Pearson profits, public education suffers

One company increasingly controls American education—the tests students take, the textbooks they read and exercises they do to prepare for those tests, the tests prospective teachers take to be licensed, the online classes students take in their K-12 and college years, and the data about student performance. It's a very profitable business for Pearson, but the more the company's reach has spread across American education, the more problems are building up.

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.

That led to a 44 percent cost overrun, but didn't stop Pearson from getting a contract extension. But because of Pearson's diverse range of educational products, it's not just database management the company gets to screw up. It gets to screw up curriculum, too:

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.

That's money that's not going to smaller classes, more teachers, or better teacher training, and it's just scratching the surface. Simon's expose has example after example of Pearson raking in millions in public contracts and tuition money for unproven or failed products. This is the natural result of the rush to privatize and profitize American public education—increasing standardization even when the standard is untested, increasing piles of money headed to private companies, decreasing transparency and oversight.

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