Dear Community Member,

I have learned of Pearsons relationships with members of the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) and the organizations undue influence on state lawmaking.
Why is this company participating in an organization that has been instrumental in promoting a
privatized, for-profit corporate model for public education? Why has their company, supposedly
dedicated to providing quality educational resources to all children and PUBLIC schools,
merged with organizations such as Connections Academy, whose director is the co-chair of
ALECs Education Task Force, and Americas Promise Alliance, whose funding sources include
Lumina, The Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundations (all members of ALEC)?
Organizations that have made it clear that they favor the dismantling of public education. How
can they expect to keep the trust and respect of parents, teachers and community members who
care about the preservation of public education, and whose educational tax payer dollars are
being redistributed to line Pearsons stock portfolios? How can Pearson, in good conscience,
reap billions of dollars (much of which is federal and state tax payer dollars) through Race to
the Top funding and other model legislation while public schools starve?
Why would they want to cozy up behind closed doors with the Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco to
financially underwrite ALEC whose corporate-minded agenda is to rewrite educational state
laws throughout the country in a venue where American parents, teachers and children have no
opportunity to resist reform measures that are destroying community schools and promoting
punitive testing measures which border on child abuse?
This partnership Pearson has with ALEC is unhealthy for our democracy and unhealthy for the
children in our schools.
Please join us in boycotting Pearson. We refuse to contribute our monies to the destruction of
meaningful teaching and learning for our children and the destruction of public education. We
refuse to use our own monies to profit a corporation whose agenda erodes our own childrens
futures. Share this information with PTAs, school boards, libraries and schools. Refuse to buy or
adopt their materials if you are an educator. Promote the use of ACT rather than SAT, as SAT is
a Pearson product. Inform Pearson of your actions.

Sincerely,
---------------------

Supporting Resources/Notes for Pearson Boycott
o Grad Nation Summits supporters/presenters reads like an ALEC yearbook.

o Alan Singer. Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit

o Susan Ohanian. Condi Rice-Joel Klein report: Not the new A Nation at Risk

o The Council on Foreign Affairs report was also written by: Joel Klein, Chancellor
of NYC schools, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, ACT, Common Core
author David Coleman and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Teach For
Americas Wendy Kopp, the American Enterprise Institutes Rick Hess and Stand
for Childrens Jonah Edelman, and Pearson. See Huffington Post.

o Alternet: Standardized Tests Hurt Kids and Public Schools: Teachers, Parents,
Take a Stand Against Corporate-Backed Test Regime

o Poor Public Education is a Threat to National Security

o GradNation Summit

o In the words of Examiner reporter Jennie Smith (April 24th, 2012): In the Age of
Accountability, the only ones not accountable for anything, apparently, are the
testing giants who have lobbied hard for the accountability legislation. Then
again, they are accountable to someoneits just not children or teachers.

o Rapoport writes: From textbooks to data management, professional development
programs to testing systems, Pearson has it alland all of it has a price. For
statewide testing in Texas alone, the company holds a five-year contract worth
nearly $500 million to create and administer exams. If students should fail those
tests, Pearson offers a series of remedial-learning products to help them pass.
Meanwhile, kids are likely to use textbooks from Pearson-owned publishing
houses like Prentice Hall and Pearson Longman. Students who want to take
virtual classes may well find themselves in a course subcontracted to Pearson.
And if the student drops out, Pearson partners with the American Council on
Education to offer the GED exam for a profit.

o While more may be found about ALEC at www.alecexposed.org , briefly stated:
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that.
Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the
changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with
legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine
ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve model bills. They have
their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative
board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost
all of ALECs operations. Elected legislators who are active in ALEC,
overwhelmingly right-wing politicians, then bring those proposals home and
introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and
important public policy innovationswithout disclosing that corporations crafted
and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills
introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them
enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a unique, unparalleled and
unmatched organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been
reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.

o Connections Academy, a nation-wide online education program designed to
replace public schools, is headed by Mickey Ravenaugh, who happens to be the
co-chair for the Education Commission for ALEC. is a division of Connections
Education LLC, a private school based in Baltimore, MD that contracts with
charter schools, school districts, or governmental entities to provide online
lessons to students. Sylvan Ventures started Connections Academy in 2001. The
company started its first schools in 2001, and in 2004, Connections Academy was
sold to Apollo Management, L.P.,a corporate investor specializing in real estate.
The website states that: The company now operates tuition-free public schools
under management contracts from charter schools. Pearson purchased
Connections from private equity firm Apollo Management LP for $400 million.
Read more: Apollo exits Connections Education via $400M sale to Pearson The
Deal Pipeline

o Sir Michael Barber is the current Chief Education Advisor for Pearson. Sir
Michael Barber published Deliverology 101in 2011 to serve as a comprehensive
guide to Education system reform and delivery. Governments and large public
organizations (from the Louisiana school system to the Malaysian government)
have systematically adopted the deliverology approach and realized quick
impact and significantly improve outcomes to their reform programs. In the
summer of 2010, Sir Michael Barber teamed with leaders from the Education
Trust (also funded by the holy trinity Eli Broad, Walton, and Lumina) and
Achieve (funded by State Farm and Lumina) to found the U.S. Education
Delivery Institute (EDI).In an interview Barber is cited as saying: I think one of
the best things Blair did was design his education reform to build on the important
Conservative reforms. So weve had 18 years of reform with a series of consistent
threads: devolution of resources, strong accountability, setting standards, national
tests and introduction of school inspection We implemented a national literacy
strategy in primary schools, followed quite rapidly by numeracy using the same
model: Large-scale reform driven from the top down; designing all the materials
at the national level and training everybody in a cascade out; using the
accountability system to publish results and school inspection to check that people
were adopting better practices. Essentially its about creating different forms of a
quasi-market in public services, exploiting the power of choice, competition,
transparency and incentives, and thats really where the education debate is going
now. I think that the concept that you devolve money to schools, you encourage
choice, you make it easier for new providers to come in as some U.S. charter laws
do, and you make it easier for networks of schools to develop brandsall of that
is conceptually sound. Read the interview.

o A small but significant diversion here EDI works behind the scenes with
several state departments of education including MA, KY, and RI to develop their
state reform agendas including but limited to Race to the Top (RTTT) From their
own website they state: Our mission is to partner with K-12 and higher education
systems with ambitious reform agendas and invest in their leaders capacity to
deliver results. The biggest funding partner with EDI is wait for it folks.Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation.Board of Directors for EDI is a familiar cast of
characters: Michale Cohen President of Achieve, David Britt who serves as Board
Chair of EdTrust, Dr. David Driscoll, Former Massachusetts Commissioner of
Education, Kati Haycock, President of the Education Trust, Dr. Teri Quinn Gray,
President, Delaware State Board of Education Kathy Cox who served as
Georgias State Superintendent of Schools from 2003 until 2010. Robert
Schwartz, Chair, Academic Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
From 1997-2002 he also served as president of Achieve. He currently co-chairs
The Aspen Institutes Education Program and serves on the boards of The
Education Trust, The Noyce Foundation and The Rennie Center for Education
Research and Policy.

o More on Tom Luna can be found here.

o Other Pearson Partners IncludeNew Leaders for New SchoolsBoard of Directors:
Jay Altman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, FirstLine Schools
Josh Bekenstein, Managing Director, Bain Capital, LLC
Christopher M. Chadwick, President, Boeing Military Aircraft Integrated
Defense System
Jean Desravines, Chief Executive Officer, New Leaders
Barbara Hyde, President, J.R. Hyde III Family Foundation
Mike Johnston, Colorado State Senator, Senate District 33 and Co-Founder, New
Leaders
S. Joshua Lewis, Founder and Managing Partner, Salmon River Capital
Ted Mitchell (Board Chair), Chief Executive Officer, NewSchools Venture
Fund
Jonathan Schnur, Co-Founder, New Leaders and Executive Chairman and Co-
Founder, America Achieves
Naomi O. Seligman, Senior Partner, Ostriker von Simson, Inc.
Jan Rock Zubrow, Founder and President, MedCapital, LLC.

o Tucker Capital Corporation Advises ACE and Pearson on a Partnership to
Transform the GED Test, Aligned with Common Core State Standards, Based on
GED 21st Century Initiative Enhanced GED Testing Program Will Validate
Career- and College-ReadinessMarch, 2011 The Tucker Capital Corporation
acted as exclusive advisor to The American Council on Education (ACE) and
Pearson on the creation of a ground-breaking new business that will drive the
future direction, design, and delivery of the GED testing program. Building on
the goals of the GED 21st Century Initiative, the two partners will combine their
collective expertise and resources to develop a new GED Test aligned with
Common Core State Standards that will assure colleges, universities and
prospective employers that adults who have passed the GED Tests are prepared to
compete and succeed in a global economy.Tucker Education, a division of Tucker
Capital Corporation, offers revenue strategy consulting, joint venture and
partnership facilitation, as well as M&A advisory to Education companies. We
deliver counsel to Education companies throughout every phase of their growth
cycle. We work with both entrepreneurs and executives to accelerate growth,
enhance core business functions and prepare clients for capital market
activities.Tucker Capitals team draws on over 25 years of experience working
with Basal Publishers and start-ups selling into the Education market place, to
bring an understanding of the unique market challenges and a firm grasp of the
innovative technologies that are altering the landscape. Education clients include:
American Council on Education
Bayard Presse USA
BenchPrep
Childcraft Education Corp
Delta Education
Gopher Sports
Hampton Brown
Kaplan Companies, Inc
National Geographic School Publishing
Scholastic Corp
The JASON Project
Time-Life Education