"Pearson" the corporate veil

The practice of the Pearson Foundation paying for Education Commissioners trips to China, Singapore, and Finland to meet their counterparts was reported in the New York Times. Included in that list was former Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith, who went to Finland. Questioned about that trip, Smith says he checked with the Florida Department of Education's General Counsel to make sure accepting the paid trip was okay. The Counsel said it was and so he went. While Pearson refutes any notion of this being an unethical practice, Florida does have a $250 million contract with the company.

The Miami Herald reports that on Monday, Florida Representative Dwight Bullard called for an "inquiry" to be undertaken by the legislature into "state’s relationship with Pearson." Bullard says an inquiry is necessary:

“If the contract comes up again, and there is someone who can do it better and cheaper, and we put it out for a bidding process, trips to Helsinki seem to be a nice incentive to keep doing business with the company,” Bullard said. “I want to make sure Florida is getting the best bang for their tax dollars.”

Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, an organization which opposes standardized testing had this to say about Pearson's growth over the last decade:

“But in the course of this extremely rapid growth, the company has developed a track record that is the worst in the industry,” he said.

Having effectively driven out most of the competition, leaving too few to compare with, Pearson is likely to remain the worst.

Who pays? Who benefits?


Read more: Lawmaker calls for inquiry into testing company

Pearson fattens in the global learning sector

15 Things Parents, Community Members, and Taxpayers Want the Nation to Know About Education

Lisa Nielsen attended the recent Education Nation conference and reported on the last panel, consisting of students. She reported on the students' perspective in the blog 20 Things Students Want the Nation to Know About Education. In response, a teacher and blogger wrote 20 Things A Teacher Wants the Nation to Know About Education.

So I decided I'd better write one to reflect the important part of the whole discussion - parents, community members and taxpayers. I listed 15 things leaving the last five for input from readers. Here's my list:

1. End the expensive, ineffective, and punitive high stakes assessment.
2. End classrooms environments that have been converted into test prep and testing centers.
3. Use the savings from #1 and 2 to return interesting and valuable electives - drama, art, home economics, computer skills, physical education, and vocational education courses.
4. Use the savings from #1 and 2 to maintain manageable class sizes so that teachers are able to meet individual needs.
5. Stop sending large sums of dollars to Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other companies for the purpose of implementing unfunded and unfundable compliance and data-driven mandates.
6. Use the savings in #5, to restore reasonable class size for core classes, vocational education, and electives.
7. Hold Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and these other companies accountable to the same degree as schools are being held accountable.
8. Apply greater transparency regarding deals and paid for "junkets" made with Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other companies jumping into the profitable education sector. Unsure on the "junkets"? Read about 10 state commissioners of education who traveled around the world on Pearson's tab, "When Free Trips Overlap With Commercial Purposes."
9.Ensure meaningful school-based accountability that meets the NUT principle (No Unnecessary Testing).
10. Use existing measures, such as NAEP, to give a snapshot of student achievement and to report on sub-group accountability.
11. Support local control via publicly elected School Board members.
12. Ditch the preschool through college longitudinal database and maintain parent rights guaranteed under FERPA, requiring consent for sharing of student data.
13. Ensure parent rights to opt out of any and all assessments, punitive-free.
14. Leave it to local control to implement teacher evaluation systems that are not dependent on students taking high stakes assessment.
15. Support communities and families so that all students are fed, housed, and receive medical care versus supporting runaway testing initiatives.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

What did I miss?

UPDATE: Responding to a private comment on the importance of these views. Ed reformers, who share Chester Finn's view on local control, will no doubt find any list and input from parents, community members, and taxpayers disruptive to their plans. If parents and the public are excluded from decision-making in their communities and over the lives of their children, what is it that we have exactly?

Common Core Standards Spur the Marketplace

According to press reports, the Bill Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation are partnering to create "complete, online curricula" for English/Language Arts and mathematics, based on the recently completed Common Core Standards. The effort is to offer school districts across the county a smooth transition to implementing the standards. Six states have not adopted the standards, the New Hampshire legislature will vote soon to reverse their decision to adopt them, and a similar proposal was presented to the Massachusetts legislature. School boards, organizations, experts, and parents have concerns about the Common Core Standards and their implications. One group expresses these shared concerns in a document called "What Parents, Taxpayers, and School Boards Should Know."

The Gates/Pearson partnership will offer 24 courses using "technological advances such as social networking, animation, and gaming to better engage and motivate students." Four courses will be available for free through the Gates Foundation. The rapid development process will release the math courseware for secondary students, and English/language arts for elementary students in the 2013-2014 school year, with "accompanying tools" to follow in 2014-2015.

Teachers will be part of the development process as well as experts from abroad.

"Officials from the two foundations also said they are working with a range of experts not only in the United States, but also from such countries as Japan, Singapore, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia in building the new curricula."

The article does not specify the precise type of input that will be provided by the international community.

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, a former director of the U.S. Department of Education research arm, expresses concern over the initiative this way:

“The question will be, and it’s a reasonable one to ask: Who profits from this? People will have to profit from it; you can’t deliver education products into the marketplace for free. But it will be interesting to follow the money and see who manages to monetize the nation’s investment in common-core standards and assessments.

Nevertheless, Mr. Whitehurst said, it’s good to see someone tackle a curriculum spanning so many grades, so one grade can build effectively upon another. And done well, the work could serve as a valuable lever in the industry to prompt more curriculum development, he said.
Still, Mr. Whitehurst said, it will be a daunting task to complete the curriculum systems in three years."

What do you think?

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/27/30pearson.h30.html?tkn=WNPFBe2J3HKGwyQI5rTI4uAlCURTf%2FytzB26&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2