A $22 million no-bid contract and a conflict of interest.
Sounds like a perfect topic for a New York Times investigation, doesn’t it, especially considering that the shenanigans have taken place under the watch of New York City officials.
Yet an archival search indicates that there have been no mentions of this scandal in the Times, and the only mentions anywhere have come in the form of self-serving news releases from the company involved.
Since the advent of No Child Left Behind during the early days of the Bush Administration, our nation’s teachers and students have taken a public relations hit while the testing and textbook industries have made a killing.
mong those who raked in the biggest bucks are the folks at McGraw-Hill. The company provides tests for states, provides textbooks designed to help students pass those standardized tests, and now has thrown itself completely into the test preparation business, charging the nation’s school districts millions of dollars for a battery of practice standardized tests, called ACUITY, which are designed to help schools improve scores on the high stakes tests at the end of the school year.
Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this?
New York City schools are paying $22 million (out of a no-bid contract) for ACUITY, which offers what are called diagnostic and predictive tests. The tests have been widely criticized by schoolteachers in the Big Apple because they are turning schools into test factories and taking away not only the enjoyment of learning, but learning itself.
Of course, perhaps I am a bit hasty since there is documented evidence that ACUITY works. A study was released Oct. 27 that proved without a doubt that ACUITY is God’s gift to education. Of course, the study was based on results from one Missouri school district…and was produced by McGraw-Hill and that school district.
In other words, New York forked over $22 million in what appears to be an effort to scam the testing system. After all, if the company that makes the tests is preparing materials to get schools ready for the tests, how can the schools fail?
And the McGraw-Hill scam has spread across the United States. Recently it was given the OK for use in California school systems. It is already in place in many other states, including Missouri where I teach and in the school system where I teach.
And who can blame school officials for latching onto ACUITY? With all of the ridiculous emphasis placed on standardized tests, school districts have to do anything they can to garner even a few points. It could be the difference between being a success and being termed one of those failing schools that fire their entire teaching staffs and get praised by President Obama.
Education has always been one of the most difficult subjects for the media to cover. School news is usually broken down to test score comparisons, violence, and union contracts. Yet with all of the emphasis on high stakes standardized tests, you will find that little, if any, investigative reporting has been done on the test industry and on the ways, such as ACUITY, that have been used to milk money out of the system.
If my success or failure and the success and failure of every teacher in the United States is going to be based on winner-take-all tests, educational consumers have the right to know everything they can about those tests.
And don’t expect that information to come from the testing companies themselves. According to SourceWatch, McGraw-Hill spent $1,320,000 on lobbying in 2007. And the company has certainly received its money’s worth.
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