Last month, a high school student in Warren, New Jersey, finished taking the state's mandatory PARCC test and did what everybody does after taking a test: She talked to her friends about it. This being 2015, her conversation took the form of a tweet, which referenced one of the test questions.
Thirty miles away, alarm bells rang in the Manhattan headquarters of the Pearson Corp., owners of the PARCC test: The tweet had "initiated a Priority 1 Alert for an item breach," a school official later wrote. Corporate officials swung into action, contacting their partners in the New Jersey Department of Education, with whom they have a $108 million contract.
That night, the Warren school district's testing coordinator received a call from a state official informing her about the "breach" and requesting that the student be suspended. The next morning, Warren school superintendent Elizabeth Jewett e-mailed her colleagues about the incident:
As Jewett predicted, the spying revelations added fuel to the fire for parents and educators who were already upset at the state's cozy relationship with Pearson, and their joint agenda to implement a mandatory testing regime in line with the Common Core standards that have reshaped schools across the country with virtually no democratic discussion about their educational merits.
Pearson's online stalking is not only creepy--it reveals many of the most threatening features of the corporate takeover of public education: the tight partnership between corporations and government officials; the use of intellectual property claims to stifle the free exchange of ideas that is a vital part of learning; and the suppression of the rights of students, parents and teachers to resist the growing emphasis on testing "data" to measure education and knowledge.
Welcome to the Education-Industrial Complex.
"The entire education sector now represents nearly 9 percent of the U.S. GDP," gushed an advertisement for a 2013 investor conference titled "Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies." The ad continued: "Merger and acquisition activity in for-profit education last year surpassed activity at the peak of the Internet boom."
Six years earlier, Jonathan Kozol warned in Harper's magazine about the coming siege on public education. Quoting a prospectus given to him by a friend on Wall Street, Kozol wrote, "'The education industry represents...the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control' and 'the largest market opportunity' since health care services were privatized during the 1970s."
Just as the health care industry encompasses a wide array of fields in which capital can find ways to mine profit out of our basic need for health and wellness--from pharmaceuticals to hospitals to the especially egregious example of insurance--so the education sector contains a variety of sub-industries.
Thirty miles away, alarm bells rang in the Manhattan headquarters of the Pearson Corp., owners of the PARCC test: The tweet had "initiated a Priority 1 Alert for an item breach," a school official later wrote. Corporate officials swung into action, contacting their partners in the New Jersey Department of Education, with whom they have a $108 million contract.That night, the Warren school district's testing coordinator received a call from a state official informing her about the "breach" and requesting that the student be suspended. The next morning, Warren school superintendent Elizabeth Jewett e-mailed her colleagues about the incident:
The DOE informed us that Pearson is monitoring all social media during PARCC testing. I have to say that I find that a bit disturbing–and if our parents were concerned before about a conspiracy with all of the student data, I am sure I will be receiving more letters of refusal once this gets out.At the time, the Jewett didn't even know that Pearson was doing far more than "monitoring" social media. Because the student's Twitter handle didn't involve her name, Pearson got Twitter to turn over her private personal information, on the grounds that she had violated the testing company's "intellectual property."
As Jewett predicted, the spying revelations added fuel to the fire for parents and educators who were already upset at the state's cozy relationship with Pearson, and their joint agenda to implement a mandatory testing regime in line with the Common Core standards that have reshaped schools across the country with virtually no democratic discussion about their educational merits.
Pearson's online stalking is not only creepy--it reveals many of the most threatening features of the corporate takeover of public education: the tight partnership between corporations and government officials; the use of intellectual property claims to stifle the free exchange of ideas that is a vital part of learning; and the suppression of the rights of students, parents and teachers to resist the growing emphasis on testing "data" to measure education and knowledge.
Welcome to the Education-Industrial Complex.
"The entire education sector now represents nearly 9 percent of the U.S. GDP," gushed an advertisement for a 2013 investor conference titled "Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies." The ad continued: "Merger and acquisition activity in for-profit education last year surpassed activity at the peak of the Internet boom."
Six years earlier, Jonathan Kozol warned in Harper's magazine about the coming siege on public education. Quoting a prospectus given to him by a friend on Wall Street, Kozol wrote, "'The education industry represents...the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control' and 'the largest market opportunity' since health care services were privatized during the 1970s."
Just as the health care industry encompasses a wide array of fields in which capital can find ways to mine profit out of our basic need for health and wellness--from pharmaceuticals to hospitals to the especially egregious example of insurance--so the education sector contains a variety of sub-industries.
by SocialistWorker.org | Read more:
Image: uncredited
