News reports have been hammering our brains for the last
year or so about how Texas must cut 3-to-5 Billion (with a capital
“B”) dollars from “Education.” Of course, there's rarely any specifics about where these cuts are made. The cuts are just made and then left to the agencies and school districts to figure out how to deal with it.
At the same time that this budgeting
fiasco has been going on, Texas has gone through some highly
public battles with the school board over textbook rewrites and the
state embarked on a major overhaul of their standardized testing
system. So, out with the TAKS and in with the “more rigorous”
STAAR and EOC (End-Of-Course) Examination system. As well, add in the
massive spending involved in an attempt to set up a state-wide online
curriculum and testing system. Through it all, one name keeps popping up:
Pearson Education.
You may wonder who that is? According to Abby Rapoport in The Texas Observer, “Pearson
is a London-based mega-corporation that owns everything from the
Financial Times to Penguin Books, and also dominates the business of
educating American children.”
In fact, The Texas Observer did an outstanding job of laying out some of the details and
reasons why Texas taxpayers (and basically anyone in other states
where Pearson is found) should be alarmed at their
lobbying efforts. I recommend everybody read the article in full.
My conclusion is that the people's call for “privatizing” the
school system seems to have been misconstrued intentionally into a massive
intertwining of government funds (meaning: TAXPAYER DOLLARS) with a
massive FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION in a way that could only make
Halliburton smile with understanding.
Calls for privatizing the
education system are rarely demands to funnel tax money into the
coffers of private corporations. Calls for privatization are calls
to remove government from the system, thus returning all tax monies
to the individual citizens, and allowing the free market to function.
The individual citizens decide to whom and where to funnel the
money...or not.
That is privatization.
What the Texas
Education Agency, Texas legislators, and the hundreds of for-profit
corporations, like Pearson, are doing is a bastardization of the
concept mostly done on the down-low while everyone in the media is
distracted by the ridiculous nit-picky backbiting at the State
Board of Education over what goes in and out of Texas textbooks.
You
might ask why would I pick on Pearson so strongly. Is it just
because The Texas Observer says I should?
Well, I did some digging just to see
where our tax money was actually going in terms of “Education”
and specifically in regards to Pearson. This was accomplished by
visiting texastransparency.org which bills itself with this sub-line:
“Open government is accountable government: a clear look at your
tax dollars at work in Texas.” Unfortunately, it may be “clear,”
but it most definitely is not easy to maneuver. They have the site
rigged up in such a way that the information is there but in terms of
ease of access – frustrating. The drop-down stair-step approach to
the searches and the slow searching script and the unavailability of
multiple searching within one session make it very difficult to get a
straight and “clear” set of numbers. The numbers don't necessarily always
quite add up either. Let me explain...
I first decided to search by “Vendor.”
I typed “Pearson” into the search engine. It brought up all
these as separate vendors within the system:
Pearson Ed/Prentice Hall
NCS Pearson
NCS Pearson Inc
NCS Pearson D/B/A Harland
Technology/Scantron
NCS Pearson Inc (yes, again, which
makes no sense)
NCS Pearson Incorporated
Pearson Education
Pearson Education Inc
Pearson Evaluation Systems
Pearson NCS Inc
I had to Google each of them to confirm
it, but, yes, each one of these is the same company. I have to suspect that there is some shenanigans going on that allows a surface-level look through funding to miss the various payments going to the same corporate entity over the years because of different naming conventions per department. I am not even
going to get into the amount of grant money that gets poured into the
Pearson Foundation which is also an active part of all of this
curriculum and standards development process. Maybe another time.
I'm going to round these big numbers
for ease of discussion, but I did a vendor search for “Pearson
Ed/Prentice Hall” and all it showed was a 2008 TEA expenditure of
$32 million. Whoa. That's a big number. But in terms of the Texas
Budget, where 2011 Fiscal Year salary expenditures are $67 million,
it isn't shocking.
So, I ran a vendor search for “Pearson
Education Inc” and it showed expenditures from 2008-2012 of $54,500
and none of it went to the TEA. At this point, I'm thinking that
maybe The Texas Observer is overblowing the issue. Then,
however, I did the vendor search for “Pearson Education” which
showed a 2010 fiscal year expenditure of $122 million! Almost twice
the total for the entire salary budget in 2011! The 2011 and 2012
payments to Pearson Education are $49 million and $68 million
respectively.
Now that's a lot of money.
I was
curious about comparing numbers with other vendors which means I had
to go search by Agency and then scroll page by page alphabetically to
get a handle on it. It is very inconsistent as to how the money is
distributed, but it falls under the category of “Professional
Services and Fees.” Total expenditures for that category in 2010:
$176 million; 2011: $174 million; and 2012: $242 million. In a time
of a budget crisis where the state is supposed to be cutting $3-to-$5
billion from the education budget, somehow the “Professional
Service and Fees” category jumps from $174 million to $242 million.
I have no idea why and it would take someone with more ability to
maneuver deeply into the minutiae of the budget to fully explain
that.
Let's look at some of these totals that I can get a handle on.
I tackled just one other category, that of "Intergovernmental Payments" -- a category that made me go "Huh?". In 2010, the total of "Intergovernmental
Payments" was $24 billion! Of that amount, $514 million was allotted
for textbooks. Of that amount, everyone got hundreds, thousands, or
maybe a couple of million of dollars each except for McGraw-Hill and
Pearson. McGraw-Hill got $148 million and Pearson got $122 million.
This is just textbooks. Under “Professional Service and Fees,”
Pearson got another $90 million, something called Educational Testing
Service got $20 million, and The Grow Network/McGraw-Hill got $4.5
million. Nobody else even came close. Just in these 2 categories...
Pearson walked away with a lottery jackpot of well over $200
million in 2010.
Looking at the current year, 2011,
Pearson was paid $87 million from the $174 million total budgeted for
“Professional Service and Fees” and they received $49 million
from the $119 million budgeted for textbooks. The next closest are
Houghton Mifflin with $25 million and McGraw-Hill with $27 million.
Pearson also inexpicably received an extra $3.5 million under the
“NCS Pearson” name. However, that payout only shows up when you run an "Agency" search and scroll through the pages. It does not show up if
you run a "Vendor" search. All other competitors aren't even close.
In total, that means in 2011 Pearson is being paid a minimum of
$139.5 million.
And remember, as The Texas Observer
correctly observed, it is Pearson who “holds a five-year contract
worth nearly $500 million to create and administer exams. If students
should fail those tests, Pearson offers a series of remedial-learning
products to help them pass. Meanwhile, kids are likely to use
textbooks from Pearson-owned publishing houses like Prentice Hall and
Pearson Longman. Students who want to take virtual classes may well
find themselves in a course subcontracted to Pearson. And if the
student drops out, Pearson partners with the American Council on
Education to offer the GED exam for a profit.”
Essentially, they control the creation
of the Standards, the creation of the testing materials and
mechanism of testing, the test preparation materials, and then they even control the
GED prep and testing materials for those students who don't pass.
And we, as taxpayers, are okay with
this?
I think it's time for the people to
stand up and stop fixating on whether a science teacher is allowed to
utter the word “God” in a classroom and look to the real problem
here...and it goes back down the money trail to the lobbyists and our
elected officials who are listening to the loudest voice with the
deepest pockets. If we are going to "privatize" the educational system, then damn well "privatize" it and get rid of the State control. However, if we are going to maintain a free public education system financed through public dollars, I think we need to pressure our officials to stop creating a defacto monopoly system for-profit from our tax dollars. As a parent of a child in that system, I expect that in a time of financial crisis that the place we would stop the flow of money would be to these corporations and redirect it to those who are in the trenches and actually teaching our children.
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