Pearson blog starts heated debate about $1.7 billion for standardized testing
A blog post written by a Pearson psychometrician under the headline “Is $1.7 billion a lot or a little to spend on testing?” has sparked a heated online debate about the costs of standardized testing — monetarily and otherwise.The $1.7 billion refers to a figure in a new Brookings Institution report on state spending on K-12 assessment systems. Author Matthew Chingos, looking at data from state contracts with testing vendors, concluded that 45 states spend a total of $669 million a year for these assessments, with “a rough estimate” state-level spending $1.7 billion annually across the nation. That, he says, is “one-quarter of one percent of annual K-12 education spending in the United States each year, raising the question of whether the amount is too much, just right or not enough. (The report unfortunately looks at the District as if it were a state, which it isn’t; it says per-pupil testing costs range from $7 in New York to $114 in Washington, D.C., as if a state and a city are comparable.)
Pearson is the largest for-profit education company in the world. Pearson psychometrician Steve Ferrara wrote in part on the Pearson Web site, referring to the $1.7 billion estimate fo