Publishing Giant Pearson Hauls in Billions in Education Dollars, But Do Students Benefit?
Leave it to Oscar Wilde to get things right. Writing about late-19th-century British attitudes regarding the poor, the Irish writer and social critic concluded, “Their remedies are part of the disease.”
Oh, how far we have not come.
With an extensive and carefully detailed examination of the British publishing giant Pearson, published by Politico last week, Stephanie Simon has drawn a similar conclusion about the state of American education: “The story of Pearson’s rise,” Simon writes, “is very much a story about America’s obsession with education reform over the past few decades.” In short, our obsession with “accountability” at all costs has given birth to an industry that, while feeding on taxpayer dollars, corrupts the very thing it (erroneously) seeks to measure: learning. As with Wilde’s poor, here, too, it is self-evident: our remedies have become part of our disease.
Pearson has clearly profited from the post-No Child Left Behind era, bolstered by the more recent Common Core movement: “Half its $8 billion in annual global sales comes from its North American education division,” Simon reveals. But what gains have Americans reaped in return? According to Simon, relatively few. “Pearson’s dominance,” she writes, “does not always serve U.S. students or taxpayers well.”
Simon’s disturbing expose of corporate gain on the backs of taxpayer dollars is a most welcome addition to the efforts currently being made to beat back the corporatization of education—many of them led by educational researchers and teachers. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the current state of education. But its appearance also raises a critical question: Why has it taken so long for the media to take note? Scholars and teachers have been warning of this for years.
Writing in 2007, professors Sharon L. Nichols, University of Texas-San Antonio, and David C. Berliner, Arizona State University, shared a detailed account of the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing, highlighting Campbell’s Law, itself a caution about statistics from 1975:
Campbell’s law stipulates that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”…High-stakes testing is exactly the kind of practice Campbell warned us about….Our literature search has turned up endless examples showing how high-stakes testing corrupts education.
On AlterNet two years ago, I connected those concerns to Common Core, asking:
Who advocates for CCSS? What claims drive that advocacy? And who stands to benefit from CCSS implementation as well as thePublishing Giant Pearson Hauls in Billions in Education Dollars, But Do Students Benefit? | Alternet:
