The Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s school board, will vote Wednesday on whether to award a subsidiary of the international Pearson corporation a $17 million dollar, five-year contract to create and administer a digital version of the SHSAT, the standardized test used for admission to the city’s specialized high schools.
The use of a standardized test as the sole metric for admission to these schools, as mandated by state law, fails to accord with basic psychometric principles according to such experts as the American Education Research Association and the National Academy of Sciences, not to mention the testing publishers themselves.
The SHSAT in particular has been called out for showing a strong gender bias against girls and for contributing to the segregation of the specialized schools, whose student bodies fail to mirror the city’s racial and ethnic demographics.
But regardless of where panel members stand on the highly-charged issues of single-test admissions or even school segregation, they should unequivocally vote no on this contract. To do otherwise would be to abdicate their responsibilities as stewards of the taxpayers’ money.
Pearson has a long record demonstrating its unfitness for even a dime of our budget. It has had many technical issues with erroneous scoring, online service disruptions, an extensive data breach, and more. Its poor history led New York State to drop it as the vendor for the annual tests administered to the state’s 3rd-8th graders, joining several other states who similarly cut ties with the company.
If you want to know why, consider some of Pearson’s errors, lapses, and misdeeds, as chronicled on Leonie Haimson’s NYC Public School Parents blog:
- In 2012, the NYS state exam produced by Pearson featured more than 30 errors, with faulty questions and problems with translation and scoring. One of the reading passages was so ludicrous it was featured on John Oliver.
- In 2013, Pearson’s state exams featured crass, commercial product placements as well as reading passages lifted from Pearson textbooks. According to Kathleen Porter Magee of the conservative Fordham Institute, Pearson was abusing its monopoly power in a way that “threatens the validity of the English Language Arts (ELA) scores for thousands of New York students and raises serious questions about the overlap between Pearson’s curriculum and assessment divisions.”
- The Pearson Charitable Foundation paid a $7.7 million fine after the state attorney general found they had broken state laws. The company also had to pay $75 million in damages plus costs to settle a lawsuit over price-fixing.
- Pearson was found to have made mistakes in scoring the NYC Gifted and Talented tests. Not once, but twice.
- In 2015, it was discovered that Pearson was monitoring the social media of students who criticized their NJ state exams.
- In 2018, Pearson’s lax security practices led to one of the largest student data breaches in history, involving probably millions of students, including many in New York. The FBI alerted Pearson to the breach in March 2019, but they didn’t tell anyone, including the schools or the students until months later. Eventually, Pearson was fined $1 million by the SEC for misleading investors about the breach.
- Altogether, Pearson has been subjected to dozens of investigations for discrimination against its employees on grounds of race, disability, gender, age, etc.
Given this record, what makes the Department of Education think that Pearson is capable of developing, scoring, and administering a reliable exam?
The decision in front of the Panel now is akin to being asked to approve a contract with Enron or Boeing. Let’s say that instead of a test, the city needed a plane and Boeing submitted a bid.
Knowing of that company’s history of price overruns, of fudging inspections, of doors blowing off mid-flight, would the Panel throw up its hands and say, “Of the two bids we received, it seems we’ll just have to give them our millions”? We would expect them to look extra hard for another vendor, or maybe seek a creative solution for extending the life of the plane the city already uses.
Honoring Pearson with a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract would be a highly irresponsible use of the people’s money. The Panel members should act with integrity and vote no on the Pearson contract.
Karmen is the parent of two graduates of the New York City public schools. She is a co-founder of NYC Opt Out, a grassroots coalition of parents and educators concerned about the impact of high-stakes testing on New York City’s schools, children, and teachers.
