Steven Singer writes about the alliance among three organizations—a private equity firm, a testing company, and an EdTech company. What could possibly go wrong?
He begins:
Prepare to watch more of your tax dollars spiral down the drain of standardized testing.
A year after being gobbled up by private equity firmVeritas Capital, ed tech company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is acquiring K-12 assessment giant Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).
Let me put that in perspective – a scandal-ridden investment firm that made billions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bought one of standardized testing’s big four and then added the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to its arsenal.
This almost certainly means the cost of state testing is going to increase since the providers of the tests are shrinking.
“It used to be if you put out a [Request for Proposal] RFP for state assessment, you get five, six, 10 bidders,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment. “Now you’re lucky to get three. When you’re doing that, there’s maybe not as much expertise and certainly the cost will go up” (emphasis mine).
Under the proposed deal announced in January, the testing company’s assessments and the ed tech company’s test prep materials will become intimately entwined.
NWEA, best known for its MAP assessment, will operate as a division of HMH. And NWEA’s tests will be aligned with HMH’s curriculum.
You can just imagine how this will affect the marketplace.
NWEA serves about 10,000 school districts and HMH estimates it works with more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries, according to a press release about the proposed acquisition.
So we can expect districts and even entire states which rely heavily on the MAP test to beencouraged to buy as much HMH curriculum as possible. That way they can teach directly what is on their standardized tests.
That is assuming, of course, the acquisition agreement is approved after a 90-day regulatory review period.
To be honest, I would be surprised if there are any objections.
Such cozy relationships already exist with other education companies. For example, Curriculum Associates provides the aforementioned curriculum for its own i-Ready assessment.
It’s ironic that an industry built on standardization – one size fits all – continues to take steps to create books, software and courses aligned with specific tests. It’s almost like individuating information to specific student’s needs is beneficial or something. Weird!
After all, if these sorts of assessments can be gamed by increased access to materials created by the same corporate entities that create and grade the tests, are we really assessing knowledge? Aren’t we just giving students a score based on how many books and software packages their districts bought from the parent company? Is that really education?
I remember a time when curriculum was determined by classroom teachers – you know, experts in their fields, not experts in the corporate entity’s test du jour.
But I guess no one was getting rich that way…
Please open the link and read the rest of this important post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“America spends $6.8 trillion a year on defense, health care and education – markets dominated by the government.”
Private equity is predatory capitalism. As this post notes, these financial services cozy up to the politicians so there is little attempt to regulate or control them. Their main objective is to make as much profit as they can often to the detriment of the middle, working class and poor. They are not educators; they are investors that often follow the pattern of “buy, strip, pump and dump.” Of all the industries they enter, their growth in health care and education should be a huge concern to all of us because human decent human services require investment when lives, well-being or young people’s futures hang in the balance.
Private equity profits by cutting jobs, understaffing care centers, and hiring the lowest common denominator. Consider our outrageous health care costs for worse outcomes. Consider the number of scandals and deaths in nursing homes. private prisons, and private juvenile detention centers or our own personal favorite, charter schools. Private equity is also wheedling its way into public pensions which should be a concern to those of us that depend on them. Private equity sees a $6.8 trillion dollar public golden goose ready to be plucked, and the testing industry is only one small element in their fleecing of America. Like sharks private equity never sleeps, and they will not stop until the public forces politicians to stand up to them. Private equity wins when most of us lose.
What you said so well.
yup
Every public employee should read this article. https://www.levernews.com/a-wall-street-time-bomb/
Uniting to Save Our Schools is hosting a powerful webinar with Angela Valenzuela, Wayne Au, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, Deb McCarty, and Harry Feder on Feb 8 at 7 p.m. EST entitled “Examining the Moral Injuries and Oppressive Impacts of High Stakes Testing. This is not to be missed. Register at USOS.or or https://bit.lyUSOSADHSST. It’s free!
I wonder if they will discuss any Wilson such as this:
“A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review”
http://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/1372/43
And
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”
https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/viewFile/577/700
or my free e-book, “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in America Public Education”
Email me at dswacker@centurytel.net put “book” in the subject line.
From a little less than valid:
“To the extent that these categorisations are accurate or valid at an individual level, these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid, they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by scientific research. If you do not believe this, then consider that no matter how high the status of an educator, his voice is unheard unless he belongs to the relevant institution.
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions?”
It makes sense that some crooks that got rich from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would see an opportunity to turn a crooked profit from another war, since so many cons and frauds are already cashing in from the battles that are taking place in public schools and public school classrooms.
Reign of Error
Life and Death of the Great American School System
Slaying Goliath
The Language Police
“The Teacher Wars, a History of American’s Most Embattled Profession
– Dana Goldstein
Your child’s schoolteacher is actually an equity firm that murders and rapes. Awesome! It’s sooo cool that we haven’t had a president with the backbone to do any trust busting in so long! Self dealers in charge of everything is fantastic! Monopolies are great for competition! Brilliant!!!!
we haven’t had a president with the backbone to do any trust busting in so long
yup
Yes, there was a time before high-stakes standardized testing, and it was a better time. Students did not learn less. Quite the contrary. They learned more. Why? Because their curricula (and the accompanying pedagogy) weren’t dumbed down to be test preparation. So, the high-stakes standardized testing is worse than useless. Far, far, far worse. So bad that anyone who supports it is complicit in child abuse.
This news just means that smart money is betting on this ghastly undermining of basic education in the United States will just go on and on, like an incurable, endemic disease.
But it could easily be stopped. The major teachers’ unions could end it tomorrow by calling a national action in which teachers take to the streets until the national and state mandated high-stakes standardized testing is ended. Until that happens, we are stuck with this egregious-to-the-point-of-being-criminal testing mania and with those predatory companies that profiteer on it. Until that happens, the teachers’ unions, because they could end it, are complicit.
cx: is betting that this
Why are they complicit? Because they could easily end this testing nonsense.
Non sense
The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) program was evaluated a decade ago by the U.S. Department of Education. Specifically, the study looked at forth- and fifth-grade reading achievement over a two-year period. The study used an experimental design, and it was conducted in school districts where teachers received training from the Northwest Evaluation Association, the producer of the MAP program and tests.
The conclusion? It’s right here:
“Overall, the MAP program did not have a statistically significant impact on students’ reading achievement in either grade 4 or grade 5.” And, “MAP teachers were not more likely than control group teachers to have applied differentiated instructional practices in their classes.”
Click to access REL_20134000.pdf