Common Core: ‘the gift that Pearson counts on to keep giving’ - The Washington Post

Common Core: ‘the gift that Pearson counts on to keep giving’ - The Washington Post:

Common Core: ‘the gift that Pearson counts on to keep giving’

Mercedes Schneider is a veteran teacher in Louisiana who has been educating students for more than two decades, as well as an education researcher who has been highly critical of corporate school reform. She is also the author of two books, “A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education,” and the newly published “Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?”

The following is an excerpt from her book about the Core. It is about the education company Pearson and it is revelatory in showing the connections between some education reformers and corporate leaders.

Here’s the excerpt, with footnotes removed.  (Reprinted by permission of the publisher. From Mercedes Schneider, Common Core Dilemma—Who Owns Our Schools, New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright (c) 2015 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.)

Those “Powerful Market Forces”

In March 2014, billionaire Bill Gates participated in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the many organizations he financially supports in his effort to promote the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (see Chapter 9). In a 6-minute video clip from the AEI  interview, Gates purports to explain various aspects of CCSS, including the reason for the “common” component. His explanation has nothing to do with educational quality:

 If [states] have two [sets of standards] they’re comparing, they ought to probably pick something in common because, to some degree, this is an area where, if you do have commonality, it’s like an electrical plug, You get more free market competition. Scale is good for free market competition. Individual state regulatory capture is not good for competition. [Emphasis added]

His mechanical analogy of education as an object to “plug in” aside, Gates says that the “commonality” of CCSS “is good for free market competition”; however, he immediately notes that he prefers market competition on a level beyond that of the state. In other words, education companies that are smaller—and are more 

Common Core: ‘the gift that Pearson counts on to keep giving’ - The Washington Post: