Dear Community Member,I have learned of Pearsons relationships with members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the organizations undue influence on state lawmaking.Why is this company participating in an organization that has been instrumental in promoting a privatized, for-profit corporate model for public education? Why has their company, supposedly dedicated to providing quality educational resources to all children and PUBLIC schools, merged with organizations such as Connections Academy, whose director is the co-chair of ALECs Education Task Force, and Americas Promise Alliance, whose funding sources include Lumina, The Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundations (all members of ALEC)? Organizations that have made it clear that they favor the dismantling of public education. How can they expect to keep the trust and respect of parents, teachers and community members who care about the preservation of public education, and whose educational tax payer dollars are being redistributed to line Pearsons stock portfolios? How can Pearson, in good conscience, reap billions of dollars (much of which is federal and state tax payer dollars) through Race to the Top funding and other model legislation while public schools starve?Why would they want to cozy up behind closed doors with the Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco to financially underwrite ALEC whose corporate-minded agenda is to rewrite educational state laws throughout the country in a venue where American parents, teachers and children have no opportunity to resist reform measures that are destroying community schools and promoting punitive testing measures which border on child abuse?This partnership Pearson has with ALEC is unhealthy for our democracy and unhealthy for the children in our schools. Please join us in boycotting Pearson. We refuse to contribute our monies to the destruction of meaningful teaching and learning for our children and the destruction of public education. We refuse to use our own monies to profit a corporation whose agenda erodes our own childrens futures. Share this information with PTAs, school boards, libraries and schools. Refuse to buy or adopt their materials if you are an educator. Promote the use of ACT rather than SAT, as SAT is a Pearson product. Inform Pearson of your actions.Sincerely,---------------------Supporting Resources/Notes for Pearson Boycott Grad Nation Summits supporters/presenters reads like an ALEC yearbook. Alan Singer. Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit Susan Ohanian. Condi Rice-Joel Klein report: Not the new A Nation at Risk The Council on Foreign Affairs report was also written by: Joel Klein, Chancellor of NYC schools, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, ACT, Common Core author David Coleman and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Teach For Americas Wendy Kopp, the American Enterprise Institutes Rick Hess and Stand for Childrens Jonah Edelman, and Pearson. See Huffington Post. Alternet: Standardized Tests Hurt Kids and Public Schools: Teachers, Parents, Take a Stand Against Corporate-Backed Test Regime Poor Public Education is a Threat to National Security GradNation Summit In the words of Examiner reporter Jennie Smith (April 24th, 2012): In the Age of Accountability, the only ones not accountable for anything, apparently, are the testing giants who have lobbied hard for the accountability legislation. Then again, they are accountable to someoneits just not children or teachers. Rapoport writes: From textbooks to data management, professional development programs to testing systems, Pearson has it alland all of it has a price. For statewide testing in Texas alone, the company 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. While more may be found about ALEC at www.alecexposed.org , briefly stated: ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve model bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALECs operations. Elected legislators who are active in ALEC, overwhelmingly right-wing politicians, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovationswithout disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a unique, unparalleled and unmatched organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Connections Academy, a nation-wide online education program designed to replace public schools, is headed by Mickey Ravenaugh, who happens to be the co-chair for the Education Commission for ALEC. is a division of Connections Education LLC, a private school based in Baltimore, MD that contracts with charter schools, school districts, or governmental entities to provide online lessons to students. Sylvan Ventures started Connections Academy in 2001. The company started its first schools in 2001, and in 2004, Connections Academy was sold to Apollo Management, L.P.,a corporate investor specializing in real estate. The website states that: The company now operates tuition-free public schools under management contracts from charter schools. Pearson purchased Connections from private equity firm Apollo Management LP for $400 million. Read more: Apollo exits Connections Education via $400M sale to Pearson The Deal Pipeline Sir Michael Barber is the current Chief Education Advisor for Pearson. Sir Michael Barber published Deliverology 101in 2011 to serve as a comprehensive guide to Education system reform and delivery. Governments and large public organizations (from the Louisiana school system to the Malaysian government) have systematically adopted the deliverology approach and realized quick impact and significantly improve outcomes to their reform programs. In the summer of 2010, Sir Michael Barber teamed with leaders from the Education Trust (also funded by the holy trinity Eli Broad, Walton, and Lumina) and Achieve (funded by State Farm and Lumina) to found the U.S. Education Delivery Institute (EDI).In an interview Barber is cited as saying: I think one of the best things Blair did was design his education reform to build on the important Conservative reforms. So weve had 18 years of reform with a series of consistent threads: devolution of resources, strong accountability, setting standards, national tests and introduction of school inspection We implemented a national literacy strategy in primary schools, followed quite rapidly by numeracy using the same model: Large-scale reform driven from the top down; designing all the materials at the national level and training everybody in a cascade out; using the accountability system to publish results and school inspection to check that people were adopting better practices. Essentially its about creating different forms of a quasi-market in public services, exploiting the power of choice, competition, transparency and incentives, and thats really where the education debate is going now. I think that the concept that you devolve money to schools, you encourage choice, you make it easier for new providers to come in as some U.S. charter laws do, and you make it easier for networks of schools to develop brandsall of that is conceptually sound. Read the interview. A small but significant diversion here EDI works behind the scenes with several state departments of education including MA, KY, and RI to develop their state reform agendas including but limited to Race to the Top (RTTT) From their own website they state: Our mission is to partner with K-12 and higher education systems with ambitious reform agendas and invest in their leaders capacity to deliver results. The biggest funding partner with EDI is wait for it folks.Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.Board of Directors for EDI is a familiar cast of characters: Michale Cohen President of Achieve, David Britt who serves as Board Chair of EdTrust, Dr. David Driscoll, Former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, Kati Haycock, President of the Education Trust, Dr. Teri Quinn Gray, President, Delaware State Board of Education Kathy Cox who served as Georgias State Superintendent of Schools from 2003 until 2010. Robert Schwartz, Chair, Academic Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 1997-2002 he also served as president of Achieve. He currently co-chairs The Aspen Institutes Education Program and serves on the boards of The Education Trust, The Noyce Foundation and The Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. More on Tom Luna can be found here. Other Pearson Partners IncludeNew Leaders for New SchoolsBoard of Directors:Jay Altman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, FirstLine SchoolsJosh Bekenstein, Managing Director, Bain Capital, LLCChristopher M. Chadwick, President, Boeing Military Aircraft Integrated Defense SystemJean Desravines, Chief Executive Officer, New LeadersBarbara Hyde, President, J.R. Hyde III Family FoundationMike Johnston, Colorado State Senator, Senate District 33 and Co-Founder, New LeadersS. Joshua Lewis, Founder and Managing Partner, Salmon River CapitalTed Mitchell (Board Chair), Chief Executive Officer, NewSchools Venture FundJonathan Schnur, Co-Founder, New Leaders and Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, America AchievesNaomi O. Seligman, Senior Partner, Ostriker von Simson, Inc.Jan Rock Zubrow, Founder and President, MedCapital, LLC. Tucker Capital Corporation Advises ACE and Pearson on a Partnership to Transform the GED Test, Aligned with Common Core State Standards, Based on GED 21st Century Initiative Enhanced GED Testing Program Will Validate Career- and College-ReadinessMarch, 2011 The Tucker Capital Corporation acted as exclusive advisor to The American Council on Education (ACE) and Pearson on the creation of a ground-breaking new business that will drive the future direction, design, and delivery of the GED testing program. Building on the goals of the GED 21st Century Initiative, the two partners will combine their collective expertise and resources to develop a new GED Test aligned with Common Core State Standards that will assure colleges, universities and prospective employers that adults who have passed the GED Tests are prepared to compete and succeed in a global economy.Tucker Education, a division of Tucker Capital Corporation, offers revenue strategy consulting, joint venture and partnership facilitation, as well as M&A advisory to Education companies. We deliver counsel to Education companies throughout every phase of their growth cycle. We work with both entrepreneurs and executives to accelerate growth, enhance core business functions and prepare clients for capital market activities.Tucker Capitals team draws on over 25 years of experience working with Basal Publishers and start-ups selling into the Education market place, to bring an understanding of the unique market challenges and a firm grasp of the innovative technologies that are altering the landscape. Education clients include:American Council on EducationBayard Presse USABenchPrepChildcraft Education CorpDelta EducationGopher SportsHampton BrownKaplan Companies, IncNational Geographic School PublishingScholastic CorpThe JASON ProjectTime-Life Education