Pearson asked me to join him for breakfast. Well, not just me. I got an email inviting teachers on Long Island to a free “Breakfast Briefing” to learn about “Pearson Personalized Learning,” which would help me “turn your traditional student learning into Student-Centered learning by delivering the right curriculum to the right student, at the right time.” I looked at Pearson’s learning products online. I decided that the complimentary breakfast and the chance to annoy them weren’t worth the trip.
Pearson is advertising GradPoint, “an easy-to-use web-based solution for grades 6–12” that “includes over 180 rigorous courses (Core, Electives, AP, Foreign Language, and CTE);” it, “a tablet-based reading intervention for students in grades 4–10” that “has everything your class needs to gain two years of reading growth in a single year;” aimsweb is “the leading assessment and RTI solution in schools today. It is a complete web-based solution for universal screening, progress monitoring, and data management for Grades K-12.”
I thought it was funny that they called their literacy program it, but other than that, I find their advertising to be scary. “Pearson Personalized Learning” is not meant to help schools; instead, it is intended to replace them. And it’s about getting rid of them without proof that their products work or caring about how their products affect schools and how well students learn.
Sir Michael Barber, Saad Rizvi, and John Fallon, all top executives at Pearson, call their plan for the global market “The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes.” Fallon is the CEO of Pearson. He has worked for the company for most of his career. He is behind the push for “efficacy,” a business buzzword that constantly evaluates how well students who use Pearson products are doing. The testing plan tied to Common Core in the United States is neither a mistake nor a sideshow. Common Core is based on tests.
Barber and Rizvi are even more interesting to me than Fallon when understanding how Pearson markets its products. Barber is Pearson’s chief education strategist. He leads Pearson’s three-pronged attack on education worldwide through what Pearson calls efficacy, affordable learning, and the Pearson Knowledge and Research Centre. Efficacy is supposed to be about what works in education based on research done at the research center. Still, everything is organized around Pearson’s goal of “finding business models for affordable schools” that they will sell, especially in “developing areas of the world.”
Suppose you want to know how Pearson plans to run. In that case, you need to look at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm that advises some of the world’s best businesses, governments, and institutions. Michael Barber had a similar job at McKinsey before he joined Pearson. There, he was a partner. Saad Rizvi was a consultant at McKinsey before becoming Pearson’s Senior Vice President for Efficacy and head of its Catalyst for Education team. One hundred of the top 150 companies in the world are clients of McKinsey & Company. It has advised the German government, the Bank of England, and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
McKinsey’s main job is to help companies stay profitable by getting rid of subsidies, selling assets, moving production, and letting people go. McKinsey has made mistakes in the past. Jeff Skilling, the disgraced CEO of Enron, and Rajat K. Gupta, convicted of insider trading, were both once employees. Advising Time Warner on its terrible decision to merge with AOL, General Motors on how to compete with Japanese automakers, and AT&T not to worry about cellphones were also big mistakes. A top partner at McKinsey brushed off these failures by saying, “We give advice, but it’s up to management to use all the information they get and make their own choices. Not to say that I did this because McKinsey told me to.”
I think it’s fair to ask if we want the same business model that led to the Eron scam and other corporate disasters to be used to run American schools and if we want McKinsey’s no-fault approach to advising local, and state, and federal governments on educational policy.
At the moment, Pearson’s Affordable Learning division focuses on developing markets in Africa and India. Still, it is the model for all of Pearson’s businesses worldwide. It includes advanced (South Africa), which sponsors a blended learning chain called Spark Schools; Omega, a chain of 38 private schools in Ghana; Bridge International Academies in Kenya; and Zaya, an educational technology and service company contracted to run 27 schools; Suiksha, a chain of pre-schools; Experifun, which sells science learning products; Avanti, which helps students prepare for tests after school; and Village Capital (Edupreneurs), which promotes private education. The description for advanced’s Spark Schools gives an idea of what Pearson is trying to do in Africa, India, and around the world: underprice the market to disrupt existing educational institutions so Pearson companies can move in, take over, and eat up profits.
“SPARK Schools has big plans to shake up the South African education system by bringing a new way of learning to the rest of Africa. In the SPARK Schools model, students divide their time between digital content that gets harder as they learn and best-practice classroom interaction. The blended model is also important because it lets advance offer high-quality education at a price that most people can afford.” It will “build eight low-cost blended learning schools in the next three years and more than 60 in the next ten.”
Pearson is also combining with other companies to grow its markets and power. In December 2013, Pearson agreed to buy Grupo Multi, a company in Brazil that teaches English. This was done to speed up growth in Latin America.
Pearson takes advantage of the fact that Third World countries are eager to modernize to get a foot in the door and act without being watched or regulated. About sixty percent of Pearson’s sales have been in the United States up until now. However, the company’s growth has stopped in this country because fewer first-year college students are enrolling, and the textbook market is slowing down. Sales also went down in Great Britain because of changes to the curriculum. The company spent about $200 million getting ready for its push into digital markets in other countries.
Because of these problems, a rating service called Moody’s Investors Service changed its opinion of Pearson from stable to negative. “We are changing the outlook to negative because Pearson’s debt protection metrics are likely to get much worse in the fiscal year 2013,” she says. Gunjan Dixit, an Assistant Vice President-Analyst at Moody’s, says, “This view reflects Pearson’s tough trading conditions, especially in North America and the U.K., the higher-than-expected costs of restructuring, certain start-up costs for new contracts in higher education, and increased provisions for returns.” Moody says that Pearson’s most significant problems in the future will be:
The financial health of U.S. states and international government funding bodies in its schools and higher education businesses.
Challenging market conditions in the U.S. education market.
The riskiness of its Financial Times group.
The rapid shift of trade book publishing to electronic formats.
Pearson stockholders were so unhappy with the company’s financial performance that they protested against high executive bonuses in April 2014.
In the U.S., Pearson has other problems that could be caused by too much growth, the inability to deliver what was promised, and possible secret contracts. In Florida, Pearson Education was to blame because at least a dozen school districts had to stop giving online tests this April because students had trouble signing in. Other problems included slowness when students tried to download test questions or send in answers and a warning message that said students should tell their teacher or proctor about a problem that didn’t exist. Pam Stewart, in charge of education for the state, told Pearson that the “failure is inexcusable. Students and teachers in Florida work too hard to be distracted by these unnecessary and avoidable tech problems.
Pearson said that a third-party hosting service was to blame for the problems with the tests. But Pearson has had issues with computerized tests in Florida and other states in the past few years. Wyoming fined Pearson $5.1 million in 2011 because of problems with the software and then went back to using paper tests. In April, Pearson had to admit that “some of our online testing services were sometimes down” and apologize for that. This time, a different subcontractor was to blame.
In the meantime, the American Institutes for Research is trying to stop Pearson from getting a big contract to make tests for the Common Core. While the complaint is brought in New Mexico, it has national ramifications. The contract is for making test items, giving tests, reporting test results, and analyzing student performance for states that are part of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. PARCC is one of the two main groups making tests based on the common-core standards. The plaintiff says that the way the contract was given to Pearson, the only bidder, was illegal because it was set up to help Pearson.
Parents and teachers in New York State are angry that teachers and building administrators have to sign statements saying they won’t talk about or share questions from new Pearson high-stakes tests aligned with the “Common Core.” On the State Education website, questions from past “Regents” exams for high school students were posted in the past. Now, Pearson, which New York State pays $32 million to make the tests, wants the state to pay an extra $8 million so that the questions can be posted.
Save Our Schools NZ is a New Zealand group against how national education departments use PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) tests and rankings. They say, “Pisa’s three-year assessment cycle has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, even though research shows that lasting changes in education practice take decades, not a few years.” Starting in 2015, Pearson will be in charge of making the PISA tests.