That is a lot of power given without much scrutiny...to those who formulate and grade the tests that judge so many.  One of the biggest of these is Pearson, and they greatly affect many states.

Recently in the New York Times Michael Winerip told of some investigations being done about educators being treated to trips paid for by Pearson Foundation, one of the largest publishers of educational materials.  That includes testing packages sold to schools and the grading of the tests as well.

New Questions About Trips Sponsored by Education Publisher

In the summer of 2010, Lu Young, the superintendent of schools in Jessamine County, a Lexington, Ky., suburb, took a trip to Australia paid for by the Pearson Foundation, a nonprofit arm of Pearson, the nation’s largest educational publisher.

Ten school superintendents went on the trip.  

More:

Six months later, in Frankfort, Ky., Ms. Young sat on a committee interviewing executives from three companies bidding to run the state’s testing program. While CTB/McGraw-Hill submitted the lowest bid, by $2.5 million, Ms. Young and the other committee members recommended Pearson.

..."For several weeks, New York State’s attorney general has been investigating similar trips involving two dozen education officials from around the country who traveled to Singapore; London; Helsinki, Finland; China and Rio de Janeiro as guests of the Pearson Foundation. The trips, and the fact that most of these officials come from states that have multimillion contracts with Pearson, were the subject of two of my columns this fall.

Last month, the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas to the Manhattan offices of the Pearson Foundation and Pearson Education. Mr. Schneiderman is looking into whether the nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation, which is prohibited by state law from undisclosed lobbying, was used to benefit Pearson Education, a profit-making company that publishes standardized tests, curriculums and textbooks, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

Pearson has a lot of influence in states like Texas and Florida.  Here is more about Texas from the Texas Observor last September.  

How private companies are profiting from Texas public schools.

Pearson, one of the giants of the for-profit industry that looms over public education, produces just about every product a student, teacher or school administrator in Texas might need. From textbooks to data management, professional development programs to testing systems, Pearson has it all—and all of it has a price. For statewide testing in Texas alone, the company holds a five-year contract worth nearly $500 million to create and administer exams. If students should fail those tests, Pearson offers a series of remedial-learning products to help them pass. Meanwhile, kids are likely to use textbooks from Pearson-owned publishing houses like Prentice Hall and Pearson Longman. Students who want to take virtual classes may well find themselves in a course subcontracted to Pearson. And if the student drops out, Pearson partners with the American Council on Education to offer the GED exam for a profit.

“Pearson basically becomes a complete service provider to the education system,” says David Anderson, an Austin education lobbyist whose clients include some of Pearson’s competitors.

With the prevalence of companies like Pearson operating in Texas and many other states, the U.S. education system has become increasingly privatized. In some cases, the only part of education that remains public is the school itself. Nearly every other aspect of educating children—exams, textbooks, online classes, even teacher certification—is now provided by for-profit companies.

Here is the webpage for their North America education interests.  Just add the name Pearson in front of the publishing companies you used to know.   Almost every textbook we used in the classroom came from one of these companies, but now there is the word Pearson preceding it.

Pearson North American Education

Pearson has the FCAT testing contract for Florida.   That is the test that has decided most everything in Florida, though I hope some of that is changing.

From the Orlando Sentinel in December.  There is concern about the investigations going on elsewhere, concern that Florida might be linked to some of it.

NY investigating Pearson, testing giant with FCAT contract

New York’s attorney general is looking into whether an educational foundation affiliated with Pearson — the national testing giant that has the FCAT contract — tried to improperly influence state educators by paying for them to take overseas trips, the New York Times reported yesterday.

The paper wrote: ”The office of the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas this week to the foundation and to Pearson Education seeking documents and information related to their activities with state education officials, including at least four education conferences — in London, Helsinki, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro — since 2008, according to people familiar with the investigation.

At issue is whether the activities of the tax-exempt Pearson Foundation, which is prohibited by state law from engaging in undisclosed lobbying, were used to benefit Pearson Education, a for-profit company, according to these people.”

Former Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith took a Pearson trip to Finland in 2009, though that was after the company won Florida’s contract. Pearson was one of three companies to initially apply to run Florida’s testing program but one of the applicants was deemed unqualified. A committee of state officials (Smith was not among them) and a few outside appointees (including a parent) selected Pearson over CTB/McGraw-Hill after rating the two proposals.

Pearson was fined about 15 million in 2010 for late scores on the FCAT.  

Florida hits FCAT contractor Pearson with another $12 million in penalties

Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith told Pearson he expects the damages to be paid by Aug. 6.

"Pearson's usage of unproven technology systems this year has caused great turmoil for our parents, teachers, administrators and other education stakeholders and I remain committed to holding the company fully accountable for these disruptions," Smith said in a written statement.

"It is our intent to make good on our previously stated commitment to reimburse the department and Florida districts for substantiated, unexpected costs due to the delay in reporting FCAT scores," Pearson spokesman Adam Gaber said in response.

Teachers in public schools are held accountable.  The companies that make the tests that are used to judge them should be held equally accountable.  

There are two more paragraphs from the Texas Observer, in which a lobbyist warns of the educational industrial complex.

Lobbyist David Anderson remains worried. “Ultimately in public education,” he says, “when you have something as significant as the education of the child or of a generation of children, you want to make sure that, to the greatest extent possible, decisions are being made based on reliable and valid information, and decisions are being made for the right reasons.”He says students and parents must now contend with a business-education complex in which industries perpetuate ideologies, and ideologies keep industries afloat.

Anderson compares it to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of. Which makes sense, since Pearsonville does have a 1950s feel.

Here is the Pearsonville site.

Welcome to Pearsonville

Accountability should not just be for teachers.

Crossposted at Twitter

This week the New York Times published teacher rankings of 18,000 New York city teachers.

The ratings, known as teacher data reports, covered three school years ending in 2010, and are intended to show how much value individual teachers add by measuring how much their students’ test scores exceeded or fell short of expectations based on demographics and prior performance. Such “value-added assessments” are increasingly being used in teacher-evaluation systems, but they are an imprecise science. For example, the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said. Some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students.

My good friend, Rita Solnet, is is a Florida co-founder of Parent Across America, has given me permission to cross-post a piece she just did.  I strongly recommend you read her story.

Everything below this point is Rita's words.  Please read and pass on to others.   Thanks

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statistically Speaking, Florida -- I Don't Believe Them

Florida's education statistics were front and center all week. As I prepare for my son's college graduation, I can't help but wonder how different his future would be had we lived by statistics.  

A '08 graduate of an outstanding public high school in Boca Raton, Jeff attended twelve years of Florida's public schools. He gained admission to some of the finest universities in our nation thanks to a village of supportive teachers, staff, guidance counselors and a host of interesting AP and college courses at his disposal.

Today Florida's education reform decisions are based on failed reforms touted by third parties with vested interests.  Worse still -- those decisions are then supported with illogically skewed or fatally flawed statistics  vs. real-world, in-the-trenches input.

Last week we learned that children could not write any better than martians arriving on planet earth yet later in the week the news trumpeted that Florida's reading scores improved across the state. Both tests crafted and scored from the same company. They can't write but they can read and comprehend very well.  Does that make sense to anyone? Flawed results based on flawed tests, forgotten instructions to schools, and flawed scoring methods were inflicted upon children. But one Conference call and presto, the passing grade drops under a recommendation by Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future which receives funds from Pearson.

Today at 11 AM - Thursday June 7 - hundreds of New York parents and kids are taking to the streets to protest:

* High-stakes testing which crowds out meaningful learning, e.g., critical thinking, complex writing, reading actual books, exploring ideas, research, experiments.

* The excessive power and influence billion dollar for-profit company Pearson has over our NYS Education Department - the tests are eating up resources and taking up children's time. Meanwhile, NY SED and Pearson have no accountability as they refuse to ever release the tests, which had nearly 30 questions invalidated this spring due to errors and poor quality.

Come join us today if you're in midtown Manhattan - we're protesting in front of Pearson HQ at 53rd and 6th avenue - more info at www.parentvoicesny.org or below

That is the title of this post at the Answer Sheet Blog of the Washington Post, run by Valerie Strauss.  The author is Carol Burris, an award-winning principal in Long Island who originally supported the idea of Common Core but has become increasingly concerned about the damage it will do as she has watched it take shape, particularly with respect to the assessments that will go with the Common Core.  As Burris puts it,

New York’s Common Core tests, designed to measure whether 8-14 year olds are on the path to college readiness, will soon begin. The stakes have never been higher, since teachers and principals are now being evaluated in part by student scores. Like the teacher evaluation system, Common Core testing is a plane being built in the air— a plane in which the passengers are children.

Offered without comment other than, please make it go viral.

New York officials signed a $32 million five-year contract with Pearson PLC's subsidiary, NCS Pearson Inc., in 2011 for its Common Core test merchandise. Pearson, a British consortium, is the world's most influential purveyor of educational supplies and holds numerous contracts with New York and other states. Texas, for example, is paying Pearson $462 million for its five-year contract.

Unknown at the time, the Pearson/New York agreement stipulated that the 2014 spring exams would be classified and not subject to public review or educators' criticism. In response to Elizabeth Phillips' April 10 NYT's Op-Ed "We need to Talk About the Test," Pearson says that the state is responsible for the gag order.

Public funds paid for the Pearson contract so it is unlikely that if challenged the suppression order will withstand judicial scrutiny but it is concerning that one or both of the parties believed they could stifle free speech.

The Washington Post revealed last year that Pearson has an unsatisfactory performance history. Alan Singer amplifies the company's failings on the Ravitch blog.

Mr. Singer shares the following sobering information regarding Pearson:

Pearson Education owns the publishers Adobe, Scott Foresman, Penguin, Longman, Wharton, Harcourt, Puffin, Prentice Hall, and Allyn & Bacon.  They are deeply involved in test assessment producing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Stanford Achievement Test, the Millar Analogy Test, the New York City special high school admissions test, and the G.E.D. Through interlocking boards of directors, partnerships, and donation’s from the company’s foundation, they have developed relationships with the largely online University of Phoenix, Teach for America, Stanford University, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the Gates, Lumina, Broad, and Walton Foundations.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aligned with the Pearson Foundation in 2011 to pursue its Common Core mission. In December 2013 NY Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, collected $7.7 million from the Pearson Foundation following his allegations of improper use of charitable funds.

It appears from various news sources that Common Core gag orders exist outside the state of New York. An example is the testimony of Susan Kimball, a Missouri kindergarten teacher. Ms. Kimball told state senators in March:

I have been strongly discouraged from saying anything negative about Common Core by my administration and some school board members.

In a professional development meeting, um, inservice in November, and at a faculty meeting in January, we were told in my building, and I quote, ‘Be careful about what you post on Facebook, or talk about in the public regarding Common Core. Don’t say anything negative. It could affect your job.’

From the Tampa Bay Times.

Computer problems shut down FCAT testing in Pasco, Hernando and elsewhere

Problems with Florida's annual FCAT test on Tuesday rekindled simmering concerns that the state isn't ready for its next steps toward full computerized testing.

At least a dozen Florida school districts, including Pasco and Hernando, were forced to suspend online testing Tuesday as students had trouble signing in to take the annual exam.

State education officials blamed test provider Pearson Education for the situation, which appeared to be related to the company's servers. Other problems included slowness when students tried to download test questions or submit answers, and a warning screen that students should notify their teacher or proctor.

"This failure is inexcusable," education commissioner Pam Stewart wrote in a letter to Walter Sherwood, president of state services for Pearson.

Here is more about Pearson's long string of problems in Florida.

Company causing late FCAT grades in Florida has history of problems.

This is from 2010, so the powers that be in education have known.

The testing company responsible for the delayed release of this year's FCAT scores has a history of problems — in Florida and across the country. Now, Florida education leaders fear their planned rollout of a new computer-based testing system is in jeopardy because the company, Pearson, is not prepared.

Education Commissioner Eric Smith criticized Pearson in a recent letter for using an "untested" system for computer-based tests that the state plans to use in high schools next year.

The lack of a "proven" system created "unacceptable" problems for schools that tried out the new tests this spring, Smith said.

"The problems experienced by schools have created a lack of confidence in Pearson, our program, and computer-based testing in general. The product seems to be so new and untested that even Pearson staff cannot provide clear and reliable instructions for successful implementation," Smith wrote in his June 4 letter.

Anyone who has ever grown fruit trees knows that you HAVE to prune branches that have borne fruit several years in a row to make new growth available that will produce at higher levels than tired old branches...

The same is with the reform movement...

It looks promising, but with that we should also take note that when Common Core was rolled out, it too looked promising.... And still would, if it hadn't been hijacked by others with not-so-hot agendas.....

But IF handled right, and IF teachers are given the entire responsibility of driving the educational process, this new technological advancement could indeed revolutionize the results of educational success......

It is called "individualized learning"....

I just finished grading my students’ algebra unit tests, and I am thrilled with how well they did.  In fact, the sixth grade algebra unit is the best unit I teach, and the one in which my students are most successful, every single year.  Why?  It’s fun.  While most of us might remember learning algebra as a set of rules and steps, for my sixth graders, algebra means solving number tricks, “bowling” with numbers, and making up puzzles.  It’s a blast, every single day.

This is because our algebra unit, unlike every other unit in our district, was written by teachers.  It’s not just math; it’s accessible, interesting and fun- and the kids love it.  All the other units in my district’s curriculum were purchased from Pearson, the testing giant (currently located in Ireland where it doesn’t have to pay taxes, and standing to make over a billion dollars from our nation’s public schools with its standardized tests, the “PARCC”).  They are not the same.

Those problems haven't hit Pearson in the wallet yet, in part because contracts are often structured so that even if Pearson screws up or doesn't produce the results it pledged, Pearson gets paid, as Politico's Stephanie Simon details. For instance, in 2012, Pearson got a two-year, $8.5 million no-bid contract from the state of North Carolina:

Pearson’s new database, PowerSchool, turned out to be riddled with so many glitches that some schools couldn’t tally enrollment or produce accurate transcripts; one local superintendent called it a “train wreck.”

Most problems have now been fixed, Jeter said. But the state had to hire eight Pearson project managers — each of whom billed up to $1,024 per day — to relieve its overloaded IT staff and assist districts with their “unique issues arising from the implementation of PowerSchool,” according to a contract amendment.

Pearson sold the Los Angeles Unified School District an online curriculum that it described as revolutionary — but that had not yet been completed, much less tested across a large district, before the LAUSD agreed to spend an estimated $135 million on it. Teachers dislike the Pearson lessons and rarely use them, an independent evaluation found.

Pearson, by the way, is a funder of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Check out this CNN youtube=

"South Korea, where more than 70 percent of high school graduates enter university, education is a national obsession that the government worries is actually damaging society.  Education accounted for nearly 12 percent of consumer spending last year, and parents spent the equivalent of 1.5 percent of G.D.P. on cram schools for their children.  There are now more cram school instructors in South Korea than regular schoolteachers, and the exams are so difficult that even college professors admit they could not pass them."

"The paradox is these ridiculous tests don’t necessarily lead to demanding college classes. In Japan, where almost all college students graduate, it’s quite common for students to be asked only to parrot back lecture notes. Rigorous thinking, reading and writing too often is simply not expected."

"When I asked a class (South Korea) if they were happy in this environment, one girl hesitantly raised her hand to tell me that she would only be happy if her mother was gone because all her mother knew was how to nag about her academic performance. The world may look to South Korea as a model for education — its students rank among the best on international education tests — but the system’s dark side casts a long shadow.  Dominated by Tiger Moms, cram schools and highly authoritarian teachers, South Korean education produces ranks of overachieving students who pay a stiff price in health and happiness. The entire program amounts to child abuse. It should be reformed and restructured without delay."

He posted the following on his blog, Bob Braun's Ledger:

MARCH 13, 2015
BREAKING: Pearson, NJ, spying on social media of students taking PARCC tests
 ” Pearson, the multinational testing and publishing company, is spying on the social media posts of students–including those from New Jersey–while the children are taking their PARCC, statewide tests, this site has learned exclusively. The state education department is cooperating with this spying and has asked at least one school district to discipline students who may have said something inappropriate about the tests.

 This website discovered the unauthorized and hidden spying thanks to educators who informed it of the practice–a practice happening throughout the state and apparently throughout the country. The spying–or “monitoring,” to use Pearson’s word–was confirmed at one school district–the Watchung Hills Regional High School district in Warren by its superintendent, Elizabeth Jewett.
Jewett sent out an e-mail–posted here– to her colleagues expressing concern about the unauthorized spying on students. She said parents are upset and added that she thought Pearson’s behavior would contribute to the growing “opt out” movement.
In her email, Jewett said the district’s testing coordinator received a late night call from the state education department saying that Pearson had “initiated a Priority 1 Alert for an item breach within our school.”
The unnamed state education department employee contended a student took a picture of a test item and tweeted it. But it turned out the student had posted–at 3:18 pm, after testing was over–a tweet about one of the items with no picture. Jewett does not say the student revealed a question. Jewett continues:

“The student deleted the tweet and we spoke with the parent–who was obviously highly concerned as to her child’s tweets being monitored by the DOE (state education department).
“The DOE informed us that Pearson is monitoring all social media during the PARCC testing.” (Diarist's emphasis)

More below the Chee-to:

Originally Published on Up North Progressive

(( NOTICE: Bob Braun's blog had to be shut down after it was attacked. He also published an article about Pearson Education spying on school children's social media after school if they mentioned anything about PARCC.))

In the Hell on Earth that has come to be corporate education reform in the United States, the reality of Common Core came to a head in New Jersey yesterday when it was revealed by the Superintendent of The Wachtung Hills Regional High School District that Pearson Education had triggered an alert that there was a breach on social media when a student tweeted about a test question. Pearson monitors all student social media accounts during the testing period searching for any discussion about the tests students are forced to take.

Is a 5th grader smarter than Ohio's PARCC testing initiative?

Ayden Pol won 3rd place in the Lorain County Chronicle-Telegram editorial contest with his aptly titled piece "Park the PARCC".

I'm with Ayden. Why aren't we making learning fun? Why are we so test focused?

Why are we micromanaging teachers? What purpose do these tests serve when students don't get the results back until the following year?

Why are school IT departments setting up their own help desks to deal with all of the problems?  Why can't teachers help kids with the technology? And why do private schools in Ohio get an exemption from all of this unnecessary compliance overhead?

At what point do we remember the students? Shouldn't we be encouraging our best and brightest to go into the teaching profession instead of discouraging them?

I think Ayden hits the nail on the head and in his honor, I am going to do my best to use the phrase "bottom drawer word" every chance I get.

Please join me in congratulating Ayden on his excellent editorial and wish him luck as PARCC tests are this week!

Yes! 

According to data released by the New York state education department today Aug. 12,.... 20 percent of students in grades 3-8 eligible to take the statewide tests in reading and math for the 2014-15 school year did not do so. 

Hovering Over the Precipice, Desperate Pearson Reaches Out – Alan Singer’s Latest Huffington Post

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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?

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

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