Uh oh. 

There will be no MCA testing today in Minnesota. Like so many schoolchildren who can’t sit still, the tests have been suspended.

Naughty, naughty, naughty.

The super high-tech $38 million online only delivery system for the MCAs has been behaving badly, by seizing up and freezing and otherwise not allowing the testing high season to define the school day across Minnesota.

Now, teachers and students will be like estranged family members forced to look at each other across the Thanksgiving table:

Who are you again? How do we know each other? What do you want from me?

Without mandatory marches down to silent computer labs, what will teachers and their scholars in training do all day?  Get to know each other, or something?

What’s the point?

I wonder if these suspended Pearson tests will be punished harshly, under a zero tolerance policy, especially since this latest episode of techno-glitches is far from the company’s first offense:

January 2015: Pearson, MN Dept. of Ed sort through testing breakdowns 

May  2014: A history of Pearson’s testing problems worldwide

April 2013: Pearson fails the test, again and again

Is there a prison for these bad tests, their flawed online delivery systems, and the gigantic beast of a company that packages and sells all of this? Some kind of debtor’s prison? Haven’t they promised to help us, the all important taxpayers, hold our schools accountable? And haven’t they failed us one too many times?

Can we counsel Pearson out of our public education system?

Oh wait– I almost forgot:

“Pearson has aggressive lobbyists, top-notch marketing and a highly skilled sales team.“

What a surprise. There is always money for Pearson, and always money for test coordinators and test prep and special Spring Break Academy test prep sessions, even as Minnesota legislators contemplate just how little money they can get away with spending on E-12 education in the state.

Unfunded special education mandates? Who cares?

Growing child poverty rates? Not our problem. 

But Pearson? Pearson? We can’t live without them! And they’ll probably be really super mad at us for suspending their tests.

At least, if our Gopher State scholars drop out of high school in droves because they get suspended too many times, or because they can’t hack learning in a classroom of 45, or because they have failed to find the pursuit of rigorous standards thrilling, they can take Pearson’s GED test someday.

Bonus section! Read all about it:

K-12 superintendents and college administrators alike struggle to boost enrollment, raise graduation rates, improve academic outcomes — and to do it all while cutting costs.

In this atmosphere of crisis, Pearson promises solutions. It sells the latest and greatest, and it’s no fly-by-night startup; it calls itself the world’s leading learning company. Public officials have seized it as a lifeline.

“Pearson has been the most creative and the most aggressive at [taking over] all those things we used to take as part of the public sector’s responsibility,” said Michael Apple, a professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

–from Stephanie Simon’s 2015 Politico piece about Pearson, “No Profit Left Behind”