It's Pearson CEO John Fallon Vs. Teachers' Union President Randi Weingarten
Randi Weingarten (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Is it a good idea for the children in the Third World to get an education, even if their parents have to pay for it? The American Federation of Teachers doesn’t think so. So the AFT is sending its president, Randi Weingarten, to the Pearson (NYSE: PSO) annual meeting in London on Friday to demand that the world’s leading education company get out of the business of supporting private schools in destitute areas of Africa and Asia.
Weingarten is dead-set against a family in Ghana or Nigeria choosing to pay even a few dollars in tuition so their children can get an education. This is why teachers like Rebecca Friedrichs are willing to take their fight to the Supreme Court: You just don’t know what political cause unions will wage with those mandatory dues.
And while she is over there, Weingarten wants Pearson CEO John Fallon to get his company out of the business of standardized testing. In a statement ahead of the gathering of shareholders, she says the corporation’s “hyper-fixation on high-stakes testing in the Global North and its privatizing of public education in the Global South have been bad for business, bad for students and bad for the community.”
Excuse my political incorrectness. The AFT would prefer that the Third World now be known as the Global South. New York, which is Pearson’s U.S. headquarters, and London, its corporate home, for instance, are in the Global North.
I spent more than five years living and working as a journalist in South Africa. Government schools were often a joke and were not free. Private schools were non-existent except for the wealthy. In one case, a man with no education himself started a school in the coops of an old chicken farm and hundreds of children showed up because there was no alternative. Now, South African public schools waive fees for the poorest families, but that’s not true at the high school level where fees are still the norm. And that is in one of the most successful countries in Africa. Children languish without schools in much of the world.
When I suggest to Fallon on a visit to the U.S. earlier this month that Weingarten needs to get out and see the world beyond New York and London, he says, “You said it, not me.”
The teachers’ union is also taking its anti-testing message to the annual meeting. The unions abhor standardized testing in part because of the fear that the results will be used to judge teacher performance and possibly remove union members from the classroom. Weingarten will speak on behalf of the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, which holds shares in Pearson. (The Chicago Teachers’ Union is affiliated with theAFT, which represents 1.8 million teachers and other workers.)
In a letter to its shareholders, the pension fund says, “Pearson’s mishandling of the U.S. K-12 school testing market through its involvement in high-stakes testing has poisoned its brand in its core market of the U.S., which comprises 66% of group revenue.”
Pearson Plc, which has $7 billion in revenues worldwide, says it makes less than 10% of its money from the assessment business in the U.S. Overall, 30% of its business is assessments. But as the largest creator of tests for schools across the country – approximately 50 million high-stakes tests administered last year in the U.S. — it’s also the focus of union ire and comedians. On his HBO show last year, John Oliver did an 18-minute segment on testing and reserved special mockery for Pearson for having “a shocking amount of influence over American schools.”
PARCC testing was just getting underway across town in the Hoboken, N.J. public schools as Fallon sat down for an interview at Pearson’s It's Pearson CEO John Fallon Vs. Teachers' Union President Randi Weingarten - Forbes:
