I absolutely hate standardized testing. There really is nothing worse than being stuffed into an uncomfortable room for half of your day answering questions created by some corporate tool with essentially no understanding of how and what students today actually learn. But believe it or not, that is actually NOT the primary reason why I, a high school student from Princeton, New Jersey, am deciding to opt-out in taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test later next month.

The thing is, despite my immense hatred for it, I can still handle standarized testing. Knowing that tests such as the SATs and the ACTs will play a huge factor in my college admissions, I have no problem taking these tests and getting them over with. And yes, they do measure your educational proficiency, to some extent.

But the PARCC is different. There are actually a lot of reasons why PARCC is so much worse compared to other standarized tests. For one, unlike the SATs or ACTs, which are created by non-profit organizations to measure your personal achievement for colleges to see, the PARCC test is created by Pearson Education, a for-profit corporation to measure the school’s achievement for the state to see. Pearson is also one of North America’s largest textbook manufactures, so you can how this can go wrong — test creators can base their tests off of a certain textbook that also just happens to also be published by themselves. Oh, and those textbooks just coincidentally cost three times as much compared to competing textbooks.

You may think that no self-respecting education company like Pearson would ever even consider enacting such an unethical and greedy scheme that exploits the very students that they teach. You’d be wrong. According to a middle school teacher in upstate New York, Pearson uses the exact same texts in their tests as in their textbooks, giving students that buy their textbooks a huge advantage. The full letter, which was written to Dr. Diane Ravitch, an educational policy analyst, can be found below:

I am an 8th grade teacher in Xxxx, NY. On Day 1 of the NYS ELA 8 Exam, I discovered what I believe to be a huge ethical flaw in the State test. The state test included a passage on why leaves change color that is included in the Pearson-generated NYS ELA 8 text. I taught it in my class just last week. In a test with 6 passages and questions to complete in 90 minutes, it was a huge advantage to students fortunate enough to use a Pearson text and not that of a rival publisher. It may very well have an impact on student test scores. This has not yet received any attention in the press. Could you help me bring this to the attention of the public?

Did that disgust you enough yet? Don’t worry, there’s more. Not only does Pearson exploit their children with their (admittedly sly) textbook money making scheme, they also just love putting in not-so-subtle brand advertising into their tests. Oh wait, I’m sorry. It’s actually not brand advertising. Pearson just coincidentally happens to include words such as IBM™, Lego®, FIFA® and Mindstorms™ in their tests. You know, just for fun. There’s no way they, oh I don’t know, got paid by those trademark owners for some easy brand advertising to susceptible kids. But you know, that’s just a theory. /s

In all seriousness, it’s really terrible that Pearson uses their tests, which are supposed to be a measure of educational proficiency, for their own profit in advertising. Isaiah Schrader, an 8th grader that took the test and wrote about how they were advertising to the test takers, said the following:

The “busboy” passage in the eighth grade test I took was fictional, written about a dishwasher at a pizza restaurant. In it, the busboy neglects to notice a large puddle of root beer under a table that he clears. His irate employer notifies him about the mess, and he cleans it up. It seems alright at first glace. However, the root beer was referred to at one point as Mug™ Root Beer. It was followed by a footnote, which informed test-takers that Mug™ was a registered trademark of PepsiCo. The brand of soda, the type of soda, and, come to think of it, the exact beverage was not necessary to the development of the story, nor was it mentioned in any of the confusing and analytical questions following the passage.

Non-fictional passages in the test I took included an article about robots, where the brands IBM™, Lego®, FIFA® and Mindstorms™ popped up, each explained with a footnote. I cannot speak for all test takers, but I found the trademark references and their associated footnotes very distracting and troubling.

Why would Pearson, the world’s largest for-profit education business, include gratuitous references to trademarked products in its tests? Pearson did not answer my e-mailed messages requesting comment.

The company, which has a five-year, $32 million contract with New York State to produce standardized tests, should have been more responsible and reproduced texts that did not include trademarked — and highly recognizable — products.

Pearson later did issue a statement, which read:

As part of our partnership with NYSED, Pearson searches for previously published passages that will support grade-level appropriate items for use in the 3–8 ELA assessments. The passages must meet certain criteria agreed upon by both NYSED and Pearson in order to best align to Common Core State Standards and be robust enough to support the development of items. Once passages are approved, Pearson follows legal protocols to procure the rights to use the published passages on the assessment on behalf of NYSED. If a fee is required to obtain permission, Pearson pays this fee. NYSED has ultimate approval of passages used on the assessment.

Call me cynical, but I honestly just find it hard to believe that Pearson decided to pay to get trademark rights to write texts that can easily be replaced by non-trademark words. Like I said, Pearson is a for-profit company, so their statement claiming that they paid trademark owners to use in their text really just doesn’t make sense.

But wait! There’s more. Unlike other standarized tests which are taken outisde of school, the PARCC test will be taken during the school day. Why should students have to sacrifice precious learning time to essentially be guinea pigs for greedy corporations? There really is only one entity that gains from the PARCC — and it’s not the students, it’s not the schools, and it’s not the government. It’s Pearson.

Let’s not forget about the fact that PARCC requires technology to administer. You see, PARCC differs from many other standarized tests in that the test is 100% online. This means that a school administering the PARCC test has to use up most, if not all of their technology equipment just to be guinea pigs for a for-profit corporation’s new money making scheme.

I personally have already felt the negative effects of PARCC taking up the high school’s technology, and the testing hasn’t even started yet. In class, there are no laptops available to write essays or do research, and the school library struggles to have enough laptops for students to do any sort of work.It is completely unfair for students to have their education disrupted because of a useless test by Pearson.

Now, to be fair, I have provided you with a very one-sided argument against PARCC. Here are some of the thdngs the for-profit corporation had to say in defence of their terrible test:

The field test last spring was very successful, and provided lessons for the first full administration next spring. More than a million students at 16,000 schools in 14 states plus the District of Columbia took the field test this past spring and with the exception of some minor glitches, as we anticipated, the tryout was a huge success. We have received lots of feedback from teachers, coordinators, students and others. We are compiling the survey results and making adjustments. For example: we are making the test manuals more concise and we are working to improve the equation editor that students use to build equations for the math tests. Student feedback was generally positive. As one student said: “I like this test so much more than [the state test] because it makes you think.”

This one is my favourite. Pearson states that the field tests were successful, which means absolutely nothing. Just because field tests were successful doesn’t mean that the students or teachers actually liked the test, it just means that there were no errors in administrating the test. Getting lots of feedback also isn’t neccessarily good — that feedback could have been saying that the test was absolute garbage.

The quote by the student at the end was the best. Instead of giving numbers telling us what percent of students liked the test, they decided to pick and choose the positive response of one student out of the millions that took the test. Doing this is not only misleading, but also incredibly unethical in giving out information regarding the test.

Watch for resources for parents, teachers, principals. This month, we’ll be releasing a toolkit of resources that principals and other instructional leaders can share with teachers and parents, and a few just for themselves. We’ll announce the release in this newsletter.

They forgot to mention the fact that they’re going to be charging boatloads of money for their resources.

Teachers in your state are playing an important role in developing the assessments. Ask around — some of your colleagues have been involved in the development of the PARCC assessments, contributing to the design, reviewing test items, and reviewing reading passages.

From what I have heard, this is simply not true. Many of my teachers at my high school (who shall remain anonymous for the sake of them not getting fired) have expressed clear disapproval towards the test. One of them noted that Pearson had completely excluded teachers in the development, creation, and preparation of the test.