Where Common Core Pays $$$

It’s interesting that the people who are usually in a fruitless search for Republican fat cats have failed to notice the actual ones for whom Common Core math actually does add up.

On September 20, 2013, Michelle Malkin reported that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s “educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests “aligned” to the top-down Common Core program.”

“One of the Bush foundation’s behemoth corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multi-billion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items. The company holds a $250 million contract with Florida to design and publish its state tests. Pearson designed New York’s Common Core-aligned assessments and is also the exclusive contractor for Texas state tests.”

“And in Los Angeles this summer, Pearson sealed a whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city’s schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps. That’s $678 per iPad, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this shiny edu-tech will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.”

More recently, at the Federalist, Joy Pullman reported on January 5, 2015 that “Idaho state Superintendent Tom Luna has spent the past four years as Common Core’s fiercest champion in a red state where voters rebuked his tech-heavy education agenda in a 2012 referendum. As Idaho superintendent, Luna makes $101,150 per year. He’ll get a boost when he moves on to Project Lead the Way, a curriculum development company that got a boost from Common Core making it suddenly a fit for nearly every school in the nation.”

“No word yet on Luna’s salary, but fellow vice presidents at the nonprofit make between $110,000 and $127,000, according to its latest 990.” The 990 is the IRS form non-profits file with the federal government.

“Oh, and by the way, former Education Secretary and Common Core-nik Bill Bennett is a senior advisor to Project Lead the Way,” Pullman adds. “ Since, as he told Politico when they reported he was paid by a public relations firm for a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Common Core, ‘I’m compensated for most of the things that I do,’ it’s fair to assume Bennett makes some money from Common Core curriculum, too, besides getting paid for his advocacy.”

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