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Preemptive Move Fails, Pearson Shareholders Turn on CEO – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

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On Friday, a large majority of Pearson shareholders, in a non-binding vote, rejected a report granting a large raise and bonuses to corporate CEO John Fallon. This was the largest vote of no confidence in corporate leadership, a 61% no vote, in Great Britain since 2009. Fallon’s salary, bonus, incentives, and other benefits, went up by 20% last year to almost $2 million, despite record corporate loses and steep declines in the value of Pearson stock.

In a preemptive effort to manipulate stock prices on the London Exchange prior to the shareholders meeting, Fallon announced Pearson planned to sell off its North American textbook business and other school “products’ like envision Math and iLit. Unfortunately for America’s children, Pearson plans to continue to invest in online “virtual schools,” and high-stakes testing.

Fallon also declared that he used his entire 2016 £343,000 “bonus,” almost half a million U.S. dollars, to purchase additional Pearson stock. These moves boosted Pearson stock value on the London Exchange by more than 10%, but they were not enough to forestall the shareholders’ revolt.

According to an analysis by Leila Abboud of Bloomberg, for the last four years Pearson has been “stuck in a cycle of falling revenue, profit warnings, cost-cutting programs, and asset sales.” Pearson’s problems are the result of major corporate miscalculations. The U.S. higher education market is currently responsible for 25% of Pearson’s sales and 45% of its profits, but “students are increasingly rejecting expensive textbooks and turning to rental programs run by Amazon as well as cheaper online materials.” Fallon keeps promising that the company will return to profitability through “cost-cutting,” but the benefits “tend to be eaten up by declines in revenue as the business weakens.” In addition, Third World markets, where Parson invested heavily under Fallon’s leadership, have produced virtually zero profit.

While Fallon was trying to fend off angry shareholders inside the IET Conference Center in London, outside, teacher union opponents of Pearson’s global policies and their allies staged a protest rally where they released helium-filled balloons with images of Fallon’s face. Representatives from the National Union of Teachers (UK), the American Federation of Teachers (US), the South African Democratic Teachers Union, the Kenya National Union of Teachers, the Danish Union of Teachers, New Zealand Educational Institute and Uganda National Teachers’ Union, and Global Justice Now demanded that Pearson appoint new leadership to end its push for privatized schools in Africa and Asia, and build a sustainable business model that views public education as a fundamental human right, not a leverage point for profits.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8


Who’s Marking Those Common Core High-Stakes Tests? – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

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Who’s Marking Those Common Core High-Stakes Tests? – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

You were stressed; your children were stressed; and the teachers in their school were stressed. But the ELA and Math tests are over and we don’t have to worry about the results until August. What we should be worrying about is who is marking them. Will graders be careful, thoughtful, and competent? Carelessly graded exams are worthless, and only serve to punish children, teachers, and schools. So who grades the tests?

Pearson advertises for test graders on the website Indeed.com. The advertisement below is from Pearson’s Austin, Texas scoring center. They want college graduates (or equivalency?), any degree, and they are willing to pay $13 an hour, almost as much as a customer associate earns at Walmart, but significantly less than our test grader would make at Costco or Home Depot. Their “highly qualified” graders, unable to find or hold jobs in low paying service industries will be expected “put aside personal biases,” evaluate “student responses to subject-related open-ended questions,” and “apply scoring guide according to customer requirements.”

Similar positions are also available at Pearson’s Charlotte, North Carolina and Hadley, Massachusetts grading centers. Questar Assessment, which designs and grades tests for New York State has similar ads with similar qualifications for seasonal test scorers, but their ad does not list the hourly wage. However, according to the website Glassdoor, salaries range between $12 and $15 an hour an hour.

In Florida, teacher and school administration candidates are protesting arbitrary certification tests that seem designed to produce high failure rates. According to a report by WPTV in West Palm Beach, since 2015 failure rates have significantly increased on the Florida Teacher Certification and Educational Leadership exams while Pearson profits from each failure. Up until 2009, the Florida Department of Education subsidized the tests, but no more. Candidates paid $25 to take each part of the multi-part tests and did not pay to retake a section that they failed. Pearson now charges test-takers up to $200 per section and an addition $20 to retake a section, an increase of 800%. Test-takers can appeal failing scores and pay $75 for a reevaluation. In January and February there were 871 appeals but only 15 scores were changed from fail to pass, less than 2%. Julie McCue, a veteran teacher with 21 years of classroom experience, a Master’s degree, and high evaluations from supervisors, is suing the Florida Department. Ms. McCue has failed the essay portion of the leadership exam four times with the exact same score and each of her grade appeals were rejected by Pearson. McCue believes the real failure is Pearson’s for hiring low paid unqualified test scorers.

Pearson and the Neo-Liberal Global Assault on Public Education – Alan Singer’s Latest HuffPost

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Pearson and the Neo-Liberal Global Assault on Public Education – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

A complete report on Pearson’s global activities by Alan Singer and Eustace Thompson of Hofstra University is posted by Education International and available online. Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8.

Powerful forces are at work shaping global education in both the North Atlantic core capitalist nations and regions historically referred to as the Third World. Neoliberal business philosophies and practices promoted by corporations and their partner foundations, supported by international organizations, financiers, and bankers, and welcomed, or at least tolerated by compliant governments, are trying to transform education from a government responsibility and social right into investment opportunities. They defend their actions as reforms designed to increase educational equity and achieve higher standards; where possible they seek out local community support. But the underlying motivation behind corporate educational reform is extending the reach of free market globalization and business profits.

An early twentieth century political cartoon from Puck magazine portrayed the Standard Oil Company as a giant octopus with tentacles encircling and corrupting national and state governments. The image can easily be applied to the British-based publishing company Pearson Education, a leader in the neo-liberal privatization movement. Pearson has tentacles all over the world shaping and corrupting education in efforts, not always successful, to enhance its profitability. Its corporate slogan is “Pearson: Always Learning,” however critics rewrite it as “Pearson: Always Earning.”

Pearson’s business strategy is to turn education from a social good and essential public service into a marketable for-profit commodity. Among other tactics to promote its products it manipulates United Nation Sustainable Development Goals as entry into global education markets. At a September 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit world leaders adopted a series of goals including the promise that by 2030 they would “ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education” and that they would “substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries.”

Pearson justifies its push to dominate education worldwide as a campaign for “efficacy,” which it defines as “making a measurable impact on someone’s life through learning.” However, in the introduction to the document where they promote efficacy, Pearson CEO John Fallon makes it clear that the company expects to profit handsomely from the “huge opportunity offered by the growing evidence of what works, advancements in technology and our enhanced ability to harness the power of data.”

In the United States and the global-North, Pearson efficacy means marketing much maligned high-stakes tests that push rather than assess curriculum and learning and serve to promote other Pearson products. It is also big in selling data management programs of questionable value and digital platforms that are supposed to enhance instruction. In the global South, Pearson efficacy means selling “low fee”“Pay As You Learn” private schools to the poorest segments of society in Africa and Asia. Pearson makes its profit partly by hiring low paid unqualified people to work in the schools.

In the United States Pearson’s efforts in the United States have been marred by a series of scandals and challenged by a parent and teacher led movement against high-stakes testing. On a global scale, the corporate take-over and privatization of education in sub-Sahara Africa has been sharply criticized by United Nations officials and advocates for investment in public education. In a 2015 statement, 190 education advocates from 91 countries, called on governments in the under-developed/mis-developed world to stop education profiteers and the World Bank to stop financing these efforts. In May 2016, Kishore Singh, United Nations special Rapporteur on the right to education, described the out-sourcing of public education in Liberia to an American corporation as “unprecedented at the scale currently being proposed and violates Liberia’s legal and moral obligations.”

Despite its omnivorous appetite for profit, Pearson Education has suffered through a series of financial crises, the product of changing global economic realities, increasingly hostility to the Pearson brand, and corporate “missteps.” In 2015 its sales were down £4.5 billion ($6.5 billion) or about 5%; operating profit down £723 million ($1 billion) or about 3%; adjusted earnings per share between 2010-2015 fell about 2%; operating cash flow was down more than 15%; and share price on the London Stock Exchange was down 38.2%. In January 2016 Pearson, facing financial difficulties, announced it would eliminate 4,000 jobs, about 10% of its 40,000 global workforce.

In 2017 Pearson awarded CEO John Fallon a 20% combined bonus and pay increase even though revenues from the company’s United States higher education business were down by 18% and the company was slashing dividends it pays to investors. The news of the bonus, the dividend cut, and the investor rebellion drove Pearson’s stock share price down on the London exchange to £6.39, about $8.25, on April 28. Pearson stock was valued at £15 ($20) two years earlier, so mismanagement had wiped billions of dollars off the value of the company. In May 2017 at the annual shareholders meeting, in non-binding vote that was a repudiation of Pearson’s leadership, investors overwhelmingly rejected the payments to Fallon.

Florida Teachers take State Ed and Pearson to Court – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

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Florida Teachers take State Ed and Pearson to Court – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

Twenty-year veteran Broward County, Florida teacher Julie McCue and physical teacher Daryl Bryant, who has taught at a charter school near Cape Canaveral for three years, are suing the Florida Department of Education (FDOE). In 2010, as part of its application for a federal Race to the Top grant, Florida proposed making teacher certification exams more difficult, supposedly to raise standards. The current examswere introduced in 2015. On the revised tests failure rates have soared by up to 30% on some sections. The passing rate on the essay portion of the Florida Teacher Certification Exam (FTCE) fell to 63% in 2015. Teachers working under temporary certification who fail the FTCE risk losing their jobs.

At a recent state board of education meeting Florida Education Commissioner Pamela Stewart defended the high failure rate on Florida teacher certification exams claiming the tests are “aligned to the standards that are being taught in the classroom which are appropriate.” But the FDOE has not produced evidence that the tests reliably predict teacher performance, which may be a basis for overturning them. In New York State multiple teacher certification exams were dismissed by the courts precisely because the State Education Department could not demonstrate that they actually measured teacher qualifications.

Julie McCue charges that the state is really using a flawed examine to deny teachers credentials and salary increases. Broward County claims to use a “pay-for-performance salary schedule,” but the reality is that no matter your education, experience, or classroom performance, teachers are denied raises if they do not pass the new state test.

McCue has failed the essay portion of the Florida Educational Leadership Examination (FELE) test four times since 2015. Each time, suspiciously, she received the exact same score, just one point below passing. The FELE test was created by the FDOE, but is administered and graded by testing mega-giant Pearson Education.

According to a report by WPTV in West Palm Beach, Pearson profits each time someone fails one of their exams. Prior to 2009, the Florida Department of Education subsidized test takers. Candidates paid $25 to take each part of the multi-part tests and did not pay to retake a section that they failed. Pearson now charges test-takers up to $200 per section, an increase of 800%, and an additional $20 to retake a section. Test-takers can appeal failing scores, but they have to pay $75 for a reevaluation.

At the day-long administrative hearing FDOE produced five “expert witnesses” to defend the testing process and Pearson sent its lawyers to observe. A representative of FDOE maintained that Pearson’s grading system is extremely detailed and thorough. FDOE’s attorney said “the idea of human error is beyond belief.” While one of the FDOE “expert witnesses” was a Florida school administrator, he is also, coincidently, a paid Pearson employee. During the past two years he reviewed 20-25 failing FELE essays and acknowledged he has never reversed a score. One hundred and sixty failing FELE test takers challenged their scores last year, and none were reversed by Pearson.

This must be the only time in test assessment history that grading is 100% reliable. I found an article on a Pearson website where they bragged that their Versant Technology when reading essays had an inter-rater reliability of 0.89, which was HIGHER than human inter-rater reliability, and is considered very high. But it still means that about 10% of the test grades were not consistent.

But there is another reason the FDOE expert witness’ scoring is invalid and the administrative judge should through the whole FDOE and Pearson gang out of court, reverse the failing grades, and recommend they be prosecuted. The test scorer testified that he had reviewed 20-25 failing FELE essays and never reversed a score. But if was only assigned to review failing exams that were being appealed, he already knew these test-takers had failed. Essentially he was being asked to confirm what FDOE and Pearson wanted confirmed. In a fair review, without bias, these tests would have been mixed in with ungraded exams and the reviewer would not know that any of them had already received a failing grade.

Testimony at the Florida administrative judicial hearing calls into question the grading of many Pearson “essay” exams. The Pearson/SCALE edTPA is used to evaluate student teachers by over 700 teacher education programs in forty states and is required for certification in sixteen states. It is a roughly sixty-page portfolio plus video that is subject to arbitrary grading practices, arbitrary practices that Pearson also denies.

The Florida administrative judge is expected to issue a preliminary ruling within a month. The judge’s decision is sent to the Florida Education Practices Commission that makes the final decision. I’m rooting for Julie and Daryl.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

Battle Over New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test

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According to David Bloomfield, a professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, no one really knows what the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT)used to decide who is accepted into eight of New York City’s elite public high schools actually measures. Why? Because the test has never been formally evaluated. The test, which by state law is the only way to become eligible for admission to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, has never undergone a public vetting process to determine if it accurately identifies students who will do well in an accelerated academic program.  Sample questions are available online at Chalkbeat.

Testing standards developed by three leading professional educational research organizations, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education, specify that a test like this one is only a valid indicator of student performance if the test has been formally tested itself.

And guess who designed New York City’s controversial elite high school admissions test without demonstrating any proof of its validity? I bet you already know. Pearson, the company famous for producing an eighth-grade reading test passage about a race between a hare (rabbit) and a pineapple. The hare won the race and Pearson lost that testing contract! However, it still has a $13.4 million, six-year deal to produce the SHSAT test. A spokesman for Pearson refused to answer questions about the test and referred a New York Times reporter to the city’s Education Department.

A federal civil rights complaint, pending since 2012, charges that the SHSAT and the entire process for admission to elite New York City schools is invalid and racially discriminatory because one factor, a suspect test, does not truly determine a students capacity to perform in high school and college. Black and Latino students make up about ten percent of the student population at the specialized high schools, but they are almost seventy percent of the city’s student population.

In 2013 New York City hired an independent firm to evaluate the test but it has never released the results. Critics charge that all the SHSAT really measures is whether students took expensive test preparation classes.

An independent review, conducted by Jonathan Taylor, a research analyst at Hunter College, raised serious questions about the test’s validity. Taylor found that the highest scorers on the test did well at the specialized high schools, but overall, a student’s seventh-grade class average was a better indicator of performance at one of the specialized schools than their SHSAT scores.

Part of the problem is that New York City rations seats at its specialized schools, limiting admission to about 5,000 students a year, so passing scores vary from year to year. The city has never established what score actually qualifies a student to do advanced work or demonstrated that the test schools have a special curriculum that only selected students are capable of completing. Students who might qualify one year are denied admission the next. Students who might benefit from a “special curriculum” are denied the opportunity to learn.

New York City’s Mayor and School Chancellor are calling for a reevaluation of the admission process to specialized high schools. They propose a mixture of school grades with state test scores to select the top eighth-graders from each New York City’s middle school. They argue this would be a fairer admission process and lead to a more diverse student body at the specialized high schools where the student population is currently overwhelmingly Asian and white.

While it would require rewriting state law to change admission requirements to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, the city can change the way it admits students to the five other test schools, Brooklyn Latin, Staten Island Tech, American Studies at Lehman College, High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, and Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, without state approval.

In an admittedly a small sample measuring the validity of the Specialized High School Admissions Test, my younger brother and I (Bronx Science), and my son (Stuyvesant), all passed their test, I attended from 1964 to 1967, and none of us did particularly well at the schools.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter:https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

New Mexico Declares War on Pearson Mis-Education

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For Pearson, the British-based international mis-education monolith, the United States has been a profit cow for more than a decade. Millions of students use Pearson's curriculum products in their classrooms. However, Pearson's reputation has taken some major hits as the company became embroiled in scandals, lawsuits, and complaints from educators and parents. Pearson was at the center of failed efforts by the Los Angeles school system to use iPads pre-loaded with Pearson content and settled a lawsuit with the district for $6.45 million. New York State forced Pearson Charitable Foundation to close and pay millions of dollars in fines for its ties to Pearson’s for-profit operations.

Pearson is a full-service vulture closely tied into the push for high-stakes Common Core assessment. Since 2014, it also has the contract to create common core aligned PARCC exams for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.Pearson also sells school districts their own tests, test prep material, test-aligned textbooks, tech support, and testing services like Pearson Vue. Teachers use PowerSchool (formerly a Pearson product) and Pearson’s SchoolNet software to record student grades. Pearson also operates alternative online schools and classes.

Pearson has continued to operate in the United States despite incompetent operation that has produced a series of missteps. In 2015, New York State, Arkansas, and Ohio ended their testing relationship with Pearson. In 2018, a New Jersey court ruled that the Pearson PARCC violated the state’s education laws. New Jersey's four-year contract with Pearson, the PARCC test vendor, ended after the 2018 exams. New Jersey educators and parents were also furious with Pearson when the company admitted that it monitored the social media use of students using its tests.

Now the state of New Mexico has declared war on Pearson for cheating its students and taxpayers.

Pearson has be investing in online courses and virtual schools because of weak textbook sales in the United States. One of its projects is the New Mexico Connections Academy, a for-profit charter school operated by the Pearson subsidiary Connections Education.

New Mexico’s Public Education Secretary-designate ordered Pearson’s New Mexico Connections Academy closed because it failed to properly educate students. The decision was based on the recommendation of the state’s Public Education Commission, which voted 6-3 to reject the 5-year-old school’s request for a charter renewal. The school’s student proficiency rate in math had dropped to 11% and it received grades of “F” for two consecutive years. In a maximum display of “hutzpah,” the charter school filed an appeal in District Court challenging that decision, claiming New Mexico statutes had not defined its “standards of excellence.”

A closer look at Pearson’s New Mexico Connections Academy makes clear why the state wants to close the “school.” It received about $6 million during the 2018-2019 school year to deliver its online “educational program” to stay-at-home students via phone and Internet. The payment is based on enrollment of 1,800 students, however, only 1,100 are being served. When the state requested a refund, school officials refused to turn over the money saying they were rolling it over for future use, which is at best questionable given their recertification issues.

New Mexico’s newly elected Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham also wants to end the use of Pearson’s PARCC exam, which was initially created with $180 million in federal money. New Mexico will continue to administer the PARCC exam this spring, but next year, New Mexico will join Maryland and New Jersey in no longer using the Pearson exam.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter:https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

Pearson and Google Partner to Steal the Minds of Children

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Parents and teachers worry about how much time young children and adolescents spend in front of hypnotizing computer, phone, and television screens and its impact on brain, emotional and intellectual development. In 2018, the average age for American kids receiving their first “smartphone” was about ten. Half of all children in the United States are on Facebook or one of the other social media platforms by age twelve. According to surveys conducted with teenagers, approximately one-fourth report they are online “almost constantly.” The Safer Internet Centre, based in Great Britain, reports that 22% of children between the ages of 8 to 17 had been victims of cyber-bullying. Meanwhile a study by a team at San Diego State University found that teenagers who spend more time online are less happy than peers involved in other activities. The lead researcher, Jean Twenge, attributed rising rates of teenage depression to increased use of social media and time spent online.

National Institutes of Health study on brain development found that children who spend more than two hours a day looking at computer, phone and television screens get lower scores on thinking and language tests than their peers and that their actual brains appear to diverge from normal development patterns. According to Dr. Gaya Dowling of the NIH, “MRI's found significant differences in the brains of some kids who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day . . . The colors show differences in the nine and ten-year-olds' brains. The red color represents premature thinning of the cortex. That's the wrinkly outermost layer of the brain that processes information from the five senses.” Dr. Kara Bagot, an investigator on the NIH study, suspects that excess screen time has an addictive affect on children and teens. “Screen time stimulates the release of the brain chemical dopamine, which has a pivotal role in cravings and desire.”

The Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for screen time recommend that parents “avoid digital media use, except video chatting, in children younger than 18 to 24 months.” Dr. Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children's Hospital and lead author of the guidelines worries that we are in the midst of an “uncontrolled experiment on the next generation of children.” According to Dr. Christakis, babies playing with iPads don't transfer what they learn from the iPad to the real world. “If you give a child an app where they play with virtual Legos, virtual blocks, and stack them, and then put real blocks in front of them, they start all over.”

None of this has stopped predator cyber companies from promoting more and more online products targeting children and parents who think they will give their kids an educational boost. Pearson Education, which calls itself the “world's learning company” just announced a partnership between its Pearson Realize™ sub-division and Google making Pearson Realize a Google for Education Premier Partner. Students will have easier access to thousands of interactive “learning resources and assignments,” including one of the largest libraries of online “formative assessments.” For those unaccustomed to education jargon, that means kids can spend lots of time taking practice tests to prepare them for Pearson prepared and delivered high-stakes standardized tests. Another benefit of the partnership, at least for Pearson and Google, is that “Teachers can import rosters from Google Classroom and create new classes in Realize. When they assign Realize content to students, scores flow into Realize and are recorded in Google Classroom as well.” Everything is seamless, but the process manages to ignore learning by actual human beings.

While Pearson and Google are busy trying to replace teachers and teaching with online test prep, human contact, the kind children need to flourish, is becoming a luxury good for the wealthy. According to a recent New York Times Sunday Review column, “The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them.” While tech companies push public schools to invest in a laptop per child and expensive “learning” programs, in Silicon Valley the techies send their own children to the local private Waldorf School, which offers a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education and shies away from the high-stakes standardized testing the tech companies promote for other people’s children.

Dr. Sherry Turkle, a professor of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fears that the push for online education programs and more screen time in schools is the equivalent of addicting our children to “fast food.”

To express outrage with the Pearson-Google partnership, contact Scott Overland, the director of Media Relations for Pearson at scott.overland@pearson.comor you can call him at (202)909-4520.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

Zombie Nation – The War on Schools, Teachers, and Children

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A war on schools, teachers, and children threatens to create a Zombie nation in the United States. We need to “connect the dots” and fight back if we want to prevent this miseducation future.

Dot 1: Adjusted for inflation, twenty-five states spent less on public education in 2016 than they did a decade ago. Low-tax Republican states are guilty of the worst underfunding The American Federation of Teachers estimates that state governments shortchanged public K-12 education by about $20 billion. All fifty states opened the 2018-2019 school year with teacher shortages. The problem is at both ends of the career spectrum. Under financial pressure because of low wage scales and benefit cutbacks, discouraged by mandated test prep that sucks the joy out of learning for both teachers and students, and blamed for everything by rightwing politicians and wealthy self-proclaimed “philanthropist reformers,” record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession, two-thirds before retirement age. At the same time, nationally, enrollment in teacher education programs declined by almost 40% between 2008 and 2015.

Dot 2: Kids are even bigger victims than teachers as states, in an effort to save money, and tech companies hoping to enhance online-screen addiction, push computerized learning programs as replacements for qualified teachers. The New York Times recently highlighted an anti-tech rebellion in McPherson and Wellington, Kansas, where middle school and high school students walked-out or sat-in in protests against Summit Learning, a web-based platform and curriculum designed for use on Chromebooks that is financed and promoted by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg and Chan currently offer the system free to school district, but the districts have to purchase the computer hardware.

About 380 schools and 75,000 students nationally use the Summit Learning system. Students spend the entire educational day on their Chromebook laptops completing online lessons and quizzes.  Teachers no longer teach in schools using Summit but are relegated to marginally skilled classroom helpers. The pay-off for the Facebook duo comes as brain-addled students spend more and more time online using other Facebook products like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Boomerang, Oculus, and of course, Facebook, providing the company with data that they sell to advertisers.

After eight months online, Kansas students were coming home after school with headaches, hand cramps, and increased anxiety. One student was suffering a recurrence of seizures. Another wore hunting earmuffs to school in an effort to block out the outside world. Kallee Forslund, age sixteen, a 10th grader in Wellington, captured student frustration with Summit.  “I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore.”

In a survey conducted at the McPherson middle school, more than three-fourth of the parents and 80% of the students complained about Summit. Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, visited his ten-year-old son’s fourth-grade class. His response: “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies.”

There has been other scattered resistance to Summit across the country. One hundred students at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn, New York walked out of classes last November in a protest against the use of Summit. Students complained it was “annoying” just sitting and staring at the computer screen all day. The students reported that teachers told them their new role was to just be mentors as students worked independently. The Journalism high school students outlined other major problems with Summit. Students were playing video games instead of working on assignments; instead of learning about the subject they re-take tests until they pass; or they just copy and paste quiz questions into Google to find the answers.

Dot 3. Hypnotizing, online, on-screen, and addicting miseducation is a worldwide phenomenon, promoted by companies like Pearson, and it is spreading like a viral epidemic. Pearson just announced that it plans to invest $50 million over the next three year through its Pearson Ventures sub-division to finance “next-gen” tech learning and assessment tools.

A just released Education International Research report highlights Pearson’s 2025 corporate goals including digitalizing and privatizing education. According to the report, if successful, Pearson would bring “disruptive changes to (a) the teaching profession, (b) the delivery of curriculum and assessment and (c) the function of school, particularly public schools.” Pearson’s “next generation” of teaching and testing platforms, implemented through a partnership with Google Classroom, would replace teachers with Siri and Alexa. As a side benefit for Pearson and Google, children would be new sources of data to be mined and sold and become lifelong customers wedded to their products. Pearson is already implementing its educational “vision” in “private schools in sub-Sahara Africa, India, and parts of South-East Asia,”

Student headaches, hand cramps, anxiety, and seizures, teacher deprofessionalization and unemployment, the Zombie Apocalypse brought to you by Facebook, Google, and Pearson is coming to a school near you.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8


Latest Charter School Scandal

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Charter schools are big business opportunities and lax oversight rules make them ripe for financial manipulation and outright theft. The latest charter school scandal just broke in California where two business operatives are accused of siphoning over $50 million in public dollars into companies they owned or controlled in a multi-year-long charter school scam.

Sean McManus, an Australian national, and Jason Schrock, his Long Beach business partner, the CEO and president of something called A3 Education, and nine others were just indicted in San Diego County. A3 is accused of enlisting small school districts in creating nineteen bogus online charter schools in order to obtain additional state funds.

A3 Education claims to provide a “wide variety of start-up services to aid school developers prior to and during launch. Working with school leaders and governing boards during the application and petition stages, A3 Education can assist with creating budgets, staff, marketing, financial, and strategic plans.Our dedicated team can review applications to ensure the mission and vision of the school is clearly portrayed throughout.”

However, according to San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan“These defendants engaged in a devious, systematic public corruption scheme on the backs of students, their parents and the public that over time diverted millions of taxpayer dollars into their own pockets. Our team of investigators and prosecutors uncovered widespread misappropriation of public funds that extends across the state.”Charges include conspiracy, misappropriation of public funds, paying for student information, and conflict of interest. A3 “enrolled” about 40,000 students across California without providing them with any services. Among other scams, McManus and Schrock are accused of paying youth programs for student information and then listed the students as enrolled into their summer charter school programs. They received $2,000 for each student whose name appeared on their books. If convicted, McManus and Schrock face more than forty years in prison.

A Los Angeles Times report found that at least $8.18 million in state money went into McManus and Schrock’s personal bank accounts. Another $1.6 million was spent purchasing a private residence for McManus.

The Dehesa Elementary School District east of San Diego is one of the districts accused of conspiring with A3 Education. While the school district has only about 150 students, its authorized online charter schools that supposedly served 20,000 students. The district superintendent is one of the people charged in the case.

Even the charter school industry is outraged by A3, but it is also trying to protect itself. The California Charter Schools Association, which lobbies for charter schools, raised concerns about illegal activity by A3 Education with the California state education department in February 2018 and urged that allegations against A3 Education be investigated. Charter schools have every reason to worry as the industry sets up independent school “accrediting agencies” to circumvent legitimate oversight. A3’s Valiant schools, Valiant Academy of Southern California and Valiant Academy of Los Angeles were “accredited” by an organization called AdvancED, which also accredits online schools operated by K12, Inc., Pearson’s Connections Education, and Responsive Education Solutions. In its recent annual report, Pearson told stockholders that its online schools offered the company “high growth potential” in a market valued at $1.5 billion with a “5% annual market growth potential.”

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Bad Tech - Pearson Wants Teacher Jobs (and to Control Student Brains)

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With its publishing business in free fall, Pearson Mis-Education is targeting teaching. On a Sunday in November Pearson ran a two-page centerfold ad in the New York Times promoting Aida, its artificial intelligence (?) program to teach calculus. Pearson claims Aida will provide a “personalized learning experience” and that the company is the first to apply “consumer apps” in education. I estimate the one-shot Times ad cost Pearson about $250,000.

Even if you don’t teach calculus, teachers need to worry about their jobs. According to the Aida website, “By combining AI with the learning sciences – psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, sociology and anthropology – we gain an understanding of what and how people learn. With AI, how people learn will start to become very different.”AI advocates promote a science fiction future with everybody plugged in and learning at their own and at a higher rate. It is an enormous potential market for Pearson, replacing 3,000,000 American teachers, with its algorithms.   

Actually all human beings need to worry as Pearson explores mind control adapting to each person’s individual learning patterns. In China, the government monitors the brain waves of children to ensure attention using electronic headbands.

Unfortunately, preliminary studies don’t support an AI learning revolution.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded an Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program (ALMAP) to establish “evidence-based understanding of how adaptive learning technologies such as adaptive courseware could improve opportunities for low-income adults to learn and to complete postsecondary credentials.” It was of limited use because the study primarily looked at student and teacher attitudes about AI and largely ignored its impact on student learning and school success.

The study’s Executive Summary apologized for AI because of the “relative immaturity of the field of adaptive learning technology.” However, it assured educators and investors that “technology capacity and ways to support instruction and learning” were “evolving rapidly.” A major concern they found with AI products was actually getting students to use the courseware.

Other findings were that AI worked better at a micro level (tutoring) than on a macro level (classroom instruction); that marketing claims for a variety of AI products were suspect; and that “multiple factors affect learning outcomes and to make sense of student outcomes, analyses need to incorporate student characteristics, specifics of how the adaptive courseware is used, aspects of the course beyond the courseware product, and the way learning is measured to make sense of student outcomes.” In other words, we know very little about the benefits of AI in education, other than while initial costs were high, long term costs, once you get rid of teachers, will be significantly lower.

Recent studies by Nobel Memorial Prize winning micro-economists confirm the drawback of schools making heavy investments in untested technology. One study, conducted in Kenya, found that just adding resources to schools improved educational performance by top students, but not everybody else, increasing social and educational inequality. Another study focused on schools in Mumbai, India where government officials are in love with new technologies. This study found that, across the board, students performed better when schools used extra money to hire additional teachers. The study’s authors found that “there exists very little rigorous evidence on the impact of computers on educational outcomes and no reliable evidence for India or other developing countries.” Meanwhile, studies in developed countries like the United States and Western Europe “find little or no effect of computerized instruction on test scores.”

Of course there are a lot of other drawbacks to replacing teachers with online AI instruction. It adds to the already serious problem on teenage technology addiction; it robs children of personal interaction with teachers and classmates vital for social development; it leaves us more susceptible to Facebook type propaganda; and it actually depersonalizes education because it forces students into a singular mode of learning. A UNESCO report questioned the ethical application of online AI instruction, given data breaches and the misuse of information to influence public opinion and to sell products.

But why should any of this stop Pearson from making money?

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Education “Reformers” Jump on Online Instruction

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Sign the Petition - Say NO to NY Permanent Virtual Education

Hoping to capitalize on Corona pandemic school closings, ersatz school reformers are “reimaging education” to shift it online and towards private profit. Unfortunately, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has provided admirable national leadership during the Corona pandemic, is buying into their magical promises. He announced a plan to partner with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation“to convene experts and develop a blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal.” Cuomo is also working with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who will head his “blue-ribbon” reimaging commission. So far, I have not been invited to contribute.

Advocates of permanent online instruction in K-12 schools include a line-up of usual suspects. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Jeb Bush, former Republican governor of Florida and chair of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, attacked teacher unions and school officials while promoting online learning as the wave of the future, not just as an emergency Corona response. Bush wants Congress to fund a transition so public education can “continue without access to classrooms,” and incidentally, as a $200 billion bonanza for edu-tech companies. The Bush initiatives one million dollar plus funders are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Walton Family Foundation. Other big donors are Facebook, Pearson, News Corporation (Fox), Charter Schools USA, and the Koch brothers through their Charles Koch Foundation. This is a galaxy concerned with profit and their own agendas that should be allowed nowhere near children and schools

Microsoft Bill” Gates, who championed small schools and then abandoned the idea, who funded teacher development programs that he then dropped, who views schools, teachers, and students as “customers,” and financed Common Core and its testing mandates to promote “market forces,” is now in the “reimaging education” business. Gates pushes online programs like Gooru, which he funds through his foundation and which has financial ties to Google, Cisco, and Pearson. Microsoft is funding the research and development of Gooru’s Learning Navigator.

In one bit of educational ingenuity, Gates actually compared the way children learn to electrical sockets. In a push for standardization, Gates wrote: “We don’t have 50 different kinds of electrical sockets—we have just one. And that standard unleashed all kinds of innovation that improved lives. The same thing will happen with consistent standards for what students should know.” But as every parent with multiple children and every teacher with 30 students in a classroom knows, children are not standardized like electrical sockets, they learn in different ways and at different rates and they have different interests. Bill Gates has three adult children. I wonder what they think of his analogy.

Eric Schmidt, the anointed head of New York’s ‘blue-ribbon” commission, is not an unbiased educational philanthropist either. He owns $5.3 billion stock shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, so his push to take education permanently online will only make him richer. Naomi Klein, author of the book The Shock Doctrine, calls the push to take everything online the “Pandemic Shock Doctrine” and dismisses it as the “Screen New Deal.” She fears a high-tech dystopia that will lead to increasing wealth inequality, shifting so much power to elites that democracy is threatened, mass layoffs, ignoring the impending climate catastrophe, and invasions of privacy that will put fundamental human rights at risk.

Pearson, formally an educational textbook and testing company, is trying to salvage itself and its profits by pushing online education. The Corona pandemic has brought Pearson an “explosion” in demand for its online learning products. The company claims traffic across its platforms quadrupled as millions of children were closed out of schools and families turned to home schooling including 500,000 new Pearson customers in plague ravished Italy. If celebrating the pandemic and 300,000 deaths as a boost to business sounds ghoulish, that’s because it is.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in the appetite for digital resources,” he said. “Across all our platforms globally we are seeing about a 400% increase in activity (...) and that demand is growing day-by-day.”

Pearson, which provides textbooks, assessments and digital services in 70 countries, trained an additional 24,000 teachers in online learning and gained 500,000 new learners in Italy, he said. Italy is the country with the most deaths, and the second most cases after China, to date in the pandemic.

Jumping on board the online bandwagon, the New York Times published an extremely well-written op-ed piece by a middle school student who complained about student behavior and teacher frustration in regular school classes. In the essay, she explained why she felt she learned better online without other students around to interrupt her.

But what works for this young woman may not be working for other students, especially those who lack adequate computer hardware and Internet connection at home or parents who can help them with their schoolwork.

There are other things about education that the young woman and advocates for online instruction didn’t consider, the value of social interaction in a classroom setting and the importance of human connections between teachers and students. Middle school is a difficult period in the life of young people as they mature physically, intellectually and emotionally. School and teachers provide guidance and support to help young people navigate those changes.

Maybe the most important lesson you learn in middle school, probably more important than math or social studies, is how to work with others in a team, to negotiate, assist and share. These are skills that become increasingly important as you progress through school, enter the work world, and develop adult relationships. These are skills students don’t learn working in online isolation.

Educational research continually demonstrates that most students, but maybe not all students, learn best in intensive groups, with teacher feedback, and when teachers they are related to have high expectations for their success.

The Network for Public Education conducted a survey that supports the value of in-class learning experiences for students and underscores the limits of online instruction. An article by its director, Carol Burris, in the Washington Post discussed interviews with educators and parents and survey results. “Over 80 percent of parents reported that their child misses his/her classmates, and over 60 percent reported they miss their teacher. Fifty-eight percent of parents told us their child misses sports and extracurricular activities, and 39 percent said he or she regularly expresses feelings of loneliness.” Only 9.5% replied that “their child prefers remote learning to classroom learning.”

A Florida parent with four children commented on the difficulty of managing multiple children in a remote learning environment. She reported that although she and her husband have sufficient tech equipment in their home, they are “juggling to keep their children on task” while they struggle with having to work remotely from home. In contradiction to the New York Times op-ed, the women told the interviewer that “Distance learning for middle-schoolers is probably the worst possible choice.” she said with a laugh.

According to New York State United Teachers President Andy Pallotta “Remote learning, in any form, will never replace the important personal connection between teachers and their students that is built in the classroom and is a critical part of the teaching and learning process. If we want to reimagine education, let's start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counselors, school nurses, enriching courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state.”

Governor Cuomo, you’re doing such a good job helping us understand and survive the Corona pandemic. You warn us not to make hasty decisions, to listen to experts, and not accept miracle cures without scientific testing. Don’t get into bed with online snake oil salesmen.

Sign the Petition - Say NO to NY Permanent Virtual Education

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

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