Pay Pearson, Go Further?
Yesterday, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for ‘Excellence’ in Education (FEE) launched a pro-testing, pro-Common Core media campaign entitled “Learn More, Go Further.” Targeting viewers of stations like HGTV, Animal Planet and the Family Channel, the ads feature teachers proclaiming good news about education in Florida, which they say are the result of “accountability, testing, and good teaching.”
The ad says to “learn more” at their website, but the site offers no evidence to back any of their claims.
Conspicuously absent from those ads? Evidence, for starters. Though the ad claims that Florida is “a top ten state” according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) based on the NAEP exam, the NCES itself does not rank states on the NAEP. This organization would have to have compiled those rankings on their own, yet they don’t say which of the many statistics the NCES gathers they’ve compared in order to make this claim. Their website offers no links or citations to back up this or any other claims about Florida’s education turnaround, nor a direct source to where this information allegedly comes from. But a quick glance at Florida’s most recent NAEP data reveals that their students’ score either statistically no different or worsethan the national average on seven out of ten points of comparison*.
Also missing from these pro-testing ads and their website is the fact that FEE is funded by several of the nation’s major testing corporations: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and nonprofit-in-name-only Educational Testing Service. Bush, FEE and their sister organization Chiefs for Change have all come under fire in the past, both from researchers calling out their misleading claims about the test-driven “Florida Formula,” and from public