Profit Over Pupils

Each spring, millions of students across the U.S. sit in silence—pencils down, stress levels up—as they face yet another round of standardized testing. While sold to the public as tools for accountability and measuring learning, these exams often reveal more about zip codes than academic ability. Behind the scenes, a small group of companies rakes in billions while students, teachers, and schools bear the brunt of the damage.

Who’s Making the Tests and Cashing the Checks? Just a few corporations dominate the standardized testing industry:

Pearson – One of the world’s largest education publishers, Pearson has contracts with dozens of states for high-stakes assessments like PARCC, state exit exams, and teacher certification tests.

Educational Testing Service (ETS) – Creator of the SAT, GRE, and many state assessments. Although ETS is technically a nonprofit, it pays its executives multi-million-dollar salaries (Ravitch, 2010).

Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) – Supplies assessments to state departments and special education services.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and McGraw-Hill – These curriculum publishers profit from selling benchmark tests aligned with the very standards being assessed.

Together, these companies form a testing-industrial complex that profits from every scantron bubble filled.

How Are These Tests Made? Most standardized tests are created using item banks—collections of prewritten multiple-choice questions that are reused across states. Students often "field test" new items unknowingly, and results from these questions don’t even count toward their scores (Au, 2009). Additionally, these tests are frequently norm-referenced, meaning students are measured against each other rather than against clear learning goals.

Are They Accurate Measures of Learning? Research consistently shows that standardized test scores are strongly correlated with factors such as household income, parental education, and race, rather than student ability or school quality (Rothstein, 2004). These assessments fail to capture critical thinking, creativity, resilience, or growth—essential components of real learning and future success.

Follow the Money: Political Influence Testing companies are deeply embedded in education policy. Pearson and ETS have spent millions on lobbying and campaign donations to maintain federal testing mandates under legislation like No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act (Strauss, 2015). In some cases, education commissioners who awarded lucrative testing contracts later received campaign support or job offers from those same companies.

How Schools and Students Suffer

Narrowed Curriculum: Teachers feel intense pressure to “teach to the test,” often cutting science, social studies, arts, and hands-on projects (Au, 2009).

Student Anxiety: Studies show that high-stakes testing increases student anxiety, especially for elementary-aged students (Segool et al., 2013).

Punitive Consequences: These scores are used to rank schools, deny diplomas, and evaluate teachers—despite their lack of reliability as tools for growth and support.

Who Benefits? Not Our Kids. While testing giants collect billions, our students are reduced to numbers, and teachers are demoralized. The system favors profit over pedagogy. It’s time to reimagine assessment—not as a punishment, but as a tool for support, equity, and meaningful learning.

Call to Action: What if we redirected those billions toward smaller class sizes, mental health support, and teacher retention? Let’s start the conversation. Do you believe standardized testing helps or harms student success? Reply to this newsletter or vote in our latest poll.

In solidarity,

The Merchant Ship Collective

References Au, W. (2009). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. Routledge.

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. Basic Books.

Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools: Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the Black–White achievement gap. Economic Policy Institute.

Segool, N. K., Carlson, J. S., Goforth, A. N., von der Embse, N. P., & Barterian, J. A. (2013). Heightened test anxiety among young children: Elementary school students’ anxious responses to high-stakes testing. Psychology in the Schools, 50(5), 489–499. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.21689

Strauss, V. (2015, January 7). How much money Pearson makes from education—and how. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com