Pearson

I've been doing that for over 15 years now.

At a certain point, I was working actually for Pearson at one point.

I was doing some online tutoring on the side.

And there were some other things that had occurred in the state of Illinois where Bruce Rauner, who was the governor at the time, was stalling on the budget.

And I saw this as a ploy to push public institutions into private receivership.

All this is going on.

And while I was tutoring for Pearson, they decided they were going to have IBM's Watson co-pilot with us.

And for those who don't know, IBM's Watson was like the premier AI at the time before all the generative AI stuff.

discussions.

She also serves on the Pearson's AI Strategic Council.

Victoria Lansdowne, welcome to EdTech Insiders.

Thank you so much for having me, Alex.

So I'm thinking of a few ed tech leaders.

I think just referencing whenever you have a set of curriculum, noting which tools can be grounded in that curriculum.

Pearson has a smart lesson generator that's grounded in global scale of English standards and Globally recognized standards for English language learning and recognizing that there are some of these tools that are source grounded and are safe to use.

Having those as a list of resources for teachers to explore or another element, another direction I'm thinking of taking this is there are so many platforms out there like Magic School.

She is VP of Product at Learning Commons where she leads teams to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner.

Kristen had spent 20 years in product development, leading teams at Pearson and K12.com. She specializes in transforming complex challenges into rigorous, user-friendly solutions.

Quite the intro.

Welcome to the pod, Brian and Kristen.

... and, and I'm, I'm a real huge advocate to, um, wanting to partner widely.

So we were able to, to develop a relationship with the Penguin, um, Lit in Colour work alongside Pearson, um, with reference to our English curriculum and how we could-

Mm

... perhaps start advocating for diverse texts being studied at key stage four.

Mm

... and how that made them feel uncomfortable in lessons.

Um, and I know that fro- from the research and the data that's come out, um, from, uh, Pearson's Penguin Lit in Colour project, that's a national thing around-

Yeah

States, people in state government always want more state control, so they, "We'll get more control then, because we're gonna control the assessment mechanism." And also, here's this federal money.

It seems like many of them just didn't realize that the money spigot was gonna get turned off, right? And that's what happened, though, which is you ha-- we're left with a bunch of states where it's, like, forty-five, fifty dollars a student goes to Pear- to Pearson for their state, you know, assessments at third and eighth grade.

You multiply that across, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of kids, that's a lot of money, right? So w- so, like, i- if you wanna understand part of the reason why this is pulling back, right, this sort of parent-led, you know, opt-out movement is the sort of optics on the top, but a lot of states were really eager to slash these costs anyway.

And so what you have ultimately is, you have this sort of, nobody is gonna admit to it, but a sort of a low grumble of people understanding that, that, you know, the, the teacher quality stuff isn't very high value, even if you take the sort of expansive view, and then the extreme cost.

And you c- sort of arrive at this place where, without, like, an ideological transformation, you have a lot of states saying, "What are we getting for our, you know, the f- the forty-five, fifty, fifty-five dollars we're sending to Pearson per student every year?" You know?

Well, I think that's a key point.

I think another thing that you point out with the, with this parents opt-out movement are with some of these, quote-unquote, "woke reforms." That I've also been banging a drum about for six years is [clears throat] these initiatives almost solely are economic because the rationale for them are d- diametrically opposed, but the effects are, are, are the same.

Today's guest is Mr. Vinay Kumar Swamy.

He's the country head of Pearson India.

Pearson is a lifelong learning company.

It offers digital content assessments, qualifications, and data-driven learning solutions.

Pearson published a recent report in which they found that AI can already do 37% of entry-level tasks in India, a number that's a lot higher than the UK and other countries.

So, why is that?

Just a little bit of context there.

They're not basically forced by market pressures and fiduciary responsibilities to destroy children's brains.

You know where this is all going, though? Eventually, there's going to be a total takeover of public education by Pearson.

And then there's going to be a fusion of Pearson and the hyperscalers.

Pearson Meta sounds like a real company.

And what it'll be is you'll have screen time blocks until the kids complete their homework, which will be on device.

And that'll be the negotiated compromise, will be that they will do psychic and brain damage, brain rot feed, interspersed with teach-to-the-test drills for education.