Friday, April 19, 2013

Education Publishers Have a 21st Century Business Plan

Diane Ravitch:

A teacher in upstate New York wrote me to say that the state English language arts test for 8th grade (written by Pearson) contained a passage that his students had read a week earlier—in a Pearson 8th grade textbook! The story is “Why Leaves Turn Color in Fall,” by Diane Ackerman. The story appears on page 540 of the Pearson textbook.

Moral of the story: if you want your students to succeed on the state tests written by Pearson, be sure to buy the Pearson textbooks.

Also, if you want to know how Pearson's test-scoring computer will score your essays, you'd better use Pearson's digital curriculum (eventually).

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