low pay is the hours: eight-hour shifts of grading essays? With “incentive pay,” presumably for increased output?
As an educator with more than a quarter century of experience in reading student essays and papers, I cannot imagine working solidly at that task, at that pace, and being able responsibly to evaluate student writing, scoring rubric or not. It’s ridiculous.
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This has been an issue for years & years–nothing new to see here. Outlined in Todd Farley’s 2009–YES, 200NINE, as in YEARS ago. WHY haven’t we shut down Pear$on by now? NOTHING–nada–has changed, & our kids have had to suffer. The CEO of Pear$on ha$n’t, of course, $uffered, though–even though Pear$on’$ $tock ha$ plummeted–as recently reported–the CEO continue$ to make BIG $$$. (And–gotta wonder just WHO owns Pear$on $tock–doe$ anyone know how to find out?)
BATS–at your convention, can you start the seeds to organize a nation-wide protest at each of Pear$on’$ campuses? This is something that MUST be done, & THIS year.
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