Pearson announced it is cutting the jobs of 3,000 employees, to adjust to declining revenues.
“Chief Executive Officer John Fallon has promised to cut annual expenses by 300 million pounds ($394 million) by 2019, as he tries to create a leaner company more focused on digital education.”
Expect a renewed campaign by Pearson lobbyists to sell school leaders on the necessity of digital learning for instruction and assessment. This is also Jeb Bush’s pet passion. The research is thin to nonexistent but the profit motive is powerful.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our district is rapidly switching over to digital curricula –of course, without much investigation into whether they’re any good. The fact that they’re digital MEANS that they’re good in administrators’ minds. I’m interested to hear if anyone has encountered any high-quality digital curricula.
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We had an IPad pilot program at our middle school. They WERE high-quality IPads 6 years ago before middle school aged tweens/teens put their hands on them! The curriculum never followed….likely because it was too expensive and administration found that the kids did nothing but play computer games on them. The kids could bypass every parental control placed on those IPads by the school system….hilarious! The parents got a little hot when they had to pay $200 to replace broken screens and $50 to replace broken wires on the cords.
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One of my students got on a web site to show her friend a picture of her brother in jail.
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Aye. The digital curriculum I am “strongly encouraged” to use is based in Common Core ideology: “close” reading of short, meaningless, “complex” text, light on projects or fun of any kind, heavy on repetitive assessments. It’s redundant test prep. Choose any four letter word to describe it. Outright rejection of the system by a teacher, or even a team of teachers, carries risks if you have a heavy handed administration. I used the system long enough to be considered “proficient” with it, and now I am going to, let’s just say — supplement — it with better resources and lesson plans. Lots and lots of supplements. 99.99 % supplements. Maybe one day my colleagues will join together and with my union to suggest a better way. In the meantime, supplements.
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I’ll call it blended scaffolding. School officials will love that.
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Don’t get caught up in that trap of educrat jargon now LCT, you may never come back!
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Ha! Reading this blog every day is just what a teacher needs in order to know what eduspeak really means (nothing). I fear for my colleagues who only read the Times…
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“has encountered any high-quality digital curricula”
Isn’t that a logical impossibility?
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Digital curricula are designed for profit, not for students or teachers. That means designs that please potential investors who are anything but grassroots, why we fail.
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Pearson has been boosting its investments in low-cost international providers of educational services. It set up a fund to and portfolio to cultivate these, many with an online feature. The following report has some highlights from 2016 and forecasts for trends in 2017. Producers of educational resources for international markets, K-12, are including modules for learning English. The report makes the point that public-private partnerships are opening markets for profits.
http://palf.io/annual-letter/
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Thank you for sharing that link! “Governments will seek to establish more public private partnership models with school chains and school management organizations like we’ve seen in Liberia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Students in the Philippines are now attending 11th and 12th grade for the first time. Expanding school for an additional two years has created an educational gap that is being filled by quality affordable private schools; this is only possible due to the partnership with the government to provide students with vouchers to attend the school most appropriate for their situation.” This immediately made me wonder how the language of vouchers translates, and who profits when it does.
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Now that it’s testing racket has past its profit-making peak and inflicted immeasurable damage to students and teachers Pearson is off to greener pastures. Yes, we are seeing the push in NYS to computer-based exams and all things that can be marketed as adaptive and personalized. Good old Pearson on the cutting edge of everyone’s dream: Individualized Instruction. Why do I keep thinking of Skinner and his pigeons?
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The testing and online learning rackets think our young and we can be reduced to Pavlov’s dog.
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We should not be jumping on any tech bandwagon without evidence to support its value. Technology is a great tool, but it does a poor job of replacing a human teacher. I am no expert, but one study I have read states can computers can benefit mostly older, motivated students in subjects where they are learning discreet items like grammar or math. Computers do less well in teaching the big ideas of literature or the social sciences. Most younger students need to make a connection with a caring, empathetic adult in order to feel engaged. It would be a tremendous mistake to supplant human interaction with a machine as humans are social beings. We should stop using our young people as guinea pigs for Silicon Valley. We should be focusing on what is best for young people, not tech. companies.
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Seems this species is at a crossroads. It frightens me to think of the negative aspects regarding the outcome.
Profits at any cost seem to “drive” the actions of corporations and even non-profits. Morality, while being given “lip service” in many realms, is taking a back seat. It’s about being #1, whatever that is. Our young and even us are being bombarded by emptiness as well as cruelties beyond my ability to cope with the total c— on screens.
Are we willing to let programmers run our lives and tell us what to do and think? Gates and Pearson Corp. along with those who write the script would love to OWN us. Why? Answer: MORE PROFITS. Why is Google and Zuckerberg (FB owner) wanting a piece of the pie when the owners already have so much? Answer: Their EGOS, which are tied to their pocketbooks.
We teachers have been common cored and told we don’t know what we are doing. Why? Answer: PROFITS for the few who have not a clue except these few need their ego stroked and show how powerful they are. It’s all so sick.
I am in total agreement with all of you who responded before I did.
retired teacher is right about her warnings.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
There’s more evidence than the link I have posted.
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Well stated, Yvonne. I hope you are coming to the NPE so that I can meet you, a very astute thinker! Along with many others here that I hope I can meet. I’ve met a few commentators here at the prior NPE conferences and all are wonderful folk, especially retiredbutmissthekids and her husband, eh, rbmtk.
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Corporate profits again and again.
This one is really foul: http://billmoyers.com/story/private-prison-industry-corporate-backers/
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One of the worse concepts ever thought of: Privatizing prisons for profit. Insanity!
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google Kahn Academy.
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Ohio lawmakers are pretending they are “cracking down” on ECOT, but it’s nonsense and spin.
“The deductions come on top $60 million that the state is subtracting from its payments to ECOT over the next two years, for failing to verify about 60 percent of its enrollment for which it was paid in the audited 2015-16 school year.
Another kick in the teeth came on Thursday, when it was reported the Ohio Republican Party is returning $76,000 in campaign donations from Lager and a top associate. This followed a decision by former House Speaker Larry Householder, who is seeking his old job, to return $70,000 to the Summit County Republican Party — the same amount the county party had received two weeks earlier from the state GOP. It looks like Lager’s money was funneled and then refunded.
Householder is no stranger to fundraising scandal; reported strong-arm tactics got him into trouble in the legislature in the early 2000s. If Householder won’t touch a dollar, that says a lot.”
Householder is the lawmaker ECOT bought, and they’re putting him in a hugely powerful position.
Compare how they handle ECOT to how they handled a data-rigging scandal at Columbus public schools. They RAIDED the public school- there were trials, people went to prison.
This is how they’re “cracking down” on ECOT. They’re putting ECOT’s man in a powerful position in the legislature.
It’s a joke. Where is the attorney general? Why is this being treated like a political problem for the Republican Party rather than a matter for law enforcement?
http://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20170804/editorial-ecots-no-good-really-bad-week
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ECOT has an authorizer. The authorizer is the Lake Erie West Education Service Center.
We were told authorizers would regulate charter schools. That’s (supposedly) what they’re paid to do.
So why is no one holding ECOT’s sponsor accountable? How have they authorized this charter for 20 years and provided absolutely no oversight?
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Authorizes, like the charters, are paid per students, anywhere from 3% to 15%. Do the math. Why would authorizes shut down a lucrative money flow.
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Diane is so right to highlight business news like this. Teacher focus is important but money is a driver of so much behind education good & bad that those who respect public education must know how to separate friend from foes.
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Gail,
It is important to understand that many policies adopted by state legislatures and even Congress are driven by lobbyists, not research. The testing industry and the software industry are multi-billion dollar industries. Bad policies are driven by the profit motive
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