The Common Core Gold Rush is On

From Michelle Malkin, "Common Core and the EduTech abyss":

The Common Core gold rush is on. Apple, Pearson, Google, Microsoft and Amplify are all cashing in on the federal standards/testing/textbook racket. But the EduTech boondoggle is no boon for students. It’s more squandered tax dollars down the public school drain.

Even more worrisome: The stampede is widening a dangerous path toward invasive data mining.

According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the ed tech sector “is expected to more than double in size to $13.4 billion by 2017.” That explosive growth is fueled by Common Core’s top-down digital learning and testing mandates. So: Cui bono?

In North Carolina, the Guilford County public school district withdrew 15,000 Amplify tablets last fall. Pre-loaded with Common Core apps and part of a federal $30 million Race to the Top grant program, the devices peddled by News Corp. and Wireless Generation were rendered useless because of defective cases, broken screens and malfunctioning power supplies.

Last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District dumped $1 billion of scarce resources into a disastrous iPad program. Educrats paid $678 per glorified Apple e-textbook, pre-loaded with Common Core-branded apps created by Pearson. As I’ve reported previously, Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded “standards” scheme. Pearson’s digital learning products are used by an estimated 25 million-plus people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.

Students breached the LAUSD’s iPad firewalls and made a mockery of their hapless adult guardians. Despite hefty investments in training and development, many teachers couldn’t figure out how to sync up the tablets in the classroom. Taxpayers now realize they were sold a grossly inflated bill of goods, but the district wants to buy even more iPads for computerized test-taking. School officials recklessly plan to use school construction debt-financing to pay for the new purchases.

Los Angeles taxpayer Planaria Price summed up swelling outrage perfectly in a letter to the Los Angeles Times this week: “Cash-strapped LAUSD — which in 2012 cut libraries, nurses, thousands of teachers, administrators and support staff … is spending more than $1 billion on one of the nation’s most expensive technology programs. … I would say that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ but few would understand because the teaching of Shakespeare has also been cut.”

Literally outrageous, and a little depressing.

But keep reading in any case.