Tag: Pearson

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What’s the future for suburban office space in Anti Business New Jersey ?

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file photo Boyd Loving

OCTOBER 25, 2015    LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY KATHLEEN LYNN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD

What do you do with a big, isolated office building that no one wants anymore?

It’s a question being asked around New Jersey as giant office parks — built along highways when the suburbs boomed in the second half of the 20th century — sit empty or half-empty while corporations shrink their footprints and younger workers look for a more urban, transit-friendly buzz.

In northern Bergen County, for example, A&P, Mercedes-Benz USA, Hertz and Pearson have left or soon will leave offices built in the 1970s and 1980s, when corporations headed out of the cities for greener suburbs.

“There was a whole movement toward beautiful, idyllic campuses, but the workforce today wants to be in an urban hub,” said Andrew Merin, vice chairman with Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate firm with offices in East Rutherford.

As a result, “each of these properties is going to have to invent its own future,” said James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.

Some of these properties are destined for the wrecking ball — including the former Pearson building in Upper Saddle River, owned by Mack-Cali, New Jersey’s largest office landlord, which is fighting to build housing on the site.

Others will be redeveloped. The most striking example is the ambitious, multimillion-dollar renovation of the old Bell Labs in Holmdel into Bell Works, a mixed-use property that aims to turn the landmark building’s giant atrium into an indoor Main Street with an “urban” vibe.

Whatever their fates, it’s clear that many of the state’s large, 30- or 40-year-old buildings will no longer function as home to a single corporate user. And, experts say, municipal officials who depended on those corporations — and their big property-tax payments — need to make another plan.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/big-office-buildings-look-to-reinvent-themselves-1.1440856

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Ridgewood Schools : Is too much technology good for the classroom?

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Is too much technology good for the classroom?

OCTOBER 23, 2015    LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2015, 12:31 AM
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Print

Is technology helping or hurting in the classroom?

To the Editor:

As a district, we have enthusiastically embraced technology in our schools. And it is certainly understandable why. With technology came the promise of improved educational outcomes for our children, and a greater chance for success competing in the 21st century global economy.

But parents are beginning to question the validity of this promise: Are children really learning more? Is their reading comprehension improving? What about their math ability?

Now, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has published a 200-page study, concluding that investing heavily in classroom technology does not improve student performance, and, in fact, frequent use of computers is more likely to be associated with lower results. For math, the study found that almost any time spent on the computer leads to poorer performance.

Internationally, the best-performing education systems, such as those in East Asia, have been very cautious about using technology in the classroom. Countries with the highest level of Internet use in schools either experienced significant declines in reading performance or stagnated.

Because of my earlier career developing software for IBM, I am acutely aware of the limitations of technology and certainly not bedazzled by it. Now I tutor math for the SAT, so I get to hear unfiltered reports of students’ experiences with technology.

Some teachers, apparently, require students take notes on their Chromebooks, even though some prefer to take notes by hand, because they believe they learn better that way. Research supports these students’ preferences; taking notes by hand results in deeper learning.

Chromebooks in the classroom frequently cause distractions because some students play games during class.

Textbooks are increasingly online, even though many students would prefer to have good paper textbooks, because they are easier to read.

There also appears to be a tendency on the part of some teachers to delegate to the computer the task of teaching, so there’s less interaction between student and teacher. Students do best in close human-to-human contact. The research supports this.

It’s interesting: the students who complain most about technology in the schools are strong students, those most interested in learning.

I think we might want to consider why the executives and employees of the top Silicon Valley firms send their kids to schools that have no technology in the early grades, absolutely none, and when it is introduced in eighth grade, it is used sparingly. It should give us pause to hear that the innovators developing these products refuse to expose their own children’s minds to them. Their thinking is that technology interferes with creativity, and young minds learn best through movement, hands-on tasks and human-to-human interaction.

The OECD report now gives us solid data linking frequent computer use in school to declining academic performance. In September, we learned that – nationally – students in the high school class of 2015 turned in the lowest critical reading score on the SAT in more than 40 years. The average score on the math portion of the SAT was the lowest since 1999.

Marlene Burton

Ridgewood

 

https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-letters-to-the-editor/ridgewood-news-letter-is-too-much-technology-good-for-the-classroom-1.1439450

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Common Core’s Corporate Backers Admit Widespread Failure of Textbooks

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Central planning sucks.

Robby Soave|Jul. 8, 2015 7:12 pm

DreamstimeStates that adopted the Common Core national education standards still can’t provide textbooks that actually teach what the standards require. That’s a big problem for students who have to take Core-mandated standardized tests that are misaligned with their teachers’ instructional materials.

An eye-opening investigation by Matt Collette of The Daily Beast reveals that most textbooks don’t fully meet the standards, despite advertising themselves as Core-aligned. Collette consulted EdReports, a non-profit that evaluates textbooks; the group recently reviewed more than 80 textbooks and found that only 11 of them matched Common Core requirements.

Most damning of all was the fact that Pearson—a publishing giant with significant Common Core ties and exclusive contracts to develop testing materials for some Core-compliant states—“had zero textbooks evaluated as being aligned with the Common Core,” according to Collette. This means, in a sense, that the gigantic corporation making the tests is also producing textbooks that don’t teach to those tests.

Additionally ironic—and certainly noteworthy—is the fact the EdReports is funded by the Gates Foundation, an organization that funded and developed the Common Core and lobbied for its widespread adoption. I would thus expect EdReports to air on the side of favorable coverage for Core-related matters. That even a Gates-funded endeavor has serious concerns about textbook compliance suggests to me that concern is indeed merited.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/07/08/common-cores-corporate-backers-admit-wid

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N.J. to review student privacy concerns about test monitoring

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N.J. to review student privacy concerns about test monitoring

March 19, 2015, 12:53 PM    Last updated: Friday, March 20, 2015, 12:29 AM
By HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
The Record

New Jersey’s education commissioner will review alleged cases of test-question leaks on the Internet to see if the state’s contractors violated student privacy when monitoring exam discussions online, officials said Thursday at an Assembly hearing.

The announcement follows days of public outrage over reports that the Pearson testing company scanned students’ comments and reported question leaks to the state Department of Education in what some people believe was a violation of student privacy.

At the hearing, legislators grilled education officials about the monitoring.

“I just find this to be unacceptable, to say we should monitor the social media of every student in New Jersey and to delegate it to a third party we don’t control,” said Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr., D-Middlesex, chairman of the education committee.

He added, “I think the response is disproportionate to find two or three questions.”

But education officials continued to defend the actions Thursday at a hearing before the Assembly Education Committee.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/education-officials-defend-monitoring-of-social-media-over-standardized-tests-1.1292328

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Bob Braun Reports that Pearson Is Spying on Social Media of Students Taking PARCC Tests

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pearsoncmyk2755

Bob Braun Reports that Pearson Is Spying on Social Media of Students Taking PARCC Tests
By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015

[Note from Diane: The link now says, “This Account Has Been Suspended.” I am not sure what this means. Some think his site crashed because of so many people trying to open it at the same time. Perhaps it will be back up soon. I hear it is posted on Bob Braun’s Facebook page. Read the comments below for that link.]

Bob Braun, an investigative reporter in New Jersey for the past 50 years, has learned that Pearson is spying on the social media accounts of students taking the PARCC tests.

Bob Braun writes:

Pearson, the multinational testing and publishing company, is spying on the social media posts of students–including those from New Jersey–while the children are taking their PARCC, statewide tests, this site has learned exclusively. The state education department is cooperating with this spying and has asked at least one school district to discipline students who may have said something inappropriate about the tests.

This website discovered the unauthorized and hidden spying thanks to educators who informed it of the practice–a practice happening throughout the state and apparently throughout the country. The spying–or “monitoring,” to use Pearson’s word–was confirmed at one school district–the Watchung Hills Regional High School district in Warren by its superintendent, Elizabeth Jewett.

Jewett sent out an e-mail–posted here– to her colleagues expressing concern about the unauthorized spying on students. She said parents are upset and added that she thought Pearson’s behavior would contribute to the growing “opt out” movement.

https://dianeravitch.net/2015/03/13/breaking-news-bob-braun-reports-that-pearson-is-spying-on-social-media-of-students-taking-parcc-tests/

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KING OF COMMON CORE PEARSON CLOSES CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AMID LEGAL TROUBLES

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KING OF COMMON CORE PEARSON CLOSES CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AMID LEGAL TROUBLES
Breitbart.com ^ | 21 Dec 2014 | DR. SUSAN BERRY

Posted on 12/21/2014, 8:08:18 PM by dontreadthis

Publishing giant Pearson Inc. is set to rake in billions of dollars in profits related to the implementation of the Common Core standards, but the corporation is now dealing with legal problems exposing some of its suspicious methods that have led to its status as the King of Common Core. snip As Breitbart News reported in December of 2013, the Pearson Foundation agreed to a $7.7 million settlement with the state of New York after accusations by the state’s attorney general that the foundation helped develop Common Core-aligned courses for Pearson, Inc., its corporate parent.

 

https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3239698/posts

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LA Schools’ $1 Billion iPad Fiasco Ends After Corruption Revelations

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LA Schools’ $1 Billion iPad Fiasco Ends After Corruption Revelations

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………..

Robby Soave|Aug. 27, 2014 1:55 pm

Los Angeles Unified School District is ending its billion-dollar iPad program, which has drawn widespread criticism for distributing expensive devices to teachers who didn’t know what to do with them and students who kept losing or breaking them.

The costly program was considered a total failure, and it’s little surprise that district officials have finally relented and scaled back. More surprising, however, are revelations that District Superintendent John Deasy may have engaged in some crooked bargaining to arrange the deal in the first place.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Deasy’s previous connections to Apple and Pearson—the companies contracted to supply the iPads and instructional materials for them, respectively—amount to a conflict of interest. In hindsight, the bidding process that Apple and Pearson won to score the contracts seems biased in those companies’ favor,The LA Times notes:

Last week, a draft report of a district technology committee, obtained by The Times, was strongly critical of the bidding process.

Among the findings was that the initial rules for winning the contract appeared to be tailored to the products of the eventual winners — Apple and Pearson — rather than to demonstrated district needs. The report found that key changes to the bidding rules were made after most of the competition had been eliminated under the original specifications.

In addition, the report said that past comments or associations with vendors, including Deasy, created an appearance of conflict even if no ethics rules were violated.

Emails obtained by The LA Times show Jaime Aquino, Deasy’s deputy superintendent, advising Pearson officials on how to win the bid.

https://reason.com/blog/2014/08/27/la-schools-1-billion-ipad-fiasco-ends-af