The $8.2 billion British education conglomerate behind high-stakes Common Core tests used to assess tens of millions of children in America’s public schools hires temporary workers who are unable to maintain real jobs to grade the complex written portions of the tests.
The New York Times visited an office park in San Antonio on Friday and found dozens of temporary workers grading Pearson’s Common Core tests. These short-term staffers included a one-time wedding planner and someone with a master’s degree in marital counseling who used to hawk Pearson products.
These temps and many others like them have never been teachers were busily scoring essays written by thousands of American third graders and fifth graders from all over the country.
Today’s Common Core tests are considerably different than the fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests you may remember from your youth. These tests are meant to be more complex and to measure a richer set of K-12 math and language arts curriculum benchmarks.
The language arts portions of Pearson’s Common Core tests ask students to read passages and physically write down answers to sets of questions. (RELATED: Mandatory Common Core Tests In New York Just Happen To Be Full Of Corporate Brand Names)
Pearson’s 14,500 temporary workers are paid $12 to $14 per hour (less than Seattle’s planned minimum wage). They must have college degrees. They work from about April to about July. Many work from their homes — along with whatever annoyances might be happening there.
How does Pearson find its temps? The company advertises heavily on Internet job search engines, in newspaper classifieds and on Craigslist and Facebook. It also shows up at job fairs. The company hires about half the people it trains for the job. Training lasts a couple days.
Pearson’s Craigslist-discovered seasonal workers score the essays in a way a Pearson official likened to the construction of a Big Mac.
“McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac,” Bob Sanders, Pearson North America’s vice president of content and scoring management, told the Times. “We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed.”
Representatives of Pearson and PARCC, an ever-dwindling consortium of states with Common Core-related standardized tests, promise their massive, early 20th-Century-era-assembly-line grading system is totally effective.
The big quality-control technique is to place already-scored essays among the essays which temps are asked to grade. These previously-graded tests have been graded by veteran scorers, so presumably the score are accurate. Less-seasoned temporary workers are fired if they give too many scores that don’t match up to the “correct” scores.
It’s unclear what happens to all the essays those fired workers scored after failed workers are sacked.
Pearson’s scoring method has many critics in the education sector.
“Even as teachers, we’re still learning what the Common Core state standards are asking,” Chicago special-education teacher Lindsey Siemens told the Times. “So to take somebody who is not in the field and ask them to assess student progress or success seems a little iffy.”
Another criticism is that third-grade and fifth-grade kids often write in ways their teachers may understand a lot better than, say, someone in San Antonio who used to plan weddings.
“Sometimes students say things as a student that as a teacher you have to interpret what they are actually saying,” Venice, Calif. third-grade teacher Meghann Seril told the paper.
The College Board and the Educational Testing Service, another couple of outfits which create and score fast-food-style standardized tests, require graders of Advanced Placement tests to be certified teachers in the area in which they are grading and to have a minimum of three years of experience.
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