Video: US Standardized Testing, It’s all about the profits

US standardized testing is all about redistributing tax dollars to the shareholders and CEOs of publishing giants, such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill. I’ve been saying the obvious for two decades. Now comedy central has caught on to this scam with John Oliver. Quite naturally, the corporate propaganda machine doesn’t want you to know this, so they never use their investigative skills to figure this out.

Oliver, however, takes it a step further. He points out that billions of dollars a year are being thrown to the testing giants, and they have failed in their objectives, and should be given the boot. Since No Child Left Behind turned schools from educational institutions to test prep school, average test scores for students have slightly dipped lower vis-a-vis their international brethren, and the achievement gap between students of European descent and African descent has not been reduced.

In other words, it’s all about the money, because if it was about educating children, then the standardized tests would be given the boot. US students can be made to take up to 113 tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade, not counting make up examinations. Students are forced to take tests until they pass them, so one test might be taken five times during the k-12 education of any child. In other words, Oliver is correct to say students can be made to take up to 113 tests, but that number goes up significantly if children fail tests.

That’s why educational standards are constantly raised time after time. The more tests students fail, the more profitable it is for the testing corporations. The latest attack on children in public education, Common Core testing, is the perfect example of this.

Finland has the highest test scores in the world, and its school children are the least tested.

The testing mania is about government corruption, and money gone wild in politics, and it, like virtually all US government corruption, began with the Reagan tax cuts. That’s when the testing mania began.

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Educational Reform in the United States Has Nothing to Do With Education

Educational reform is all about corporate profits, especially for the big publishing corporations, Pearson Limited and McGraw-Hill. These companies a lot of money on government; lobbyists, campaign contributions, etc…. McGraw-Hill, for example, donated $32,400 to the Republican National Committee in 2014. The corporation also gave $10,000 to the Democratic Party of New Hampshire. This company spreads its money, or rather your money, around. In return, their puppets in state houses around the nation and within the federal government push for more testing and higher standards.

School districts are then forced to allocate your hard earned tax dollars to tests and testing materials, which then fuels corporate profits, dividends and share prices. All the while, education for the young has gotten twisted into learning how to take tests, which for most students, makes education a non-learning experience, especially since standards are always raised.

Why are test standards always increased? Because it’s profitable. Raising the bar means more students will fail, and then they’ll need to take the test over and over again until they move up in grade, or drop out of school. The more tests they take, the more profits Pearson and McGraw-Hill rake in, and at your expense.

Every few years, testing standards are changed. That’s because it’s more profitable to change standards every few years than maintain the current standards. When standards are changed, school districts are forced to purchase new tests and new prepatory materials in accordence with the new standards, which is way more profitable than keeping prepatory materials that were purchased a year or two earlier.

In other words, mandatory standardized testing is an income redistribution scam. Income is redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent, particularly to shareholders and major officers of the testing industry.

The testing industry then redistributes some of your redistributed money to politicians as campaign contributions, lobbying jobs after politicians leave office, vacations in Scotland, and other things.

To garner that cash, the politicians push more and more standardized tests for your students to take, as well as higher standards. That’s why US public school students are the most tested in the world, and by a wide margin. That also shows how corrupt your government has become.

And that’s why educational reform has absolutely nothing to do with education. It’s all about using public school students as profitable testing material. And because of that, such useful classes as automotive, wood shop, metal shop and other classes than might be applicable to real life are gone for the most part. That’s why your students have to take second year Algebra and Geometry, even though 99 percent will never use these things in real life. These tests are also why many schools have eliminated or shortened such social skill interactions as physical education and recess.

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Three Cartoons Showing The Current State of the Economy on This Labor Day 2014 and How We Got There

Ultimately, it is political corruption that plays the biggest role in creating income and wealth inequality. The Reagan tax cuts gave the rich and powerful the money to craft legislation, purchase politicians, such as Wall Street Senator’s Ron Wyden, Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell, and then use their corrupt corporate news media to sell the legislation using lies to the public. Now that the public has begun to see reality, the news media, such as ABC News, Fox Propaganda Network, and the Oregonian newspaper, among many others, have continued the lies about how free trade treaties are good for the economy even though the US trade deficit continues to explode more and more with each treaty. That’s because US corporations are shipping more and more jobs overseas, and then they ship the products that used to be manufactured in the USA straight back to the USA, creating the trade gap and a few longshoremen jobs along the way.

Trade treaties are perhaps the principal reason the US economy is historically weak, and why job creation and wage and salary growth are also his historically bad.

The difference between the old wages and the new lower overseas wages goes into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate profits, surging dividends and soaring share prices. That’s why the same process in terms of inequality, political corruption and news media corruption are also in play with most government actions, whether it’s war in Iraq, education loans, public school testing, privatization scams, and deregulation schemes, keeping secret the negative health impacts of GMOs, among many others, it’s all about redistributing your income, your children’s income, and your neighbor’s income, as well as your health, to the 1 percent. The US government is a total cesspool of corruption, as is the corporate news media.

Now the Obama regime is trying to pass through congress the largest income redistribution treaty of them all, the Trans Pacific Partnership. Obama’s primary ally is this corrupt scam is Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, who is crafting legislation that hasn’t been crafted yet, but he assures those who are listening that it will be fair and balanced. This legislation is called “smart track.” It’s job is to replace fast track legislation. Fast track allowed trade treaties to be voted on with little or no debate in congress, making it difficult for the public to discover what was going on and to muster opposition. Wyden’s smart track is just another scam to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent on behalf of his wall street masters.

Fight back, protest, inform and organize your neighbors. Don’t let social issues get in the way of economic solidarity with your neighbors, because that’s what the corrupt news media, the political class, and the 1 percent have been doing to the 99 percent for forty years, and that’s solely to achieve their objective of income redistribution.

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Our Current Inequality Began With President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Cuts and Privatization for the Rich

The war against the middle class officially began during the reign of President Ronald Reagan, and also because of his policies. I’m suggesting that he was a part of this war, but his actions clearly allowed the war to commence.

His trade policies, deregulation scams, and tax cuts for the rich gave the 1 percent the money and power to purchase legislation that bleeds income and wealth from the 99 percent and redistributes it to the 1 percent. This gave the 1 percent the power to purchase the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which President Bill Clinton signed into law. Nowadays, the monopolized information we receive because of this act is often filled with misinformation, including the claim of no health hazards from GMOs, and the public school testing mania, both of which are nothing more than income redistribution scams.

Reaganomics has led us to the economic disaster in which we are living, and virtually every other economic ills that beset our nation.

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Teachers Elect Foes of Corporate Reform in Massachusetts and L.A.

Executives at the testing giant corporation known as Pearson want to increase their profits by testing student teachers, which is utterly stupid since student teachers already need to pass a battery of education classes, a three month or longer apprenticeship as a student teacher under the guidance of at least one experienced teacher. In addition, to obtain their teacher’s licenses, they already need to pass at least two national examinations. One education professor had enough of Pearson’s garbage.

Labor Notes now reports, “The new statewide president of the 110,000-member Massachusetts teachers’ union made her name leading a boycott of standardized tests.

She’s calling for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing, meaning tests that carry heavy consequences under the guise of “accountability”—for instance, holding students’ graduation, school funding, or teachers’ compensation for ransom.

Barbara Madeloni was running the teacher education program at the University of Massachusetts in 2012 when she led her student teachers to boycott a pilot standardized assessment for teachers-in-training. The boycotters opposed outsourcing teacher evaluation to the testing giant Pearson, preferring that experienced educators observe student teachers.

The current mania to test, test and more test students is driven by the need to redistribute income from taxpayers to the rich shareholders of such testing giants as Pearson and McGraw-Hill. It’s all about profits, and has nothing to do with education reform or improving the the education of students. In fact, it was McGraw-Hills business plan that was adopted by the Bush administration, and became No Child Left Behind. This was the result of over 70 years of friendship between the Bush and McGraw families, and had nothing to do with improving education. It seems the testing mania has ruined public education.

Check out the complete story below.

Teachers Elect Foes of Corporate Reform in Massachusetts and L.A. – See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2014/05/teachers-elect-foes-corporate-reform-massachusetts-and-Los Angeles–Labor Notes

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Why are the Children of Finland so much better educated than those in the US?

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