A Very Pricey Pineapple
By GAIL COLLINS
Let’s talk about talking pineapples.
Actually (spoiler alert!) I’m going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way
to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was
driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read
about “privatization of education?” It’s hell. A pineapple, on the other
hand, is something everybody likes. It’s a symbol of hospitality. Its
juice is said to remove warts. And you really cannot beat the
talking-fruit angle.
This month, New York eighth graders took a standardized English test
that included a story called “The Hare and the Pineapple,” in which
you-know-what challenges a hare to a race. The forest animals suspect
that since the pineapple can’t move, it must have some clever scheme to
ensure victory, and they decide to root against the bunny. But when the
race begins, the pineapple just sits there. The hare wins. Then the
animals eat the pineapple. The end.
There were many complaints from the eighth graders, who had to answer
questions like: “What would have happened if the animals had decided to
cheer for the hare?” They were also supposed to decide whether the
animals ate the pineapple because they were hungry, excited, annoyed or
amused. (That part bothered me a lot. We’ve got a talking pineapple here, people. You don’t just go and devour it for having delusions of grandeur.)
Teachers, parents and education experts all chimed in. Nobody liked the
talking pineapple questions. The Daily News, which broke the story,
corralled “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings, who concluded that “the
plot details are so oddly chosen that the story seems to have been
written during a peyote trip.”
The state education commissioner, John King, announced that the
questions would not count in the official test scores. There was no
comment from the test author. That would be Pearson, the world’s largest
for-profit education business, which has a $32 million five-year
contract to produce New York standardized tests.
Now — finally — we have tumbled into my central point. We have turned
school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for
whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a
five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers
nearly half-a-billion dollars.
This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard
about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind
was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would
provide monster profits for the private business sector?
Me neither.
It’s not just the tests. No Child Left Behind has created a system of public-funded charter schools,
a growing number of which are run by for-profit companies. Some of them
are completely online, with kids getting their lessons at home via
computer. The academic results can be abysmal, but on the plus side —
definitely no classroom crowding issues.
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.
“We’re a capitalist system, but this is worrisome,” said New York Education Commissioner King.
The Obama administration has been trying to tackle the astronomical
costs of 50 different sets of standardized tests by funding efforts by
states to develop shared models — a process you will be stunned to hear
is being denounced by conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas as “a
federal takeover of public schools.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has also begun giving out waivers from
the requirement that children in failing public schools be given
after-school tutoring. Idea sounded great. Hardly helped the kids at
all. But no for-profit tutoring company was left behind.
The pushback against privatization isn’t easy. We’re now in a world in
which decisions about public education involve not just parents and
children and teachers, but also big profits or losses for the private
sector. Change the tests, or the textbooks, or the charters, or even the rules for teacher certification, and you change somebody’s bottom line.
It’s a tough world out there. Ask the talking pineapple.
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