 Scott McLeod (@mcleod)5/26/13 11:00 AM Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring businessbit.ly/10Vm5gh |
2002, President George Bush signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act. While testing around the country had been on the rise for decades, NCLB tripled it.
n 2009, K-12 testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry
Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes.
"The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted," he says. "It's a farce."
The Twin Cities were early beneficiaries of the gold rush. Minnesota's history as an early computer hardware hotbed led to the creation of some of the earliest data-scanning and numbers-crunching businesses here, including Scantron and Nationa
In 2000, NCS was bought by Pearson, a multinational corporation based in London, making it a part of the largest education company in the world. In 2009, it posted $652 million in profits.
"Nobody is saying, 'I'm doing good work, I'm helping society,'" she says. "Everyone is saying, 'This isn't right.'"
Or the essays where the handwriting got rushed and jumbled at the end, then cut off abruptly—he imagined the proctor telling the frantic student to lay down his pencil on a well-written but incomplete response
Over the next several months, Indovino got to know her co-workers better. The young people were mostly laid off or in foreclosure. They came straight from paper routes and went off to waitressing jobs afterward.
They also made for a very dedicated workforce. Indovino says she saw her co-workers hung-over, extremely ill, and even fresh from surgery.
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but there's not a dot. ass(dot)ess
assess - to sit beside.
redefine - literally.
redefine - literally.