Friday, April 4, 2014

Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com

Keep Fox News out of the classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com:



 Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education

Rupert Murdoch and other moguls smell mega-riches in Common Core Standards. They can't be allowed to wreck schools



TOPICS: EDUCATION, COMMON CORE, BILL GATES, BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION, ARNE DUNCAN,MICHELLE RHEE, RUPERT MURDOCH, EDITOR'S PICKS, , , 
Keep Fox News out of the classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public educationRupert Murdoch (Credit: Monika Flueckiger)
The Pearson Foundation has agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle allegations that the nonprofit broke New York state law while attempting to profit from Common Core-aligned products. An investigation by New York state Attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman revealed the charitable side of Pearson spent years wooing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in hopes the two would partner in creating Common Core courses. The Pearson Foundation and Gates Foundation joined together in 2011, creating 24 online courses that were then sold to the for-profit side of Pearson for $15.1 million.
As for the $7.7 million settlement, the Pearson Foundation has announced it will donate the money to 100kin10, a company that focuses on developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. Interestingly, the Gates Foundation has also pledged $7 million to 100kin10 over the next six years along with several other partners Pearson works with. Clearly, the new standards mean big business and big profits.
America’s most recent education reform, the Common Core State Standards, has divided teachers and parents across the United States. Whether or not the standards mark a step in the right direction for the education system, one thing is for sure. For the first time in American history, businesses are able to freely tap into the K-12 market on a large scale, and they aren’t waiting.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers began writing the standards in 2009 with the financial help of private donors, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pearson Publishing Co. A few months later the United States Department of Education announced a $4.35 billion contest called Race to the Top in which every state could compete for federal grant money. The applications for funding were judged on a point system of fulfilled criteria, one of which was adopting the new Common Core State Standards. Many states agreed to adopt the new standards before they had even been finished, proving that the decision was largely a financial one. The grant money in RttT was a powerful vehicle in spreading the standards quickly across the United States.
How have the authors proposed we track the success of this reform? Testing, and lots of it. Along with the Common Core come two new major testing consortiums called SmarterBalanced and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Forget your No. 2 pencil; these aren’t the bubble tests you remember from school but adaptive computer testing that is required two to three times a year for every student in every grade. From theSmarterBalanced website, “The full suite of summative, interim, and formative assessments is estimated to cost $27.30 per student … These costs are estimates because a sizable portion of the cost is for test administration and scoring services that will not be provided by Smarter Balanced; states will either provide these services directly or procure them from vendors in the private sector.”
Big business in education isn’t new. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have dominated the textbook market while the College Board, makers of the SAT and Advanced Placement courses, are the veritable gatekeepers to higher education. The entire U.S. education system has been valued at nearly $1.5 trillion, second only to the healthcare industry. As media mogul Rupert Murdoch saidafter acquiring education company Amplify (previously known as Wireless Generations), “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting Keep Fox News out of the classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com:
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