Let’s say you’re in the leadership of a screwed up country where the quality of life for your citizens is not very good. Basic services are intermittent and life is chaotic or worse. One strategy to take their mind off of that, and the likelihood they’ll start to blame you for it, is to constantly villainize others. The U.S. and Israel play this part in the Middle East, for instance. It’s a tried and true strategy because…it works!
That’s pretty much what seems to be happening here in the education sector with regard to Pearson.* In case you’ve been living in a cave, Pearson is a large multinational publishing conglomerate that does a lot of work in the U.S. ed sector. You probably haven’t heard that they’re great, because only people paid to say so say that. But you may well have heard that they’re awful, venal, corrupt, greedy, mendacious, you name it. Actually, you can’t turn around in this sector, or turn on Twitter, without bumping into someone braying about how Pearson is doing this or that horrible thing. And, yes, sometimes these things are genuinely bad acts. Everyone is frustrated with testing errors**, for instance, and there are certainly some legitimate concerns around data privacy. But most of what you hear is overwrought if not downright ridiculous – you really can’t hang school finance on Pearson. No Child Left Behind, not really their doing. Common Core? The old system was actually better for them and other large vendors. Current push to maintain federal law on testing – civil rights groups are pushing that along with a broad coalition.
In fact, when you think about the top threats facing public education these days, for example wildly uneven quality, pervasive mediocrity, flight of the affluent, lack of common signals for quality, an aging population, unsustainable cost structure, lack of choice and customization for students and parents, and more none of those issues have much to do with Pearson (or most other private sector interests in and around the education sector). It’s almost as though everyone carrying on about Pearson would rather talk about that than all the more serious issues facing schools – most of which Pearson doesn’t have much to do with, positive or negative.
If we’re going to obsessively focus on Pearson then let’s at least talk about some real issues – for example the lack of competition and innovation in the assessment industry and the long-term impact of that? And whether a large corporation can really do innovation or just absorb innovative companies and dull their sharp edges? Sir Michael Barber is working hard to help redesign Pearson in some new ways, but is it doable? Can a market with a few dominant players move toward the kind of frequent but light touch and non-instrusive kinds of assessment that are better for kids and teachers, and if not what’s the best way to disrupt that industry? Those are real questions. Pearson as the biggest villain in the sector is just a misdirection that obscures far more than it reveals.***
*I carry no particular brief for Pearson and we have not worked with them at BW. Meanwhile, we do work with some of those trying to disrupt the assessment industry. I also know people who work there, obviously, and they’re of course nothing like the stereotypes. Financially, Pearson paid me to keynote a conference they were sponsoring and discuss the evolving landscape of teacher preparation in late 2013. I had fun, so perhaps I’m biased? And I once did an interview about the assessment landscape with a consulting company that was doing strategic planning for Pearson given the client description – I was paid for my time (given the description of the company they shouldn’t have paid me if I couldn’t figure out who it was). In any event, I also have watched Pearson work from a few vantage points in the public and non-profit sector and – spoiler alert – for the most part they’re no better or worse than the other big players. They’re just bigger. I do wish they’d stop buying interesting companies and making them less interesting, but all the big players do that.
**Not everything that looks like an error is one, however.
***It also creates a distorting effect on our conversations in this field. Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who is rarely accused of being in cahoots with the reform crowd, elected to use Pearson for a project she’s doing on performance assessments for teachers. She described Pearson as having, “the experience, capacity, and infrastructure to deploy the [new assessment] to scale quickly, so that the field would not have to wait to see the benefits in the classroom.” I don’t know if that’s right in this case but it sounds sensible enough. Nonetheless, she’s since been trying to distance herself see here and here. Even with the experience, capacity, and infrastructure, or perhaps because of it, Pearson’s taboo. And, of course, for those trying to follow along with the new assessment discussion of Pearson’s role overshadowed most discussion about whether the new test was a good one or what kind of applicability it had. It turned into a real circus in New York (for a variety of reasons). Maybe we can do better?
The link in the TIME story to the “memo” is wrong.
Here’s how Pearson works in one suburban high school district in northern California: we are required to map out what we’ll teach (according to state standards), regularly check in with students to see how we’re all doing (assessments both formative and summative), teach relatively the same content and skills at roughly the same time (alignment/pacing), and to be held accountable for all of that (doing our job). Pearson comes in because we cannot get all this done (we’ve tried) with any real quality (we’re not psychometricians). In a global 21st century, where standards are now expected to be internationally benchmarked, where teachers must prepare students for career and college outside of their immediate community, we need some help knowing what material to engage with, and what skills might actually be marketable in a rapidly-changing economy. Teachers balk and want more autonomy in their classrooms, however, as an instructional coach and teacher myself, I see those arguments stemming mainly from a fear of the unknown. Teachers want to teach their favorite moments of history, their favorite novels, the types of writing at which they themselves excelled. They want to assign ‘participation points’ but are unable to explain where a student is on a spectrum of mastery of a skill. Adopting a curriculum like Pearson means that a teacher and her students can now be compared to other students nationally, and that scares some teachers. Honestly, sometimes it scares me–I’ve never been held accountable for my students’ growth until now and I’m not sure how I measure up, nor how well they will, nor how the measurements will affect my career. It’s new. But I do know that Pearson isn’t to blame. I have worked in poor urban districts as well, and I’ve seen first-hand how ‘individualized instruction’ can rear its ugly head in the form of racist and classist dumbing down of curriculum for students who ‘are struggling.’ I much prefer a similar curriculum for all, where students who struggle get more support, rather than less education.
Jane … Three questions. (1) Do the Pearson resources include support for differentiating instruction to meet the needs of particular students? (2) Has the introduction of the Pearson resources increased constructive discussion among teachers at the same grade level and between teachers at different grade levels? (3) Any feedback from parents and kids?
Dear Jane,
Tell this to the Finns, for example. Looks like the world’s leading country in quality of education does not need Pearson at all… Yes, I know the situation is different everywhere and that we’re not Finland (or Czech Republic, or Slovenia or…). Still, different thinking may be what we need most, not more superficially comforting corporatist “fixes”.