Protest at the McGraw-Hill Awards Ceremony
On January 29th, about 15 activists met at the New York Public Library to "meet
and greet" the education elite as they entered in tuxedos and high heels to
attend the McGraw-Hill Education Awards Banquet. Though this was a very last-
minute event, our group consisted of some local students and some parents from
the Parents' Consortium to Stop High Stakes Testing. Apparently, McGraw-Hill
also found out about our event at the last minute, and went to the
nomoretests.com site over 90 times in the two days before the event. We
specifically targeted McGraw-Hill in an attempt to expose their
mega-profiteering as a result of the recent increase in standardized testing. We
held a 20 foot "No More Tests" banner and passed out small "Awards in
Miseducation" explaining that it was not the award recipients that we were
protesting, but McGraw-Hill themselves.
Within an hour or two, we had become strangely friendly with many of the
McGraw-Hill executives, one of whom took a packet of information from us and agreed to
share it with the CEO. I hung around the area until the participants were
leaving, distributing info to those who didn't already have it. Towards the
very end, as the VP saw me approaching Harold McGraw II, he frantically offered
to give him the flyer to save even further embarassment, and put a flyer
through his limo window at the last minute. When one of the parents who
attended was at a meeting the next day with Charlotte Frank, a McGraw-Hill
executive who is also on the New York Board of Regents, she apparently could
not even talk to them she was so frustrated by our last-minute action.
Why We Prostested
On January 29, over 250 business leaders, bureaucrats and
education elites attended the awards ceremony to salute three of McGraw-Hill's
latest pro-testing and pro-business leaders. McGraw-Hill is among
the most profitable companies in the testing industry, and is intimately
connected to the Regents exams and the Bush administration's education
plan. These particular awards are a black-tie salute to the leaders of
the testing industry, not real education - last years winners were Rod
Paige (now Bush's Secretary of Education), Nancy Grasmick (Maryland State
Superintendent), and Sanford Weill (CEO of Citigroup). McGraw-Hill
creates and scores exams across the nation and is notorious for its
inaccuracies. In New York, a scoring mistake by CTB/McGraw-Hill caused
8,600 students to be mistakenly ordered to attend summer school, at the
end of which over 3,000 were told they would have to repeat a grade.
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