Blood Money

Dear Teachers,

We are being asked (key word “asked”) to be trained (key word “trained”, like dogs,) by Pearson “Learning” August 29^th and 30^th. Pearson is going to pay us. Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, the money they are going to pay us is blood money. And the blood money they are going to pay us with is our own blood. It is the blood we bled when LAUSD cut our pay. It is the blood we will bleed every day when we struggle with larger and larger class sizes. It is the blood Jenny, Isabel, Jared, River, Susan, Summer and all the rest are bleeding right now as they sit home BLEEDING because they no longer have jobs.

It is blood money.

Pearson “Learning” was once a nice publishing house. They printed books under names like Penguin and a number of textbooks primarily in England. They made a tidy profit in the millions of dollars each year. In 2000, as NCLB was being written and discussed, they bought their first testing company. That may or may not have been a coincidence. After passage of NCLB, they bought another testing company. Then they bought another and another and another and another. That was no coincidence. Today they are a conglomerate of testing companies, seven by my count. They have created a vast, powerful TESTING INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. Their profits are not a few million each year, but a few billion each year and they are growing exponentially.


They employ legions of well-paid lobbyists who infest Washington, D.C., every state capitol, and many local school boards. I would love to know how much they contribute to reelection campaigns. They have infested LAUSD which I will explain in a minute. They have one agenda: Profits. Until recently, they had one means to their agenda: Testing. More standardized testing means more profits for Pearson. NCLB is Pearson's business model. Teachers are laid off, their salaries cut, class size increased, and curriculum narrowed as Pearson lines its pockets with gold.

Consider this regarding standardized testing:

• high scores often signify relatively superficial thinking
• many of the leading tests were never intended to measure teaching or learning
• a school that improves its test results may well have lowered its standards to do so
• far from helping to “close the gap,” the use of standardized testing is most damaging for low-income and minority students
• as much as 90 percent of the variations in test scores among schools or states have nothing to do with the quality of instruction
• far more meaningful measures of student learning – or school quality – are available.

-Alfie Kohn’s  The Case Against Standardized Testing

Standardized tests are DEMONIZING all of us in the inner city, demonizing our union, and being used by almost infinitely powerful economic and political forces in this country to dismantle public education.

And the situation is only going to get worse. [LAUSD Superintendent John] Deasy and [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan both are pushing value-added standardized testing measures to evaluate teachers. The LA Times slanders all of us on a daily basis with its value-added measure on its website. Deasy calls his AGT.

Slander is slander. This year he is bribing teachers with $1,250 (after cutting their pay) to “volunteer” in a pilot project for AGT. “If you volunteer, we will pay you (after cutting your pay.)” To measure “improvement” you need baseline scores (pretests), probably at least one or two interim assessments, and a post test. These tests will be maximally time consuming and VERY expensive. All teachers need to be evaluated, so multiple tests will be given in every subject of every grade multiple times every year. You can bet that Pearson is using its vast influence to get to the front of the line to write (and sell) those tests. As far as I know, they may well have already elbowed out the competition. Their profits will be enormous. And guess where those profits will come from. They will come from you and our students. Your job, if you have one left, will rely on these tests, so you can be damn sure you are going to teach to them and probably teach little, if anything else.

Read this: The Test Generation.

Pearson “Learning” has now figured out a way to “double down” its billions in annual profits, its rape of public education. They are using their publishing arm to sell “Teaching Guides”, “Lesson Books”, etc. so teachers can “better” teach its own tests. Genius. They have created a mobius strip of profit production. We are pawns in their game and they are going to move you two spaces ahead August 29^th and 30^th.  Don’t think you are getting paid very much for being a pawn. Pawns, if you don’t play chess, are the first things sacrificed.

I reject Pearson and their blood money. I reject everything that they stand for. I reject their endless bubbling. I reject their process of elimination universe. I refuse to be trained like a dog to teach my students how to bark like seals. So should you.

I am drawing my own line in the sand. Public education is going up in flames in this country because of profiteers like Pearson and teachers are going down. I intend at least to have a say in my own demise.

I may show up on August 29^th. I will not sign in. I will not touch their food. I will go nowhere near their blood money. If I do show up, it will only be to stand up before everyone and publicly denounce Pearson in much the same way I am doing now. My fantasy is to walk out and have everyone follow, but alas that will never happen. It would be nice if some of you would follow, though.

If I do not show up, it will be because I chickened out. Fear is something I understand. In an age of perpetual layoffs and teacher transfers, fear is not without merit. We are surrounded by fear. We are immersed in it. You all will make your own decision regarding the Pearson “training”. You all have your own lives, your own families, your own personal situations. You have to decide what is right for you. I will respect whatever decision you make. Count on that. But consider what is being done to you and our profession by Pearson, companies like it, and politicians who exploit their malevolence. Consider. Consider Jared, Jenny, Isabel, River, Susan, Summer and all the rest. Consider that you are next. We are next.

Joseph K. is a 24-year veteran of LAUSD, a former mentor teacher twice named a Johns Hopkins University Teaching Fellow, who now teaches poor, inner-city children who wake up every morning in their gang-ridden, drug-infested neighborhoods at five a.m. to catch the bus by six. He teaches the old-fashioned way – by ignoring standardized test scores. Instead of teaching bubbling, he tries to instill a love of knowledge and learning in his students and for this reason will probably be allowed to continue teaching for fifteen more minutes.

Who Is Joseph K?

There has been some confusion regarding Joseph K. Who is Joseph K? Is he any relation to Josef K? I assure you, he is not. Josef K is fictitious. Josef K is a surreal character in a real but surrealistic novel called The Trial, by a real surreal novelist named Franz Kafka. Franz Kafka died in 1924, but used absurd humor to portrait surreal situations so absurdly surreal, they eventually led to the ultimate surreal absurdity, Nazi Germany. He played with multiple meanings of words, virtually all of which are lost in translation. 

Joseph K is and did none of these things.

Joseph K is a real teacher living in a surreal world created by an even more surreal (and absurd) piece of legislation called No Child Left Behind, a world where all children are above average by legal mandate, a world where teachers and their unions are persecuted when it turns out much to the surprise of everyone that all children are not, in fact, above average, a world where as many as eighty percent of our public schools will be labeled failures (officially “in need of improvement”) as early as this month, a world where the wondrous, quixotic journey we once called a rich, well-rounded education has been reduced to four bubbles on a standardized test, four bubbles indistinguishable and/or irrelevant to many students (especially poor, minority students), a world where standardized tests are now being used bubble by bubble to dismantle public education brick by brick.

None of Joseph K’s multiple meanings are lost in translation because almost no one reads Joseph K in the first place and certainly no one translates him.

Joseph K lives in a REAL world where Michele Bachmann is now a serious candidate, is in fact leading in the polls in a world where the “shots heard round the world” in Lexington and Concord were heard not in Massachusetts but in New Hampshire, a world where the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery while simultaneously owning and sleeping tirelessly with their slaves,  a world where John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father working even more tirelessly to end slavery though “just a small boy at the time,” a world where “The System” ended slavery (not  a bloody Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation), a world where the Federal Government should not infringe upon States’ rights to determine the legality of gay marriage but simultaneously have a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman, a Bachmannesque world bursting with Intelligent Design but utterly void of fossils.

Joseph K, ladies and gentlemen, is all too real.