Steven Singer writes about the alliance among three organizations—a private equity firm, a testing company, and an EdTech company. What could possibly go wrong?
He begins:
Prepare to watch more of your tax dollars spiral down the drain of standardized testing.
A year after being gobbled up by private equity firmVeritas Capital, ed tech company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is acquiring K-12 assessment giant Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).
Let me put that in perspective – a scandal-ridden investment firm that made billions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bought one of standardized testing's big four and then added the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to its arsenal.
This almost certainly means the cost of state testing is going to increase since the providers of the tests are shrinking.
"It used to be if you put out a [Request for Proposal] RFP for state assessment, you get five, six, 10 bidders," said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment. "Now you're lucky to get three. When you're doing that, there's maybe not as much expertise and certainly the cost will go up" (emphasis mine).
Under the proposed deal announced in January, the testing company's assessments and the ed tech company's test prep materials will become intimately entwined.
NWEA, best known for its MAP assessment, will operate as a division of HMH. And NWEA's tests will be aligned with HMH's curriculum.
You can just imagine how this will affect the marketplace.
NWEA serves about 10,000 school districts and HMH estimates it works with more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries, according to a press release about the proposed acquisition.
So we can expect districts and even entire states which rely heavily on the MAP test to beencouraged to buy as much HMH curriculum as possible. That way they can teach directly what is on their standardized tests.
That is assuming, of course, the acquisition agreement is approved after a 90-day regulatory review period.
To be honest, I would be surprised if there are any objections.
Such cozy relationships already exist with other education companies. For example, Curriculum Associates provides the aforementioned curriculum for its own i-Ready assessment.
It's ironic that an industry built on standardization – one size fits all – continues to take steps to create books, software and courses aligned with specific tests. It's almost like individuating information to specific student's needs is beneficial or something. Weird!
After all, if these sorts of assessments can be gamed by increased access to materials created by the same corporate entities that create and grade the tests, are we really assessing knowledge? Aren't we just giving students a score based on how many books and software packages their districts bought from the parent company? Is that really education?
I remember a time when curriculum was determined by classroom teachers – you know, experts in their fields, not experts in the corporate entity's test du jour.
But I guess no one was getting rich that way…
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