Pearson: The Evil Empire?
(Editor: www.thereportcard.org Pearson, the $9 Billion educational publishing giant stands to make $ Billions on testing and other Common Core related requirements. Pearson has been accused of bid rigging and monopolistic practices. It becomes clearer daily that Common Core has become a giant cow that feeds politically connected cronies. It is becoming clearer daily that Common Core has more to do with bureaucratic power and money for Common Core providers and little to do with educating American school children. The educational testing market alone is estimated to be $2.6 Billion. No wonder Pearson and others are in a feeding frenzy. No wonder a recent Gallup Poll shows that 60% of Americans oppose Common Core).
By Caroline Porter Wall Street Journal
As states race to implement the Common Core academic standards, companies are fighting for a slice of the accompanying testing market, expected to be worth billions of dollars in coming years.
That jockeying has brought allegations of bid-rigging in one large pricing agreement involving 11 states—the latest hiccup as the math and reading standards are rolled out—while in roughly three dozen others, education companies are battling for contracts state by state.
Mississippi’s education board in September approved an emergency $8 million contract to Pearson PLC for tests aligned with Common Core, sidestepping the state’s contract-review board, which had found the transaction illegal because it failed to meet state rules regarding a single-source bid.
When Maryland officials were considering a roughly $60 million proposal to develop computerized testing for Common Core that month, state Comptroller Peter Franchot also objected that Pearson was the only bidder. “How are we ever going to know if taxpayers are getting a good deal if there is no competition?” the elected Democrat asked, before being outvoted by a state board in approving the contract.
Mississippi and Maryland are two of the states that banded together in 2010, intending to look for a testing-service provider together. The coalition of 11 states plus the District of Columbia hoped joining forces would result in a better product at a lower price, but observers elsewhere shared some of Mr. Franchot’s concerns.
The bidding process, which both states borrowed from a similar New Mexico contract, is now the subject of a lawsuit in that state by a Pearson competitor.
For decades, states essentially set their own academic standards, wrote their own curricula and designed their own tests. In a bid partly to help the U.S. education system keep up with overseas rivals, state leaders began working on shared benchmarks.
With financial and policy incentives from the Obama administration, 45 states and D.C. initially adopted Common Core. But the standards have faced pushback from some parents and conservatives who say they represent federal overreach. Two states have pulled out and are writing their own standards.
Still, most states are implementing Common Core and accompanying testing this year. The sheer size of that effort and this year’s deadline heighten the stakes and exacerbate the difficulty of hiring test suppliers.
“Winning the policy battle was not even half the battle,” said Michael McShane, a research fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who is skeptical about Common Core. “It was more like 10%, and 90% of the battle is implementation.”
The $2.46 billion-a-year U.S. testing market is seeing more competition beyond the three traditional powers of Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. and McGraw-Hill Education CTB, according to Simba Information, a market-research firm. While McGraw-Hill recently got a $72 million contract for assessment services with several states, meanwhile, midsize vendors such as AIR Assessment and Educational Testing Service are winning big states like Florida and California.
Amplify, the education subsidiary of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, also provides assessment products.
Some experts say legacy companies are best able to meet states’ demands and offer familiar relationships during this period of flux. At the same time, the move to new standards coincided with a switch to digital and online learning that has forced vendors to rethink their strategies.
Maryland’s contract with Pearson was built off the one in New Mexico, which took the lead in writing the bidding documents for a four-year, roughly $26 million contract that applied to that state. But other states in the coalition were meant to copy the contract and competition, meaning its full value could balloon to $1 billion.
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