Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Parsing Pearson After Politico Expose

Pearson has been in the news with a Politico piece-  promoted by Diane Ravitch: A MUST-READ: Stephanie Simon in Politico: A Blockbuster Report on Pearson’s Money Machine

We had a heads up the other day with some comments from inside the Pearson machine that were shared with some people in Change the Stakes. There are a few pdfs with some of the comments pointed to below. I know some of these comments don't make sense without the documents but I am not going to post these but will send them to anyone interested- normsco@gmail.com.

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Usually most of the things they say on their internal web site are either dull and unimportant, or shrouded in their lingo (words like "efficacy," etc.) but here we have shilpi giving out talking points, about a politico article that's going to be published today about them.
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Here we have them talking about "lessons learned" from the parcc
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Here is something from January 21, 2015; This is their hilarious response / talking points regarding the recent fortune magazine article, called 'everyone hates pearson,' -- they completely dodge any questions about lausd and their so called charitable foundation, and they deny that barber wants global standards (of course he does) and they go on about how they are the most accurate assessment system ever!
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Maybe you've seen this one, ...but it's straight from the horse's mouth about how they are purposely dumbing down the children, I mean, they say it right there, "this material has been totally re-written, not repurposed from existing materials" and, get a load of the math problem on page two, where "marta" has a glass full of pieces of gravel VARYING IN SIZE (varying in size!!!!) and yet she has to GUESS how many will fill the glass, I mean, THIS IS NOT MATH, this is not rounding numbers, it is absolutely designed to confuse young children and make them feel that there are no correct, exact answers that can be found.  They want kids to do it by a "best-fit" line.  And with algebra, they're teaching it all wrong, they're having the kids move all the scientific formulas around first, solving for just one variable, before plugging in numbers.  That's an extra step you don't need to do, and makes problem-solving very time-consuming. They apparently don't want you to be able to plug in numbers directly into formulas written the way they're supposed to be written in the standard format.

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