Anchor Lead:
As the school year winds down, students in Washington State - and across the country - have just finished taking standardized tests. Increasingly, student performance on these tests is how schools are judged. That means testing and test prep is big business. In the latest installment of our education series, "The Learning Curve," KPLU's Austin Jenkins looks at who's profiting from this trend in testing - the companies, the students, or both. 7:51

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Informative weblinks:

Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction

Eduventures.com, marketing and consulting for educational firms

Fairtest.org, against standardized testing

The Princeton Review, test preparation organization

Kumon.com, providing after-school tutoring

Puget Sound Educational Service District

AJ: In a San Francisco exhibition hall the size of a football field, educators from across the country browse the booths at a trade show. They've come here for a national education conference. Among them: a group of principals, superintendents and curriculum specialists from Washington State.
Mike Power with the Mercer Island School District points to a sign in the distance.

POWER: "Proven to increase test scores by as much as four hundred percent."

AJ: Mike leads the group toward the booth. But as he approaches the saleswoman, another sign catches his eye.

POWER: "We were attracted by your sign, correlated to your state standard. We're wondering how you do that?"

SALESWOMAN: "We look at each state's curriculum and match our products to correlate specifically to what that state requires and our products are not just correlated material, they're also very fun and interactive."

AJ: Correlated and interactive: two buzz words at this education trade show. In the competitive business of education products, companies know their curricula must correlate to what students will be tested on . They also know they have to be interactive in order to grab kids' attention.

COMPUTER: "This exhibit's called Busy Bees and it's a honey. In this exhibit you'll practice your math skills by using the honeycomb to study shapes and fractions. So, let's get busy as bees."

AJ: A couple of aisles over, another math program uses a familiar song to teach students their numbers.

COMPUTER: "Zero. Z eero. Zero is the number that's different from the others. Zero is a big round hole."

AJ: Buffy Kelly is a sales rep for this program.

KELLY: "Video games, I mean this is how they're being brought up, you know television and things like that. Well, I can't get up on my desk and stand and do a tap dance to get my children's attention and so this does this for me."

AJ: But it's not cheap. This program costs about three hundred dollars per child.
Deborah Gonzalez represents thirty-five school districts in the Puget Sound region. As she looks around the trade show, she says she worries about the money schools and districts, desperate to boost their test scores, will spend on these products.

GONZALEZ: "And it's ironic because schools are seeing less funding coming directly to them, districts are seeing less funding and yet we have a lot of money going into things like this."

AJ: At virtually every booth is a promise to help students learn more and perform better on standardized tests. According to the consulting firm Eduventures, K through 12 testing and test prep is a more than four billion dollar a year industry. Nearly seven billion if you include the companies that produce the curriculum designed to help teach students what they need to know for the tests. And it's a number that's expected to grow to more than ten billion in the coming years as more and more schools seek outside help to improve student performance.
Gayle Pauley is with the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Olympia. She holds in her hand a list of after school tutoring companies, also known as Supplemental Service Providers.

PAULEY: "Tutor dot com, The Princeton Review, Huntington Learning Centers."

AJ: There are fourteen providers on the list. These are the companies - and in a few cases non-profits - the state has approved to tutor low-income students. It's a requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind law passed in 2001. Schools that fail to improve their standardized test scores over three years, must divert some of the money they get from the federal government to low-income students for after school tutoring.
As a former public school teacher, Pauley says at first she was leery of these for-profit companies. But now considers them a partner in helping students succeed.

PAULEY: "The way it's managed and set up is that the students get the instruction during the day by their classroom teacher and then they have the opportunity to have someone work one-on-one or one and a small group."

AJ: According to Pauley, the companies charge from eight to twenty-five dollars for an hour of tutoring. This year alone Eduventures calculates that approximately one billion federal dollars are up for grabs nation-wide for after-school tutoring. And it anticipates these supplemental service providers will enjoy significant profit gains in the coming years as more and more students exercise their right to after school instruction. But Pauley says the companies will have to prove themselves.

PAULEY: "As a state, it's our responsibility to ensure that these providers are effectively working with children and showing that the children are growing academically."

INSTRUCTOR: "Twenty-three goes into 297?"
STUDENT: "Four times."
INSTRUCTOR: "Four, you're right. Four is good."

AJ: At a Kumon Math and Reading Center in Lynnwood, Instructor Renee Layendecker helps fifth grader Navid Haq with a math assignment.

INSTRUCTOR: "So it becomes?"
STUDENT: "Twenty-four, twenty-three."
INSTRUCTOR: "Exactly right, exactly right."

AJ: Kumon is one of the Supplemental Service Providers approved by Washington State to provide after school tutoring to students in schools that fail to improve their test scores. Navid is not one of those students. His father Mohammed enrolled him because he needed some extra help in math. But Mohammed says he doesn't mind the idea that soon his tax dollars may pay for low-income students to enroll at a place like Kumon.

HAQ: "I think it's definitely a good cause for the kids to give them an opportunity now rather than later on just be stuck in a rut of not being able to accomplish anything at all."

AJ: But not everyone is convinced.
Monty Neill is the Director of FairTest, a national anti-testing group. He's a vocal critic of the standardized testing industry and the No Child Left Behind legislation - which allocated nearly four-hundred million dollars last year to states to develop and fund new tests.

NEILL: "We might call the new federal law the "no testing company left behind" act."

AJ: Neill says education companies are now in a position to profit from federal education dollars by preying on the fears of parents and teachers.

NEILL: "You have desperate schools and school districts and parents often really wanting the kids to do better on these tests, even if they don't always think the tests are good and along come the companies that offer to jack up the test scores. If it produced really better education, we wouldn't complain."

COHEN: "The question he's really asking is can for-profit companies provide solutions as effectively as not-for-profit companies and the answer is of course."

AJ: Rob Cohen is the Executive Vice President of K through 12 services at the Princeton Review - a major player in the test prep market.

COHEN: "I think it's important for everyone to understand that for-profit companies provide a valuable service whether it's in supplemental services or in supporting the school system and companies like Princeton Review have a valuable role in helping schools succeed."

AJ: Back at the education trade show, the Washington State educators stop at a booth selling a geography game that includes a stain polyester globe students climb into and a giant floor map. The saleswoman explains how it works.

SALESWOMAN: "You are actually looking at, right now, the base mat, which is made out of a vinyl laminate and you are also looking at the states as puzzle pieces and you're looking at rubber chickens which are part of a game that can be used on the floor mats as well."

AJ: After listening to the pitch, Deborah Gonzalez, the curriculum specialist who represents several Puget Sound school districts, is skeptical.

GONZALEZ: "You have to ask yourself, ok, what is the learning having a child crawl into a globe, what's the learning of having them put rubber chickens on different map parts."

AJ: But Gonzalez and her colleagues are quick to point out there are many helpful products on the market. They also note that for-profit companies have long had a role in public education - textbook companies for instance. And like it or not, they know these companies will play an ever greater role in public education as standardized testing becomes the key benchmark by which schools in Washington State and across the country are judged.

Austin Jenkins, KPLU News.