Pearson, one of the country's largest testing and curriculum companies, is
paying $7.7 million to settle charges that it used its "charitable" foundation to get business for its for-profit arm:
Around 2010, Pearson began financing an effort through its foundation to develop courses based on the Common Core. The attorney general’s report said Pearson had hoped to use its charity to win endorsements and donations from a “prominent foundation.” That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Pearson Inc. executives believed that branding their courses by association with the prominent foundation would enhance Pearson’s reputation with policy makers and the education community,” a release accompanying the attorney general’s report said.
Indeed, in April 2011, the Pearson Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced they would work together to create 24 new online reading and math courses aligned with the Common Core.
Pearson executives believed the courses could later be sold commercially, the report said, and predicted potential profits of tens of millions of dollars. After Mr. Schneiderman’s office began its investigation, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for $15.1 million.
This is the company to which the corporate education policy movement wants to hand over more and more responsibility for educating kids, from the tests that determine whether their teachers will still have jobs to the test prep materials that prepare kids to take the tests, test prep materials that these days function as curriculum as tests take over more and more class time.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's education and labor news.
A fair day's pay
Marsh, 42, acquired the company in a liquidation purchase in 2003. He said a "disgruntled employee" complained to the U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), prompting the federal inspector to make an initial visit in March 2011.
[American Bar Products president William] Marsh said he gave the inspector "free reign" to investigate, which led to citations and a settlement in which the company paid an $8,400 fine, according to OSHA inspection reports that identified 10 "serious" workplace violations.
But it's OSHA that "hurts workers" according to Marsh.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels today issued the following statement regarding the sentencing of Craig Sanborn in Coös County Court in New Hampshire for manslaughter in connection with the May 2010 explosion at the Black Mag LLC plant, which killed employees Jesse Kennett and Don Kendall while they were manufacturing a gunpowder substitute. Sanborn, who was the company’s president, managing member and primary owner, was sentenced to five to 10 years on two counts of manslaughter, to be served consecutively, for a total of 10 to 20 years, and assessed fines of $10,000.
“The disregard for safety cost two workers their lives, and this jury agreed that Craig Sanborn’s actions were criminal.
“Sanborn recklessly ignored basic safety measures that would have protected their lives. His criminal conviction and sentence won’t bring these men back to life, but it will keep him from putting workers' lives in peril. And it should drive home to employers this message: Worker safety can never be sacrificed for the benefit of production, and workers’ lives are not—and must never be—considered part of the cost of doing business. We categorically reject the false choice between profits and safety.
It'll take a lot more convictions like this to get employers to take workplace safety seriously, though.
Education
- How your tax dollars fund anti-LGBT hate:
This is the pattern: Every few weeks or so, a news story appears about an LGBT teacher who was fired by a religious school because of his or her sexuality, or a private school is exposed for having an explicit policy of rejecting LGBT students and families. Progressive news sites (like this one) circulate these stories with considerable and justified outrage, but all too often the story stops there — with strongly registered disappointment that private schools are legally empowered to discriminate against people because of who they are. Time passes, these cases recede into the white noise of the news cycle; rinse, repeat.
There is no doubt that what these schools do to LGBT faculty and students is despicable, but what’s often absent from the coverage of these cases is the fact that, in many states across the country, taxpayers are subsidizing their anti-LGBT agenda through state-sponsored voucher programs.
- Is harsh school discipline necessary? That's up for debate.
- Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy gets some seriously preferential treatment from New York City:
During the past two years, the DOE gave Moskowitz’s controversial chain, Success Academy, rent-free space in city school buildings to open 14 new co-location sites. In each handover, Moskowitz demanded the DOE deliver the space clear of furniture and broom-swept by 5 p.m. on the last day of the school year, according to sources and emails obtained by DNAinfo New York.
But since students used the space until the second-to-last day of the school year, the DOE was left with less than 36 hours to clear the area — costing the department tens of thousands of dollars in overtime from contracted workers scrambling to meet the onerous deadline.