Here is a site that takes a hard look at the profit-making end of education, and it is booming. Business is amazingly good, what with all the new opportunities for testing, test prepping, outsourcing, online stuff, new technologies.
Meanwhile, your public officials are trying to figure out how to cut teachers’ pensions.
Remember the old saying: “A promise made is a debt unpaid.”
The new version is: “Promises are meant to be broken.”
A press release describes a shocking new initiative: the New York City Department of Education will pilot Pearson’s new in-the-womb test for fetuses.
The esteemed research entity and public relations firm Students Last was first to break the news.
Lighten up.
Barbara Madeloni, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst protested the field-testing of the Stanford-Pearson evaluation of her students. The New York Times wrote about her courage. She was fired (“given a letter of non-renewal”).
Please consider adding your name to the petition demanding her reinstatement.
Alan Singer wrote an article about Pearson and its leaders in Huffington Post.
I linked to it in a post yesterday about the high attrition rate of teachers.
In his original article, Singer pointed out that Susan Fuhrman is a director of Pearson. She is the president of Teachers College. Singer said she had $20 million in Pearson stock. As he notes here, he misread the British currency by a multiple of 10.
He made the correction, and I reprint it here.
There remains the question of conflict of interest when the president of the nation’s most prestigious graduate school of education (and the president of the National Academy of Education) is also a member of the board of directors of a profit-seeking seller of standardized testing, online instruction, online charter schools, and course materials for the Common Core. Pearson is deeply entwined in the current destructive reform movement. It is hard to see how the leader of major education institutions can be a spokesman for the best interests of both Pearson and American education.
Important Corrections to the Latest Pearson Article
London Stock Exchange prices are quoted in pounds and pence. Unless indicated, the price of shares is shown in pence. I00 pence equal 1 pound. I wrote “The sales brought Ethridge alone 20,474,712 GBX or approximately 32,350,000 in U.S. dollars.” However, GBX is in pence, so the U.S. dollar value of the transaction was only be $323,500.
http://www.stockexchangesecrets.com/london-stock-exchange-prices.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling
In official Pearson PLC reports available online, Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College-Columbia University is listed as a non-executive director of Pearson. As of February 29, 2012, she held 12,927 shares of Pearson stock valued at $240,000. As a non-executive director she also receives an annual fee of 65,000 or almost $100,000. Fuhrman has been a non-executive director since 2004 and has received fees and stock I estimate worth more than a million dollars, certainly a substantial sum, but not the $20 million I initially reported.
I thank “Nick50000” for bringing this to my attention.
Corrected Version — Pearson “Education” — Who are these people?http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/pearson-education-new-york-testing-_b_1850169.html
According to a recent article on Reuters, an international news service based in Great Britain, “investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education. The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/usa-education-investment-idUSL2E8J15FR20120802
Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011.
http://www.answers.com/topic/pearson-plc
Starting in May 2014, Pearson Education will take over teacher certification in New York State as a way of fulfilling the state’s promised “reforms” in its application for federal Race to the Top money. The evaluation system known as the Teacher Performance assessment or TPA was developed at Stanford University with support from Pearson, but it will be solely administered and prospective teachers will be entirely evaluated by Pearson and its agents. Pearson is adverting for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators willing to evaluate applicants for teacher certification. It is prepared to pay $75 per assessment.
http://www.regents.nysed.gov/meetings/2012Meetings/March2012/312hed5.pdf
http://www.nystce.nesinc.com/NY_annProgramUpdate.asp
http://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-and-pearson-collaborate-deliver-teacher-performance-assessment
http://www.scoretpa.pearson.com/
The Pearson footprint appears to be everywhere and taints academic research as well as government policy. For example, the Education Development Center (EDC), based inWaltham, Massachusetts, is a “global nonprofit organization that designs, delivers and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic opportunity.” EDC works with “public-sector and private partners” to “harness the power of people and systems to improve education, health promotion and care, workforce preparation, communications technologies, and civic engagement.” In education, it is involved in curriculum and materials development, research and evaluation, publication and distribution, online learning, professional development, and public policy development. According to its website, its funders include Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, the Gates Foundation, and of course, Pearson Education, all companies or groups that stand to benefit from its policy recommendations.
http://www.edc.org/about/contracting
http://www.edc.org/about/funders
EDC sponsored a study on the effectiveness of new teacher evaluation systems, “An examination of performance- based teacher evaluation systems in five states,” that Pearson is promoting but there are two VERY BIG FLAWS in the study. First, of the five states included in the study, Delaware, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, four, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, are notorious anti-union states where teachers have virtually no job security or union protection, and Delaware used the imposition of new teacher assessments to make it more difficult for teachers to acquire tenure. In Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia collective bargaining by teachers is illegal. Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina used the new assessments to make it easier to fire teachers and Georgia used the assessments to determine teacher pay. The second flaw is that the study draws no connection between the evaluation system and improved student learning.
ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/northeast/pdf/REL_2012129.pdf
publications.sreb.org/2011/11S11_Focus_Tenure.pdf
According to the Financial Times of London, a Pearson owned property, in what I consider a conflict-of-interests, Susan Fuhrman, the President of Teachers College at Columbia Universityhas been a “Non-Executive Independent Director of Pearson PLC” since 2004 and a major stockholder in the company with over 13,000 shares worth according to my estimate over two hundred thousand dollars. Fuhrman also is “president of the National Academy of Education, and was previously dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.”
http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Directors-and-dealings?s=PSON:LSE
In official Pearson PLC reports available online, Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College-Columbia University is listed as a non-executive director of Pearson. As of February 29, 2012, she held 12,927 shares of Pearson stock valued at $240,000. As a non-executive director she also receives an annual fee of 65,000 or almost $100,000. Fuhrman has been a non-executive director since 2004 and has received fees and stock I estimate worth more than a million dollars, certainly a substantial sum, but not the $20 million I initially reported.
www.pearson.com/investor/ar2010/files/pdf/Pearson_AR10.pdf
There has been some resistance to Pearson’s influence over American education.
In May 2012, students and teachers in the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus School of Education launched a national campaign challenging the forced implementation of Teacher Performance Assessment (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/education/new-procedure-for-teaching-license-draws-protest.html?pagewanted=all). They argued that the field supervisors and cooperating teachers who guided their teaching practice and observed and evaluated them for six months in middle and high school classrooms were better equipped to judge their teaching skills and potential than people who had never seen nor spoken with them. They have refused to participate in a pilot program organized by Pearson and to submit the two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching and a take-home test. They are supported by United Opt Out National, a website that organized a campaign and petition drive to boycott Pearson evaluations of students, student teachers, and teachers (http://unitedoptout.com/boycott-pearson-now/). In June 2012, New York parents protested against Pearson designed reading tests that included stand reading passages and meaningless choices.
The question that must addressed is whether the British publishing giant Pearson and its Pearson Education subsidy should determine who is qualified to teach and what should be taught in New York State and the United States? I don’t think so! Not only did no one elect them, but when people learn who they are, they might not want them anywhere near a school – or a government official.
From what I can make out from its website, the three key players at Pearson and Pearson Education are Glen Moreno, chairman of the Pearson Board of Directors, Dame Marjorie Morris Scardino, overall chief executive for Pearson, and William Ethridge, chief executive for North American Education. Although the largest stockholders are a British investment firm called Legal & General Group PLC which controls 32 million shares or 4% of the company and the Libyan Investment Authority with 24 million shares or 3% of the company. According to the Financial Times of London, the Libyan Investment Authority was founded by Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam, his heir apparent until the regime’s collapse, in January 2007.
http://www.pearson.com/about-us/board-of-directors/Boardmembers/Glen-MorenoChairman-47/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1b5e11b6-d4cb-11e0-a7ac-00144feab49a.html#axzz24qXoOwON
Glen Moreno is wealthy, powerful, influential, and highly suspect. According to Wikipedia, Moreno was born in California in 1943 and has a law degree from Harvard University. He worked for 18 years at Citigroup in Europe and Asia, running the investment banking and trading divisions. Moreno was a director of Fidelity International Ltd. And became chairman of Pearson, the publisher of the British newspaper Financial Times in October 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Moreno
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/lloyds-says-deputy-chairman-moreno-to-step-down.html
Moreno was chairman of UK Financial Investments, the group set up by the British government to protect public funds used to bail-out banks after the 2008 global economic collapse. He was forced to resign in 2009 when it was revealed that he was a trustee of Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank accused of aiding tax evasion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/12/moreno-uk-financial-investments
Moreno was also deputy chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, Great Britain’s largest mortgage lender, but stepped down there in May 2012.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/lloyds-says-deputy-chairman-moreno-to-step-down.html
Among the Pearson troika, Moreno is the lowest paid, although he apparently has other resources. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was a little over $600,000. He does however own a home in London and a cattle farm in Virginia and according to the Times of London, managed to contribute half a million pounds to the British Conservative Party in 2009, and purchase 200,000 shares of Lloyd stock in 2010.
http://www.forbes.com/profile/glen-moreno/
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/sitesearch.do?querystring=glen+moreno&p=tto&pf=all&bl=on
Dame Marjorie was also originally an American but became a British citizen. She has been CEO of Pearson since 1997. Before becoming CEO of Pearson she was a lawyer in Georgia and a newspaper publisher. In 2007, Forbes magazine placed her seventeenth on its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. She was named a “Dame of the British Empire” in 2010. According to Forbes, her total compensation in 2011 was $2,455,000. But that represents a tiny fraction of her compensation that includes stock options. Scardino holds 1.5 million shares of Pearson stock.
http://www.forbes.com/profile/marjorie-scardino-1/
William Ethridge became chief executive of Pearson’s North American Education division in 2008. He has what Pearson considers educational experience because he previously worked for Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley. At Pearson he has been head of its Higher Education, International and Professional Publishing division and chairman of CourseSmart, a Pearson sponsored consortium of electronic textbook publishers. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was $1,390,000. He holds a half million shares of Pearson stock.
http://people.forbes.com/profile/will-ethridge/62414
According to ILSE or London South East, which reports British stock market transactions, on July 30 and 31 2012, Dame Marjorie and William Ethridge were heavily involved in Pearson stock transfers and sales on the London exchanges earning them millions of dollars. If I read the ILSE report correctly, the percentage of their holdings that Ethridge and Scardino sold seemed to be a bit less than 4% of their total holdings. The sales brought Ethridge alone 20,474,712 GBX or approximately $323,500 in U.S. dollars.
http://www.lse.co.uk/SharePrice.asp?SharePrice=PSON
This was at a time when financial observers including the influential Nomura Group were questioning whether Pearson stock was overvalued. ILSE reported that “Pearson had warned in April that its adjusted operating profit would be down in the first half of 2012 . . . Sales at Penguin dropped 4%, with profits falling 48% to £22 million, which management said was caused by lower sales in its more profitable U.S. market. Uncertainty over potential national and local government spending cuts in the US continues to cast a shadow over the group’s Education business.”
http://www.lse.co.uk/SharePrice.asp?SharePrice=PSON
In other words, Pearson’s chief operating officers, who are also heavily invested in the company, are busy trading stocks and racking up dollars and pounds while the corporation’s financial situation is shaky. And their solution is to sell, sell, sell their products in the United States.
Are these the people we want designing tests, lessons, and curriculum for our students and deciding who is qualified to become teachers?
The article reports:
Recent findings by Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania show that as teacher attrition rates have risen, from about 10% to 13% for first-year teachers, schools are having to hire large numbers of new teachers. Between 40% to 50% of those entering the profession now leave within five years in what Ingersoll calls a “constant replenishment of beginners.”
The end result: a more than threefold increase in the sheer number of inexperienced teachers in U.S. schools. In the 1987-88 school year, Ingersoll estimates, there were about 65,000 first-year teachers; by 2007-08, the number had grown to more than 200,000. In the 1987-88 school year, he found, the biggest group of teachers had 15 years of experience. By the 2007-08 school year, the most recent data available, the biggest group of teachers had one year experience.
The brand new teachers, as Susan Fuhrman says, are “very used to standardized testing,” she says. “They’ve grown up with it in some way. Maybe that’s healthy, in that they would be less obsessed with it.”
Fuhrman is president of Teachers College and also a member of the board of directors of Pearson.
Tim Daly, whose organization The New Teacher Project, was founded by Michelle Rhee, loves the idea of all these new teachers. TNTP exists to recruit them. He says that most were 11 years old when NCLB was passed, so they don’t know anything different from standardized testing and being held accountable for raising test scores. For them, it is the norm.
No voice in the article explains why experience matters.
No one asks why the teaching profession is being systematically dismantled.
Apparently having three years under your belt these days makes you a “grizzled veteran.”
Pearson has sent a solicitation to principals: If you allow us to use your students to field test items, we will give you an IPad or another electronic device of your choice. The principal who sent this to me put it somewhat more plainly: Should I turn my kids into guinea pigs in exchange for a free IPad?
Field Study November 2012
Program Information and Participation Form – Grades 3-7
Dear Principal,
ACT has engaged Pearson in a national effort to try out new test materials. ACT and Pearson have worked together since the earliest days of ACT’s history and share over 50 years of cooperation and experience developing and delivering the highest quality assessments. We are seeking your participation in a field study that will help lay the foundation for the next generation assessments that address college readiness and the Common Core State Standards.
By nature, educators are future-focused believers in the potential of the next generation. Their professional ethic is to help young people reach this potential and achieve their dreams. And, at the highest levels, educators understand the need for systematic evaluation and guidance to pave the way from dreams to reality. Will you be one of those who help ACT set the guideposts on the path to success for the next generation?
Pearson is requesting applications from districts/schools willing to assist in the development of these test materials while offering an opportunity for your school to generate benefits in return for your school’s participation.
Why Should You Participate?
Educational excellence is the core of a nation’s economic prosperity, and just as data drives the decisions of those who manage corporations, measures of educational achievement inform the decisions of those, like you, who manage our educational institutions. But these measures must reflect such achievement accurately, so, partnership between educators and testing professionals is critical. You are the key.
In return, we will give you a choice of an iPad, iPod Touch, Nook Tablet, or Kindle Fire. For grades 6 and 7, you can select an online administration of ACT’s new ENGAGE™ 6-7.
| Incentive Packages |
For every 80 assessments completed:
Grades 3, 4 & 5
2 iPod Touches
OR
3 Nook Tablets
OR
1 iPad
OR
2 Kindle Fires
Grades 6 & 7
80 ENGAGE™registrations
How does ENGAGE™ benefit your school?
For every completed assessment in grades 6 and 7, one of your students can be assessed, at no charge to your school. ENGAGE™ is a low-stakes, self-report assessment that measures students’ behaviors and psychosocial attributes–critical but often overlooked components of their success. It can assist in the identification of students who may be at risk of academic difficulties or dropout. ENGAGE™ is anextremely powerful way for educators to improve their graduation rates and directly reach students whose personal challenges go unreported in standardized academic tests.
What Will Your School be Required to do for the Field Study?
https://www.surveymk.com/s/EnrollNovemberPilot
Our intent is to gather data for analyzing our testing program while offering your students an opportunity to practice their test-taking skills at no cost to your school.
Project Details
What to Do Next?
1) Apply online: https://www.surveymk.com/s/EnrollNovemberPilot
2) Share this opportunity with colleagues who may also be interested.
We appreciate your interest and look forward to working with you.
Last year, for reasons not altogether clear to me, the British government issued a white paper saying that non-teaching institutions would soon have the power to award degrees. Now, as was anticipated, the Pearson corporation says that it plans to award degrees to complete its role as the ultimate education organization of our era. Of course, Pearson could just buy a struggling college or university and change its name, but it doesn’t plan to do that. It has already opened “Pearson College.”
This is all very puzzling. Businesses awarding degrees in business, technology, or maybe even in liberal arts, perhaps online.
I am not enough of a visionary to understand why it is a good idea for a university education to be redefined to mean that you can pick up a degree over the counter or online without ever meeting a scholar. And I am no fan of for-profit universities in principle.
Is it about handing out degrees? Is it about dumbing down higher education? Is it a business plan to make money?
Or is it something else?
Nancy Flanagan is a nationally known teacher and teacher-advocate. I am honored to post her comment here because she has deep authority. And what she has to say is alarming. Pearson has taken over the National Board Certification process! Will they align it with their tests and the Common Core, where they are funded by Gates to develop online resources?
| I am a National Board Certified Teacher. I also worked for the National Board as a certificate developer, assessor, and in their teacher leadership and policy outreach divisions, then returned to the classroom. I have seen National Board Certification from all sides.
First–there have been well over 200 studies done on NB Certification, and nearly all show that NBC Teachers are highly effective. The studies have been done by major research institutions as well as university-based critics of national certification for teachers, and have examined all aspects of the process. The National Research Council published a federally funded, well-respected meta-analysis of the major studies in 2008, during the Bush admin: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12224 One more–here is a report written by actual teachers, analyzing the impact of National Board Certification on their practice, as well as a couple dozen major research reports. It addresses some of the familiar objections and remarks found in the comments on this blog:http://www.nbpts.org/userfiles/File/CTQ_Report_FINAL.pdf In short, research has convincingly demonstrated that NBCTs are effective. Not “better” than other teachers–effective. And especially effective in low-performing schools–which supports state policies that provide stipends for NBCTs. There are many candidates, like Teacher from the West, who find that they’re already reflecting daily, planning carefully, delivering instruction using multiple paths to learning, and assessing carefully– and that going through the process is simply an exercise in exhaustively documenting that practice. Others see NB Cert as professional development, learning to do things they weren’t doing before–and either experience is beneficial to kids and learning. Yes, the NB experience feels annoyingly nit-picky. But that’s about psychometric integrity, not the NB being overly rule-bound. In order for scores to be psychometrically valid and reliable, teachers have to follow explicit assessment rules. It’s annoying–but clean assessment procedures are what yield useable data. Here’s what I worry about: NBPTS has now been taken over by Pearson. The teacher-led, teacher-developed goals of the original founders’ mission–using teacher expertise to shape education reform–are so far from what we’re doing now it’s frightening. And–the US Dept Of Ed decided not to put the National Board in their last budget. They gave $$ to Teach for America instead. Perhaps–as a profession–we need to be worried about the one major national attempt to set professional standards of practice. That fact that many states are dismantling their NBC programs (since they’re not getting federal money) is a harbinger of more de-skilling and de-professionalizing to come. |
A recent post noted a story in the New York Times that described a design flaw in the Texas tests created by Pearson (at $100 million per year). It reported that the state tests did not reflect the improvements observed in connection with an outside intervention because the tests are designed to show improvement only in relationship to previous and future versions of the test.
I am not a statistician or a psychometrician and do not feel competent to say that this is a Eureka! moment. I leave that to others more competent than I. My reaction is that this finding bears further investigation. Otherwise the only way to improve on the tests is to prepare for the tests and to learn the subject in no other way.
Someone commented negatively in response to this post and questioned the claims and “provenance” of the study.
The central figure in the news story, Professor Walter Stroup of the University of Texas, responds:
| It’s hard to know what to make of someone who would find the provenance of a PhD thesis “suspicious” because, in its standard use, the word provenance simply refers to “the chronology of the ownership or location of a historical object.” Anyone who has read a thesis would have to know that in conformity with long-established practices such issues are typically addressed in the first few pages. Given this, one can only assume that “provenance” and “suspicion” are invoked in proximity to one another in the previous post for reasons having more to do with an effort to discredit the particular work being discussed. The implication is that somehow the artifact, in this case a PhD thesis by my former advisee Vinh Pham, is not what it purports to be, and thus is worth less than it might be if its provenance was secure.While one might admire the elegance and subtlety of this form of malice and character assignation directed at both myself and, more importantly, my former student, I would suggest that in general: (1) PhD theses, especially those that emerge from top-rated graduate programs, are routinely cited in nearly any realm of formal inquiry as credible sources of scholarship and (2) that the best way to evaluate the quality and significance of that scholarship is to actually read it.
You might also note the NYT article does in fact refer to myself “and two other researchers” in the second of two introductory paragraphs. Both names — Drs. Vinh Pham and Guadalupe Carmona were given to the reporter, Morgan Smith. My guess, and I should stress it is only a guess, is that she left them out only for reasons having to do with style. Having now addressed your concerns about provenance, I would close by simply expressing our sincere hope that you might now settle into actually reading the work you seem so committed to disparaging. A place to start might be Dr. Pham’s Thesis: http://generative.edb.utexas.edu/presentations/2009PMENA/pham/VinhHuyPham09Dissertation.pdf |
The Texas testing system is a pot of gold for Pearson–a five year contract worth $500 million.
Pearson has a problem. More than half the school boards in Texas have passed a resolution against high-stakes testing.
The parents and citizens have watched the stakes go up and up for the past 20 years and they don’t see how it helps their children or their state.
They didn’t see any miracle in Texas.
Now an influential conservative blogger has spoken up and called for a halt. Enough is enough. Put the money into the classroom.
Is there a real possibility that common sense may be breaking out in the great state of Texas?
As a native Texan, I sure hope so.
Texans may talk funny (to non-Texans), but we are not stupid.
Diane Ravitch's blog 