Pearson has plans for the future. Its plans involve students, education, and profits. Pearson, of course, is the British mega-publishing corporation that has an all-encompassing vision of monetizing every aspect of education.
Two researchers, Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, have reviewed Pearson’s plans. It is a frightening portrait of corporate privatization of teaching and of student data, all in service of private profit.
Pearson 2025: Transforming teaching and privatising education data, by Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, discusses the potentially damaging effects of the company’s strategy for public education globally. It raises two main issues of concern in relation to the integrity and sustainability of schooling:
- the privatization of data infrastructure and data, which encloses innovation and new knowledge about how we learn, turning public goods into private assets; and
- the transformation and potential reduction of the teaching profession, diminishing the broader purposes and outcomes of public schooling.
You can also find a radio program featuring one of the researchers which discusses these issues at http://www.radiolabour.net/hogan-140519.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pearson is the modern day British East India Company, spreading colonialism worldwide.
Pretty much all that’s left of Britain’s once overwhelming imperial influence.
Pathetic, really.
The T(est) Party
The colonists revolted
They dumped the foolish tests
The British were insulted
They thought their T was best
Well done, SomDAM. And yes, colonization is precisely what this is. But it’s a particularly insidious form of colonization. It’s colonization of the mind. It’s the Thought Police. It’s the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love. I’m not exaggerating. This is deadly serious.
Where can we sign up to take part in dumping Pearson’s tests in the ocean – maybe there can be several dumpings: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pearl Harbor, New Orleans, New York, Boston, et al.?
To get the tests so we can dump them, will require several Special Forces teams to hijack the shipments and deliver them to the dumping harbors.
Wait, what if Pearson puts the tests online so they are not on paper. How can we dump that test – is the internet a virtual ocean we can hack to dump Pearson?
on the nose
Forewarned is forearmed. We need to Keep on Pushing against Pearson and other entities that place profits over the public good.
Pearson is EVIL. It is the incarnation of GERM. It’s US educational publishing operation was losing money hand over fist until it discovered the riches to be made from a) standardized testing and b) depersonalized learning test prep. The motto of this company seems to be
Pearson, Not Persons. All your base are belong to us.
cx: Its, of course, not It’s. Sorry about the typo.
Not long ago, I was handed the recent Pearson literature program, which included print books and online materials. I looked this stuff over, and it was appalling. Every page was filled with errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, and fact. It was totally incoherent. It intended to be test prep, but it didn’t even do that well. I dutifully passed out the Pearson books and then ignored them for the rest of the year.
Teachers and administrators: a boycott is in order. Pearson is one of those companies that will do ANYTHING to achieve higher sales this quarter, no matter how detrimental to kids and teachers. Refuse to buy or use their products. Starve the beast.
I agree 100%. Boycott Pearson and all their products. We need to get administrators and state ed. people on our side. Pearson is poison!
not just strikes, but BOYCOTTS needed
I’m in a Pearson/PARCC state….MD. PARCC ELA 10 and PARCC Alg I are graduation requirements. We can’t boycott, we can’t opt out (we have to use civil disobedience and REFUSE), we can’t get rid of the curriculum because there would be none, we can’t get rid of texts because there would be none. Stuck!!! I refused for child #1 as long as I could but in High School, there is no way to get around it…..a high school diploma is very important in this world. The only way to get out of it is to enroll your child in a private school that doesn’t use CCSS or standardized testing or accept vouchers. I have little respect for most of the teachers in this state who will not boycott this crap….on average, teachers in MD are paid pretty well.
Four takaways for me: teachers in under resourced schools perversely rely on testing and chromebook based lessons to balance their own laziness and or exhaustion for planning engaging lessons on their own. That is, they prefer to test kids as long as possible because it removes A LOT of the prep work and consequent anxiety.
Pearson will not or cannot adress the need for cooperative learning and its inherent benefits of empathy, following, leading, and a sense of sacrifice. These are big parts of k-20 learning and software does nothing to address this.
3.Publishers and authors will demand more from the assemblers in India or wherever Pearson has them. The profit margin on tech content will shrink as writing recognition software keeps Pearson honest about plagiarism and copyright.
My CTU bargaining team needs to address this issue now with CPS so that their (inevitable) Pearson contract has language that gives teachers authority to pick and choose lessons, to view source materials, and to limit the duration of any district commitment
Your first point is not a takeaway from the report (at least not from the podcast interview w/its co-author). Pearson’s plans for 2025 do not in fact seem to include teachers at all, much less teachers picking & choosing which pieces of personalized learning to use. Is it an observation from the school you teach at or what?
True it’s no takaway from the report as much as it is my own connection. Just like we need to rid ourselves of screen dependency outside of schools, the same applies within. In some ways the teachers are complicit in this screen dependency, myself included. When I wake up in the morning knowing that my Ss are just sitting in front of an adaptive test for an hour, i breathe a little easier, and no, i do not think this mindset is unique to my school.
Agreed. I don’t let my students anywhere near a Chromebook. Google has infiltrated the public schools with 20 million Chromebooks. Ask yourself why they maintained a platform for students that allows them to easily “stray” into every corner of cyberspace? The excessive amount of screen time from the combination of Chromebooks, smart phones, and X-Box should be alarming adults everywhere. The only problem is that the majority of parents are equally addicted.
Wow that’s depressing. To remember how that feels [overloaded, I presume], I have to reach back to early days when I taught 5 levels of hisch French. Very diff teaching Span to 2-5y.o.’s: there’s absolutely nothing you can park them at for more than 15mins that will keep them quiet & busy. I’m also going to guess you have to do some kind of redundant crap like writing up details of every lesson plan every week [& do not deviate] for powers that be—that’ll remove any creative spontaneity, which can replenish your energy as you go…
How DARE you MSS? Have you worked in one of these under-resourced schoos? I have, and we plan our own engaging lessons, thank you. The compiuter stuff is mandated by the district, who probably get kick-backs, and the kids and teachers hate them.
The kids might hate them and the experienced teachers might hate them, but the new teachers seem to be just fine with all of this. It makes their life easier. In fact, districts are offering early retirement packages for older teachers so that they can pay the newbies less and they can socially engineer them to “follow the rules”.
The “new teachers” do not know what it was like before NCLB, the Common Core crap and the ESSA. To them, starting in 2002, this insanity is the norm and crazy is normal.
For instance, IF (big “IF” I hope) Trump stays in power (Heaven Forbid) never leaves the White House, and the Trumps become a dumb-duck dynasty, in two-or-three generations, that will be all the living citizens know. They will have no idea what it was like before Trump because for sure, he will have all the history books changed so by 2050 at the earliest, the Founding Fathers would be forgotten and Trump’s face would be the one we see on the one dollar bill.
I think Trump, if he had that kind of power, will erase all evidence of every other president that ever existed. There would only be him, the glorious genius and greatest president and businessman that ever lived. Every home and business would be required to put his framed face on a wall in every room even over the toilets.
Admittedly, my sample size of my school and a people I know at other local schools is small, but within two years, the vast majority of our new teachers have figured out that the kids and parents hate the technology and move away from so much tech.
I feel as I near to my retiring years that our children will be taught by robots in the future. The whole thing is just saddening. My school begins sol testing this week and I am doing PALS, no recess, no play, it will be a miserable 19 days.
The speculation about teaching by robots that was done in the 1950s and ’60s (see, for example, Isaac Asimov’s delightful short story “The Fun They Had”) mostly missed the big issue: when you centralize and depersonalize the provision of educational services, you centralize command and control over the “education” (brainwashing) of the next generation. Important decisions about people’s futures (will this child have access to this program, which leads to this future possibility) get made by the program, which is controlled by a few oligarchs. Pearson is ALL ABOUT the complete scripting of education, K-college, and the elimination of the democratic role of teachers in shaping the next generation. It’s completely Orwellian, and it’s a clear and present danger.
Those stories about robot teachers from the 1950s and ’60s mostly made a crucial error. They personified the robots as individuals–breathtakingly skilled individuals. They didn’t represent them as what they will in fact be–the working end of a Borg controlled by a few extraordinarily wealthy oligarchs.
Teachers, please read this report, and share it widely with other teachers. Pearson is the enemy. These people want to erase any autonomy that you have left.
If your school or district gives a dime to this company, that dime will be used to destroy public education, to deprofessionalize and depersonalize teaching, to implement top-down scripting of education via Pearson products, and to develop vast databases for tracking and controlling individuals cradle-to-grave. If you have any doubts about this, read this report.
Pearson’s vision is the roadmap for complete oligarchical command and control. It’s 1984 as public policy manual. The whole intent is to increase profits by eliminating the bottom-up, democratic, interpersonal character of education for the masses.
posted at
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Pearson-s-Plans-for-2025–in-General_News-Diane-Ravitch_Education-Funding_Education-Testing_Education-Vouchers-190519-741.html#comment734241
I ran into a student of mine at graduation. He was doing security there, an SRO at one of the schools in our county. He introduced himself-people change a lot in 20 years-and thanked me for teaching him how to measure. He was astounded that all the students have to take advanced algebra courses now, knowing that he could not have done it when he was in school, and recalling that we did practical problems in math class. I really think he was responding more to the personal nature of the school than anything I did. He was the sort of kid who loved nothing better than to get in a John boat and float the river with a fishing hook. He still harbors a dream of floating all 325 miles of the Duck River. I told him about the National Geo article on the Duck and other biodiversity monuments in the world.
There were others there too. A kid with a family of five beautiful children. A host of other former students seeing relatives and friends graduate. Just let a robot give a forty year old former student a hug.
“Just let a robot give a forty-year-old former student a hug.”
What a powerful image of the hug that will never happen. Robots cost too much so it will have to be a keyboard or the monitor the student gets to hug.
I can see it now. A young adult who had that algorithm for a ninth-grade meets it somewhere on another computer and is asked by the computer to give it a hug.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.