Move fast and break teachers,or what if Facebook bought Pearson?

Abstract

This study takes a short trip into the near future to see what happens if Facebook bought the global education corporation Pearson. It takes a prefactual stance, meaning that it is responding to and extrapolating from an event that has not yet happened, but very probably could. The theoretical framework of this piece is futures studies, specifically educational futures, to take contemporary education policy issues and imagine what happens to them when they encounter our present-day anxieties of the future of society. Responding to the call for a creative turn in educational futures, the study uses a narrative approach to considerations of a probable future in which Mark Zuckerberg decides to stop donating hundreds of millions of dollars to various schooling projects and instead purchases Pearson's monopoly in the areas of teacher testing and licensing. In this way, Facebook exerts a level of control over teacher preparation that, while frightening, could very well come to pass. This piece also hopes to contribute to the development of educational dystopia as academic literature.