If you don’t live inside the ultimate company town that is the Washington DC metro area, you may not have heard of Politico. It’s basically an inside-the-beltway gossip rag that one writer calls “Tiger Beat On The Potomac”.1
While most of what they publish isn’t worth your bandwidth or time, Politico does have an investigative unit that occasionally produces something worth reading. Like their recent deep dive into Pearson, the 800-pound gorilla of standardized testing, in an aptly titled piece No Profit Left Behind. It’s not especially flattering.
A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson’s contracts set forth specific performance targets – but don’t penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used.
The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.
And it’s not at all surprising when the writer states “[t]he story of Pearson’s rise is very much a story about America’s obsession with education reform over the past few decades”.
What she misses is that the “obsession” has not really been with “reform” as much as the desire to hold someone accountable for the perceived “decline” in the American education system. The politicians writing the laws needed concrete data, and companies like Pearson crafted the products to deliver it. Right place, right time.2
The worst part about the contracts many states have entered into with Pearson is that they get paid regardless of whether their products and services actually work, or at least do what the company says they will. One example that hits too close to home.
The state of Virginia recertified Pearson as an approved “school turnaround” consultant in 2013 even though the company had, at best, mixed results with that line of work: Just one of the five Virginia schools that Pearson cited as references improved both its math and reading proficiency rates against the state averages. Two schools lost ground in both math and reading and the other two had mixed results. State officials said Pearson met all the criteria they required of consultants.
Our state must have pretty low criteria for consultants. As, it seems, do many districts and states all over the country.
Anyway, go read the whole thing, keeping in mind the bottom line, as I ranted about recently, is that the blame for the educational malpractice described in this piece belongs in large part to us.
“When the federal government starts doing things like requiring all states to test all kids, there’s going to be gold in those hills. The people we’ve elected have created a landscape that’s allowed Pearson to prosper.” – Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at New York University.
We, dear citizen and taxpayer, enable the pigs to eat at the trough.