Testing-driven education means giant corporate profits and 'pineapples don't have sleeves'

In the past week, an unbelievably stupid set of questions on a New York standardized test has made headlines. As a result, the state education commissioner has announced that the questions won't be counted toward students' official scores, but if you care about education, the concerns raised by these test questions can't end with "they don't count in New York." For one thing, these questions have been in use for years, in multiple states. While they won't count in New York, they have counted for many other students'and the teachers whose performance is judged by those students' test scores.

The questions at issue (PDF) were attached to a reading passage parodying the tortoise and the hare. In this one, a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, leaving other animals confused about who they should root for and whether the pineapple has a victory plan'a moose suggests that "The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve." When the race begins, the pineapple just sits there and is ultimately eaten by the animals, leading to the "MORAL: Pineapples don't have sleeves." The students then had to answer ambiguous questions such as why the animals ate the pineapple and which animal was the wisest.

"Pineapples don't have sleeves" is eminently quotable; the silliness of the passage and questions doubtless helped publicize it and get it looked at with a critical eye, but we can't let that same silliness obscure at least three major issues this episode highlights: Testing is big business bringing some corporations enormous profits, the tests that are so much a focus of education policy today are fallible, and the tests themselves are just the leading edge of how testing companies are making their way into the schools and defining the education kids get.

Testing is big business

The education commissioner of Texas, a Republican, recently said that:

'The assessment and accountability regime has become not only a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex. And the reason that you're seeing this move toward the 'common core' is there's a big business sentiment out there that if you're going to spend $600-$700 billion a year in public education, why shouldn't be one big Boeing, or Lockheed-Grumman contract where one company can get it all and provide all these services to schools across the country.'

Texas has been at the forefront of the testing craze; in fact, testing was one of the things George W. Bush brought with him from Texas and pushed to a national level, through No Child Left Behind. In 2000, Pearson Education, the company that produces tests for Texas, "signed a $233 million contract to provide tests for Texas schools, and in 2005 they got another $279 million." In 2011, as Texas was slashing its education budget to the bone, Gov. Rick Perry's administration gave Pearson a $470 million contract "to come up with a new test that will hold Texas schoolchildren to a higher standard at the same time that budget cuts are forcing them into increasingly crowded classrooms."

But Texas isn't alone. Pearson is the company responsible for "pineapples don't have sleeves," and the size of those Texas contracts combined with the fact that the pineapples passage has appeared on tests in New York, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Illinois at a minimum should give you some idea just how lucrative the testing business is for Pearson and other testing firms. In fact, combined state spending on standardized tests went from $423 million in 2001 to $1.1 billion in 2008.

When educational policy is just coincidentally falling in line with something that very directly creates large corporate profits, it's time to stop and consider whether maybe the policy is being driven more by profit than by actual results.

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