Pearson Is Everywhere: Digging ‘Free’ Community College

Posted on February 24, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

Pearson

Welcome back to Pearson Is Everywhere!

Last time we looked at how Pearson has gotten fat in the State of North Carolina.

Today, we see how excited Pearson is about President Obama’s “free community college proposal.

 

Nothing is “free”.  Citizens pay for it in one way or another.

Xconomy.com headline: Edtech Companies Weigh In On Obama’s Free Community College Plan

Excerpt:

Pearson Education, the huge global textbook publisher with an expanding digital learning business and thousands of online courses, already has many partnerships among the nation’s public two-year colleges, says the company’s Jonell Sanchez, vice president of global employability and career success. Sanchez welcomed Obama’s initiative, which was inspired by new tuition-free community college programs in Tennessee and Chicago.

“It aligns very much with where we have been,” Sanchez says. “Pearson works with most of the community colleges in the country.”

Pearson’s partners include Indiana’s multi-campus Ivy Tech Community College, which was cast into the spotlight by the president’s public campaign for his free tuition proposal. Obama chose Ivy Tech’s Indianapolis campus as the site for a Feb. 6 forum where he touted the plan.

Hey — Did you hear a sound while reading the excerpt?

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION | Tagged | Comments Off on Pearson Is Everywhere: Digging ‘Free’ Community College

North Carolina’s SBAC ‘Status’ Change

Posted on February 23, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

In case you missed it, at some point, North Carolina went from being a ‘Governing’ state to an ‘Affiliate’ state in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

When and why this happened depends on who you ask.

I contacted the NC Department of Public Instruction and was told the change occurred in Spring 2014, when North Carolina did not participate in the ‘full’ SBAC test. (See the email exchange.)

I say ‘full’ test, because DPI did managed to run an SBAC pilot or ‘field’ test instead. I still am waiting on the information of how that pilot test was paid for and what the notification to parents looked like.  It’s now been over 6 months since my first inquiry to DPI on those items.

At roughly the same time, I contacted the SBAC and asked the same question. The response I received was that it was the result of an MOU not being signed:

Nicole Siegel <Nicole.Siegel@smarterbalanced.org> Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 2:11 PM
To: Lily Liberty <thell1885@gmail.com>
Hello –
After North Carolina decided to not sign the MOU with UCLA, we switched their affiliation with Smarter Balanced. I’d recommend connecting with the Department of Public Instruction in NC to ask when they made the decision to not use Smarter Balanced this year.
Thanks,
Nicole

 

This was a very different answer than NC DPI’s gave. I sent back a reply to the SBAC representative asking for the exact date range, but have yet to hear back.

So when did the change really happen?  I can only approximate a range sometime between October 18, 2014 and January 20, 2015 based on screenshots of the SBAC website using the Internet Way Back Machine.

What was the real reason? Still unknown. Transparency!

By the way…
I recently wrote about Lamar Alexander, the ESEA reauthorization and Alexander’s ‘education’ history as it pertains to ‘education’ entities like the American Institute for Research (AIR).

Part of the reauthorization is continued mandated high-stakes testing and the data that comes from it.   It might interest people to know that the SBAC and Alexander’s pals, AIR are partnered on the testing front.

Related:  US Dept of Ed Wanted Much More Testing from PARCC and SBAC

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core, EDUCATION, NC DPI, Testing | Tagged , | 4 Comments

#AmplifyChoice: 1 Mom, Multiple Choices

Posted on February 23, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

A few weeks ago, the Amplify Choice conference took place in Washington, D.C. with the aim of looking at the topic of Charter schools.  Participants at the conference took a look at two D.C. schools and I delved into Charter schools in my home state of North Carolina.

A pervasive theme of the conference was the idea that school choice can mean a great number of things.  Charter schools, private schools, virtual schools and homeschooling all were mentioned as top choices for parents.

In a nutshell, School Choice is ‘Multiple Choice’.

To follow-up on the theme of ‘multiple choice’, I decided to interview a mom who chose to homeschool.

Homeschooling For The First Time

I sat down with Raleigh area mom, Kristen Stocking, to talk about her decision to homeschool. Mrs. Stocking has two children; grades 2 and 6.  Mrs. Stocking uses a project based style of learning with her children.

I asked Mrs. Stocking four questions regarding her choice.
*The responses are condensed versions for the sake of brevity as our discussions lasted almost two hours.

1. You chose to homeschool your children for the 2014-2015 school year, can you tell me a little bit about what issues factored into that choice?

  • There was a sense that decisions being made at higher levels were not in the best interests of the individual children’s needs.
  • The amount of inflexibility of the system and embedded bureaucracy was an issue. Mrs. Stocking has found that in homeschooling, she is able to cover what the kids need at the time they need it.
  • Common Core was a factor in the decision.  The math in particular was problematic as it took basic concepts and muddled them.  This was frustrating both for the children and for her as a parent.
  • Having been inside the classrooms, Mrs. Stocking noted that there was little time for kids to focus on topics they truly liked; there was far too much ‘busy work’.
  • Mrs. Stocking noted that autonomy is one of the great parts of homeschooling. There is the ability to incorporate unique elements into a lesson “on the fly” that you can’t do with a large group in a classroom setting. The result is a vastly increased level of customized attention.

2. What hurdles or roadblocks (if any) did you encounter in your choice to homeschool your kids? (ie, red tape, application process, pushback from relatives, teachers, friends)

  • Mrs. Stocking said it was very easy for her to get started homeschooling; the state of North Carolina has an easy  process for it with reasonable requirements such as attendance records and one end-of-year standardized test.   She noted in the application process she had to provide proof of a degree of some kind.
  • It wasn’t the decision to homeschool that came with ‘roadblocks’. Her husband, family and friends were quite supportive of the idea. At first, it was the actual homeschooling process in the home. Mrs. Stocking explained she had to ‘unschool’ her children in the beginning. It became clear to her that some behaviors with regard to school had become entrenched in her children. For example, her oldest child constantly wanted to be graded on all her work “group taught,” as she would be in a public school setting. In the case of her oldest, the idea of grades being most important and not proficiency in the skill. She says that teaching her children how to teach themselves is one of her ultimate homeschool goals.
  • Mrs. Stocking said that, “Life is a learning experience.” Her children were beginning to reclaim their love of learning; inquisitiveness was returning.

3. Did you weigh other options before choosing homeschooling? If yes, what was it about homeschooling that won the day as your choice?

  • Mrs. Stocking explained that her children had experiences with public school and with private schools.  While private schools had high academics, they weren’t guaranteed to be ‘stable’; shifts in leadership, schedules and teachers. There are few choices within close proximity to her home, and having the children nearby and interacting with their community was a family priority.
  • There were no charters close by to her, so the decision to homeschool was easy.
  • When considering the other choices available to her that were out there, she said, “I can do better myself. There is nobody who can understand my children’s needs as well as I can.”
  • The ability to learn while traveling and to pick the experiences they wanted was important. Mrs. Stocking added, “Everything is a learning experience if you make it that.”

4. What do you think the future holds? Will you continue homeschooling or return to the public school system?

  • Mrs. Stocking indicated they are most definitely going to homeschool again next year and that the decision will be made one year at a time.
  • She said they participate in a co-op and that she will be teaching pre-algebra to middle schoolers in the coming year. The goal is to have the kids ready to do algebra 1 before 8th grade.
  • Mrs. Stocking noted that if a charter school possessing the quality, location and instructional style that she desires for her kids became available, that it would certainly be an option they’d consider.

Those wishing to contact Mrs. Stocking can do so via email: KPStocking@gmail.com.
I’d also like to thank her for taking the time to sit down with me for this discussion. 

Related Articles:

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION, EXCLUSIVE, Homeschool | Tagged | Comments Off on #AmplifyChoice: 1 Mom, Multiple Choices

Pearson Is Everywhere: Getting Fat In North Carolina

Posted on February 23, 2015 by A.P. Dillon
Pearson

PEARSON: Always Earning!

Welcome back to Pearson Is Everywhere!

Last time we looked at how Pearson has a history of massive profits off the federal government.

Today, we’ll look closer at how fat Pearson has gotten off of the state of North Carolina.

In case you’re not aware, Pearson has sweetheart no-bid style deals all over the country and Politico has taken a look at some of them.

But the POLITICO review found that public contracts and public subsidies — including at least $98.5 million in tax credits from six states — have flowed to Pearson even when the company can’t show its products and services are producing academic gains. – Politico, No Profit Left Behind

 

Stephanie Simon at Politico investigated education publishing and testing giant Pearson in the article, No Profit Left Behind.  North Carolina was the first example.

Excerpt:

“The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for instance, declined to seek competitive bids for a new student data system on the grounds that it would be “in the best interest of the public” to simply hire Pearson, which had done similar work for the state in the past. The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.”

That student data system is known as Powerschool. I’ve written fairly extensively on Pearson and Powerschool problems.

Simon is correct in her passage. Pearson got in without a bid process because of a ‘prior relationship’ and because the tool being used at the time was also Pearson’s.

Flashback to September 2013, a comment left on Stop Common Core NC confirms there was no RFP process done in shifting to Powerschool:

Lady Liberty – let me save you some time. There was no RFP for Powerschool. NCWISE is just a label. The NCWISE uses a product called ESIS – and ESIS is a product developed an maintained by a company called aal. Well back in 2010 aal was purchased by….wait for it…Pearson. Pearson announced the end of support for the ESIS product shortly after the acquisition and essentially “upgraded” the State to Powerschool from ESIS for the same annual cost to the State. Both products sit atop Oracle DB technology.

To be clear, NCWISE was already a “giant funnel into CEDARS.”

 

The commenter was later identified as Phil Emer, Director Technology Planning and Policy at the Friday Institute at NCSU.

View the Pearson 2013 Powerschool Contract Summary.
View the Pearson 2014 Contract Summaries.

Politico Report Mentions North Carolina A Second Time
The mention of the no-bid contract with Pearson for Powerschool wasn’t the only North Carolina mention in the article. Under the section ‘Backlash’, there was this paragraph:

“The industry is changing,” said Mark Edwards, superintendent of the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina. Pearson has hailed Edwards as a partner and a visionary, but he recently discontinued the remaining Pearson curricular product in use in his schools. Edwards said he couldn’t imagine ever again investing in a “one-size-fits-all” curriculum when “there’s so much rich new content coming online all the time.”

Edwards teamed up with former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Heath Morrison to pen an op-ed praising Common Core. Interesting to see the flip-flop from ‘essential’ to ‘one-size-fits-all’.

Morrison originally said he was resigning to take care of his sick mother. That reason raised eyebrows as it came out Morrison was being looked at for misconduct and creating a hostile work environment and a ‘culture of fear‘.  Since his resignation, Morrison has landed a cushy job at McGraw Hill Education as VP of Government Relations.

McGraw Hill is one of Pearson’s top competitors.

Follow the Money
There is this wonderful tool for looking up contracts and spending in North Carolina. It’s called OpenBook.

I looked up Pearson. Records at OpenBook for Pearson went back to 2009-2010 with a cumulative total of $20,199,831.58.  (A copy of this list can be viewed here.)

More information on NC contracts with Pearson located here. Related: NC DPI & Pearson’s Power (School) Trip

 

NC Virtual Charter Schools
Guess who again? Pearson. Via News and Observer:

“N.C. Virtual Academy, which is affiliated with K12, Inc., and N.C. Connections Academy, which is working with education conglomerate Pearson, were the only two that applied. They will each be able to enroll up to 1,500 students in their first year.”

Hat Tip To CommonCoreDiva for the News and Observer link. Check out their very detailed article on Pearson and the Virtual Charters in NC, who notes Pearson also has a contract regarding textbooks; paid for using Race To The Top funds.

In that same textbook contract notice is a curious line: “A pre existing relationship was established in January 2014 for testing materials.”

Wait…What testing materials? These materials?

Read To Achieve and Pearson
Looking at the Fiscal Notes on Read To Achieve from the State Board of Education website, Pearson pops up in two spots:

  1. Requirement 8: Kindergarten Developmental Screening of Early Language, Literacy, and Math Skills  (Pearson’s DIAL-3 Product)
  2. Requirement 10: LEAs Provide Alternative Reading Assessment for Third Graders Who Have a Reading Deficiency (Pearson’s TORC-4 Product)

The cost of these products can be found in their sections as listed above.  It is unclear if these tools were purchased or not.
A Note on Transparency
The Freedom of Information Act request I did for Powerschool over a year ago took me over 6 months to weed through, since NC DPI sent me four copy-paper sized boxes of documents. It was a blizzard of paper.

One of the end result of all my digging was a huge stack of complaints from local districts, superintendents, parents and teachers.   I also had stacks of contracts, revised contracts and amended contracts.

Currently, I am waiting on 3 separate information requests I have sent to DPI.  These requests are anywhere from 2 weeks old to 6 months old.

Some of them are overlapping requests made by the Common Core Academic Standards Review Commission (ASRC), such as the raw data and comments from the “teacher survey“.  Neither the ASRC nor I have received this information yet and the ‘Parent survey‘ is now in the field.

RELATED READING:

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core, NC DPI | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

#DM7 Article: Down The Rabbit Hole With Lamar Alexander

Posted on February 22, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

This is a reposting of my weekly Da Tech Guy article: Down The Rabbit Hole With Lamar Alexander

By A.P. Dillon

With the ESEA Reauthorization looming, Sen. Lamar Alexander has been a central figure. A colleague of mine recently sent me this video of Alexander from 1989. Watch the video, it’s only about 3 minutes long and is an eye-opener.

The video’s description reads:

Lamar Alexander lays out the plan to restructure education at the 11-2-1989 Governors Conference on Education in Wichita, Kansas. The Conference title was “Schools, Goals and the 1990s”. As George Bush, Sr’s Secretary of Education, he implemented education restructuring as America 2000 that specified creation of the New American Schools Development Corporation. He is currently senior Senator from Tennessee and Conference Chair of the Republican Party.

What caught my eye was “New American Schools Development Corporation” and it sent me down a rabbit hole. We’ll use NASDC  to identify New American Schools Development Corporation going forward for the sake of brevity.

NASDC is defunct. Well, sort of. I’ll explain.

I did some Googling and came up with a 1991 C-SPAN video. In the video, it describes NASDC as what now is commonly referred to as a public-private partnership:

“The New American Schools Corporation was created as a private, non-profit corporation dedicated to solicit donations from American businesses for the creation of 535 new experimental schools.”

What happened to those schools, one has to wonder?

I hit the Wayback Machine after coming up empty on finding a website for NASDC. At the Wayback Machine, I located the original site which was started in 1997. The working title for the group was “The New American Schools Network”.

The WayBack Machine’s archive of NASDC included a link to a partner business who did multiple research pieces for NASDC called Rand Corporation. On one lengthy research piece, it should be noted one of the funders was the Ford Corporation.

Of interest are the long list of business ‘contributors‘ for NASDC; many are the same as the ones promoting Common Core.

The list includes IBM’s Lou Gerstner. Gerstner is now Chairman Emeritus of Achieve, Inc. — the outfit who helped write the Common Core. There is a whole other rabbit hole to go down with Gerstner for those who are interested.

I dug a bit further and found that in May of 2004, NASDC merged with another company. That company should be familiar to those fighting Common Core. The company NASDC merged with was The American Institutes for Research or AIR for short.

AIR is now in the high stakes testing world, competing against Pearson in multiple states, including Jeb Bush’s Florida.  In New Mexico, AIR accused officials in the state of bid rigging.

Now, coming full circle, Lamar Alexander’s NASDC merging with AIR is important for another reason. Remember? The Vice President of AIR was selected to oversee the application of ESEA waivers.

 

AP DillonA.P. Dillon resides in the Triangle area of North Carolina and is the founder ofLadyLiberty1885.com. Her current and past writing can also be found at IJ Review, StopCommonCoreNC.org, WatchdogWireNC and WizBang. Her current writing project is a children’s book series.

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core | Comments Off on #DM7 Article: Down The Rabbit Hole With Lamar Alexander

The Common Core Weekend Reads – 02-22-15

Posted on February 22, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

Kasich Runaway CampaignThese are the Common Core Weekend Reads for February 22, 2015.

This is a review of the past week of news on Common Core nationwide and in North Carolina.

Articles are organized by category.

Prior Edition of Weekend Reads: 2-15-15

 

 

NC Academic Standards Review Commission (ASRC) Updates:

NC ASRC Site 

NC UPDATES:

QUOTES OF THE WEEK:

​”Rupert Murdoch (who once claimed ed was a $500 billion industry) and happens to own DIBELS, also decided to raise the bar for children. Under the guise of Common Core, the cut scores for DIBELS have been changed. For instance, pre Common Core a 1st grader was expected to read 40-64 words per minute. Under the Common Core, they are now expected to read 69+ words per minute.

There is no money to be made in labeling children as successful, but labeling them failures has continued to fuel the perceived crisis in education and increases profits.​”

-Lace To The Top,DIBELS Raises Common Core Cut Scores to Show More Students Below Grade Level

LEGISLATIVE/LEGAL:

APUSH: 

POLITICAL/PROTESTS:

HIGHLIGHTED ARTICLES:

THE WEEKEND READS:

TESTING UPDATES:

VIDEO OF THE WEEK:

TWEETS OF THE WEEK:

Posted in Academic Standards Review Commission, Common Core | Tagged | 1 Comment