A sales manager at one of America’s largest textbook publishing companies has been fired after she was caught making shocking claims about Common Core on video.
A hidden camera set up by Project Veritas investigative film journalists captured Dianne Barrow, the West Coast sales manager for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, saying that Common Core enables publishing companies to sell more textbooks, thus making more money.
She laughed as she said that she “hates kids” and focuses only on selling books. “I’m in it to sell books; don’t even kid yourself for a heartbeat,” she added.
“You don’t think that educational publishing companies are in it for the education, do you?” she said. “No, they’re in it for the money.”
“It’s all about the money,” she said again at another point in the video released earlier this week. “What, are you crazy? It’s all about the money.”
Barrow was fired soon after the video emerged, a company vice president told the Daily Mail.
The company’s CEO Linda Zecher told the Daily Mail that she and her employees are “as appalled by these comments as we expect readers will be.”
“These statements in no way reflect the views of HMH and the commitment of our over 4,000 employees who dedicate their lives to serving teachers and students every day,” Zecher said. “The individual who made these comments is a former employee who was with HMH for less than a year.”
But later in the video, a Brooklyn teacher identified as Jodi Cohen is caught saying that Common Core “is a joke.”
“It’s [expletive] and the thing is, what they do is they create some new [expletive] system, that [expletive] sucks to sell more books and then we have to learn something new with the students,” she said.
“It’s all a money game. It’s all a money game.”
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