Pearson Education Group is making big money from creating standardized tests, writes Gail Collins. She says that Pearson, the world's largest for-profit education business, has a $32 million five-year contract to produce New York standardized tests. This is small potatoes compared to the profits that it is making in other states. "Pearson has a five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars."
Pearson is just one part of the picture, albeit a part about the size of Mount Rushmore. Its lobbyists include the guy who served as the top White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.
An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer.
If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a diploma via the good old G.E.D. The General Educational Development test program used to be operated by the nonprofit American Council on Education, but last year the Council and Pearson announced that they were going into a partnership to redevelop the G.E.D. — a nationally used near-monopoly — as a profit-making enterprise.
Apt. 11d 
I actually worked for a while developing standardized testing questions. Imagine sitting in a meeting where people are developing a question about pineapples (the example in the Collin’s article) and you’re thinking: “Great, my child has Asperger’s. He always fails any question that asks about anyone’s motivation for doing anything. Imagine how well he’ll do on that!” I raised this point several times but no one who worked on the testing panel appeared to ever have considered how Theory of Mind plays into these evaluations, and what’s really being tested. (Might be interesting to write about that!)
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This is the secret behind the war on teachers and the attacks on public education. Why pay trained professionals to provide services in your community when you can pour buckets of money into corporations that need the double-digit profits they can extract from the public!
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Because crappy competition isn’t any worse than a monopoly and might be better.
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Anyway, around here for-profit education is mostly charter schools and that’s why I support them. If the incumbent education system can’t suck less than a greedy corporate monster (or a bunch of delusional hippies—that seems to be the other leading charter school source), then it very much deserved to be attacked.
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This is rent seeking, right, instigated by a government bureaucracy?
I can’t speak to the schools in MH’s neck of the woods, but there’s no question that our monopoly is better than crappy for-profit education (including in 90% of the charters).
The for-profits colleges have disgustingly higher default rates that they try to justify with convoluted reasoning. Is there one that passes the smell test as a business (if it wasn’t being subsidized by government on the backs of people taking loans)? A real question — is there an “effective” for-profit college, by the measurable that conservatives like to use?
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I was thinking of secondary education. Of course, the nicer suburbs have very nice public school because they attract residents by competing among themselves over school quality. The poorer suburbs around here are usually running their schools trying to stay one step ahead of a state takeover.
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