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Pearson is a London-based mega-corporation that owns everything from the Financial Times to Penguin Books, and also dominates the business of educating American children. The company promotes its many education-related products on a website that features an idyllic, make-believe town. It's called Pearsonville, and it looks like the international conglomerate version of SimCity. In this virtual town, school buses whizz through tree-lined streets, and the city center features skyscrapers and a tram. Tabs pop up to show you just how many Pearson products are available. A red schoolhouse features young kids using Pearson products to learn math (with Pearson's enVision Math) and take standardized tests online. Nearby, at the Pearsonville high school, students use the company's online instructional materials to study science. The high school also features online testing. Pearson online courses are available at the town library. At the model home, parents can use Pearson's student information system to track their children's grades. The "test centre," not shockingly, provides even more testing options. It's a beautiful little town. A Las Vegas-style sign welcomes you, while a biplane flies through the sky trailing a Pearson banner behind it.

"This is a long post because there is so much about the Pearson company you need to read about and evaluate. Please read to the end, because if you agree with these findings, you need to contact public officials and press them to end the relationship between Pearson and American schools. I did receive a reply to my email above from Susan Aspey, the Vice President for Media Relations at Pearson. It is included at the end of the report. I attach it without comment. It is up to you to decide if the reply satisfactorily addresses the issues I raise in this post."

"According to The New York Times, the New York State Attorney General has exposed the supposedly non-profit Pearson Foundation for what it really is, a partner with the for-profit wing of the global Pearson publishing mega-giant. The Pearson Foundation agreed to pay a penalty of over seven million dollars to New York State that will be used to prepare teachers to work in high needs communities. According to New York State law, foundations are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit activities."

Last month, the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas to the Manhattan offices of the Pearson Foundation and Pearson Education. Mr. Schneiderman is looking into whether the nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation, which is prohibited by state law from undisclosed lobbying, was used to benefit Pearson Education, a profit-making company that publishes standardized tests, curriculums and textbooks, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The recent Pineapple and the Hare fiasco does more than identify a daft reading passage on New York State's 8th grade English Language Arts test. Education Commissioner John King scrapped the selection and its six multiple-choice items, admitting they were "ambiguous," when the questions became public last week. The episode opens the door to discussing how the 2012 exams were put together. The State Education Department signed a five-year, $32 million agreement with NCS Pearson to develop English Language Arts and math assessments in grades three to eight. In fact, math testing was administered over three days this week for 1.2 million students. Pearson has grown immensely over the last decade, securing contracts with many states required to test students under the No Child Left Behind Act. This year it succeeded CTB/McGraw-Hill as New York's test vendor.

Ever since the debacle of Pineapplegate, it is widely recognized by everyone other than the publishing giant Pearson that its tentacles have grown too long and too aggressive. It is difficult to remember what part of American education has not been invaded by Pearson's corporate grasp. It receives billions of dollars to test millions of students. Its scores will be used to calculate the value of teachers. It has a deal with the Gates Foundation to store all the student-level data collected at the behest of Race to the Top. It recently purchased Connections Academy, thus giving it a foothold in the online charter industry. And it recently added the GED to its portfolio. With the U.S. Department of Education now pressing schools to test children in second grade, first grade, kindergarten - and possibly earlier - and with the same agency demanding that schools of education be evaluated by the test scores of the students of their graduates (whew!), the picture grows clear. Pearson will control every aspect of our education system.

However, what has been missing from much of the debate over the wisdom of the Pearson pineapple passage so far has been discussion of what wisdom actually is and what the New York State curriculum standards that are supposed to be the basis for instruction and assessment are. Clearly Pearson and Tisch need some lessons in classical philosophy.

Standardized tests in English and math taken by students in New York State are about to become slightly less tricky. Beginning next spring, a new company, Pearson, will write the standardized tests that the Education Department gives to nearly all third through eighth graders. The department switched to Pearson this year after its contract with another company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, expired.

For the fourth time within a month, state education officials have tossed out a question on the standardized tests after finding that errors by Pearson, the test maker, made the problem virtually impossible for students to solve.

New York got the pineapple story because NY is paying Pearson only $32 million for five years of tests. Texas is paying Pearson $500 million for five years of tests. That means that Texas gets the shiny, new questions-the ones that make sense-and NY gets the recycled remainders, the ones that no one else wanted You get what you pay for.

I learned that the tests themselves are being kept secret because the state Department of Education and Pearson, their test development contractor, wrote strong confidentiality provisions into the contract. My understanding is that this was so that they both could reuse test questions in the future. In order for the questions to be re-usable, they have to be kept secret, otherwise students could prep too easily for the tests, and Pearson's other customers would be able to get the tests from the public domain. We only know about the gaffes because students exposed them. Educators have been sworn to secrecy.

As a specialist in testing during a 33-year career spent working for New York City, I believe Pearson is to blame for the current mess we find ourselves in regarding the state exams, which are given to 1.2 million students each year in grades three through eight. But the state is even more culpable, making bad decisions about the design of the program, particularly the contractual requirements related to field testing. Now the partners are stuck, and neither can admit the situation is beyond repair. Here are my concerns, based on what I know about the Pearson experience and my many years in test research and development

"According to a recent article on Reuters, an international news service based in Great Britain, "investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education. The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors." Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011."

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch sounded perhaps her sharpest criticism yet of educational testing company Pearson for what critics call its shoddy handling of state standardized tests, but said the results would still be used by the state to evaluate teachers.

In many ways the for-profit edu-corporations and their not-for-profit allies resemble a giant octopus with tentacles reaching into every facet of public education in the United States. I am reminded of the book The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris that detailed the way railroads at the start of the 19th century controlled every facet of business and individual life. There is also a famous political cartoon from 1904 that portrays the Standard Oil monopoly as a giant octopus controlling state and national governments. This giant octopus is strangling public education in both blatant and subtle ways. For example, on the surface the 2000 and 2003 editions of the popular middle school United States history book The American Nation barely differ. Both editions list the publisher as Prentice-Hall in association with American Heritage magazine. However, in the 2003 edition Prentice-Hall was listed as a sub-division of Pearson.

New York State's attorney general is investigating whether the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks.

"In the high-stakes world of American education, Pearson makes money even when its results don't measure up."

As math exams for the state's fourth to eighth graders begin on Wednesday, new controversy emerged about the quality of the exams and choices of the exam-maker, Pearson Education.

The fundamental problem with Common Core, the latest educational miracle solution that is being promoted by the National Governors Association and Pearson Educational, the publishing conglomerate, is that it is conceptually backwards. Instead of motivating students to learn by presenting them with challenging questions and interesting content rooted in their interests and experiences, Common Core is a bore. It removes substance from learning. Skills are decontextualized, which means they taught and practiced divorced from meaning. Common Core offers students no reason to learn.

Test maker Pearson defends the controversial questions and details how many states have been using them in recent years