As of three years ago the government was paying nearly $2 billion on standardized testing annually. Yet, you have some people claiming that's not enough. That's the real racket, folks. The money being generated from making and distributing these tests throughout the country is the real racket and it's part of the reason you see this witch hunt that is taking place in a courtroom in downtown Atlanta.
We live in a country where prisons are private corporations that profit from keeping their beds stocked at, or near, capacity and the governing officials scramble to meet contractual “lockup quotas.” Some of these quotas are as low as 80%. While some are between 95% and 100%. In many states taxpayers have to pay for any empty beds should crime rates fall below that quota. The billions of dollars that the private prison corporations make off of mass incarceration is the real racket. Keep in mind these corporations use the reading test scores from these standardized tests of 3rd graders to determine when and where they will need to build new prisons. Are you starting to see the jig rise?
Once a person is incarcerated, other than get free, what is the one thing they want to do? You guessed it, talk to their loved ones on the outside. Did you know it costs about $18 for a 15 minute phone call? That's .89 cents per minute, plus a $3.95 per call fee. Considering that there are over 2.2 million people in federal and state prisons throughout the country, you do the math on how much money the phone companies who have the contracts with the prisons are making. Trust me, they aren't just smuggling in cell phones to check their social media timelines. That's the real racket, folks.
College coaches start tracking players as early as sixth grade in an attempt to get an upper hand on the competition when it comes to recruiting. Feeder programs like AAU help coaches weed out the bad groom the good and the good from the great and the great from the elite. Unfortunately, standardized testing and zero tolerance policies help to do the same for private prison corporations and Corporate America as a whole. Thus, you have the School to Prison Pipeline. In addition, these new Common Core standards are definitely meant to to separate the cream from the crop. Well, what's so wrong with that? Ever see an old classmate who didn't seem very smart and you just knew they weren't going to amount to anything but happens to be doing very well for themselves? That's what's so wrong with it. It doesn't allow for potential growth or evolution. Anyone who knows anything about business knows that you have to be able to forecast in order to maximize opportunities to increase your bottom line. That's precisely what these tests are doing for private prison corporations and Corporate America. That's the real racket, folks.
A jury has found 11 educators guilty of racketeering or violation of the RICO Act and they face several years in prison. Federal and state racketeering, profiteering and RICO laws make it against the law for any criminal organization to profit from any legitimate business operation. Which sounds more like racketeering, price gouging people to make phone calls because you hold a monopoly on the phones in prisons, making backroom deals which essentially sell the freedom of citizens in order to meet lockup quotas, setting kids up to fail in order to get them caught up in the system so that you can ensure future occupancy rates, and paying people billions of dollars to make tests that make all of those things go...or erasing a wrong answer and making it right on a test in order to save schools from state take over? Some of the schools involved still didn't make AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress so there was no extra funding to be had.
What those educators did was wrong, but who's the real racketeer?
