Want a Teaching License? Just Pay Pearson!
A generous and forward-thinking company has finally stepped forward to help colleges and universities weed out those prospective teachers who just shouldn't make the cut... and it's Pearson, the company known for every textbook and basal reader not published by Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, or Cengage! They've offered to take on one of the most important roles that university faculty play in preparing students to become education professionals, the process of approving graduates for licensure.
Colleges (including Ohio University, which I'll get to in a moment) have already begun field-testing this system in the last year or two, but it's in the news now because instructors and student teachers at the University of Massachusetts are choosing to opt-out of sending their portfolios and final reports to a company best known in 2012 for introducing children across America to the story of a talking pineapple and other ridiculously unfair and biased test questions. (Pearson has since stated that its tests are valid and reliable. As always, it's the student's fault for not recognizing the moral of a story in which a group of animals inexplicably eat a pineapple because it doesn't have sleeves or something. I'm just as lost as everyone else.) I sure hope the 15-billion dollar company can maintain a profit in 2012.
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