The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled a list of America’s highest-paid government employees. They are not teachers or nurses or social workers.
“Time and again we’re told that librarians, nurses and teachers are to blame for state and local budget problems,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “In reality, taxpayers are being duped by corporate CEOs and Wall Street banks that are siphoning money out of our communities for huge salaries and bonus packages.”
CMD writes:
The effort is part of our ongoing new project,OutsourcingAmericaExposed.org, which focuses on 12 firms doing the most to privatize public services.
Today, CMD puts the spotlight on Ron Packard, CEO of K12 Inc., America’s highest paid teacher.
K12 Inc. is a publicly-traded (NYSE: LRN) for-profit, online education company headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. On its own and as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), K12 Inc. has pushed a national agenda to replace bricks and mortar classrooms with computers and replace actual teachers with “virtual” ones. As K12 Inc. notes in its most recent 10-K, “most of (its) revenues depend on per pupil funding amounts and payment formulas” from government contracts for virtual public charter schools and “blended schools” (combining online with traditional instruction), among other products.
From 2009-2013, Packard received $19 million in taxpayer dollars. Not bad for a government employee!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For the past 4 plus years, Chris Christie has been screaming and bloviating against the “golden parachute” given to those greedy, selfish grasping public employees called teachers. From all his propagandizing (LYING), you would think that teachers were responsible for NJ’s fiscal woes and for the problems with the underfunded pension fund. How dare those teachers have a defined benefit pension while an increasing number of private sector workers are denied pensions, health benefits, paid vacations and sick leave. The billionaires will not be happy until they have totally killed off pensions, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid or any kind of job security for the great mass of ordinary working class Americans. It’s obscene.
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Don’t governors get their own pensions? I believe Illinois governors do. Is Christie planning to forego his?
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Yes, I’m sure Christie will get a pension from his gig as governor plus other benefits. He was also the US attorney for NJ, will he get a pension from that position plus other possible benefits? I don’t really know. In Christie’s mind’s eye, he is deserving of a pension and health benefits while a lowly teacher should just be happy to have a job, no pension for you (teacher). Imagine the Soup Nazi as CC is saying no pension for you. CC is your typical political hypocritter.
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Here’s a quickie review of a Henry Giroux book that sums things up nicely: “Education and the Crisis of Public Values examines American society’s shift away from democratic public values, the ensuing move toward a market-driven mode of education, and the last decade’s growing social disinvestment in youth. The book discusses the number of ways that the ideal of public education as a democratic public sphere has been under siege, including full-fledged attacks by corporate interests on public school teachers, schools of education, and teacher unions. It also reveals how a business culture cloaked in the guise of generosity and reform has supported a charter school movement that aims to dismantle public schools in favor of a corporate-friendly privatized system. The book encourages educators to become public intellectuals, willing to engage in creating a formative culture of learning that can nurture the ability to defend public and higher education as a general good – one crucial to sustaining a critical citizenry and a democratic society.” Giroux has appeared on the most recent Bill Moyers show.
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Dynamite information! Just what we need to spread.
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Reblogged this on Naked Teaching and commented:
Are we going to sit still for this?
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In Florida, our man Rick Scott signed into law a requirement that all high school students must take at least one online class. I wonder why he did that??!!
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We’re lucky it’s just one! He’d bulldoze every school personally if he could get away with it.
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“The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled a list of America’s highest-paid government employees. They are not teachers or nurses or social workers.”
Nor should they be, obviously.
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Sourcewatch maintains an excellent corporate profile of K12, Inc., including a list of controversies involving the company (high drop-out rates, misuse of tax dollars, astroturfing, and use of uncertified teachers).
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/K12_Inc.
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An important bit of information, available on Sourcewatch and other sites, is that Andrew Tisch provided $10 million of the $40 million used by Packard to start up K12, Inc. Andrew Tisch is Merryl Tisch’s brother in law. He sits on the Board of K12, Inc. She is the Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. I was just informed by my NY State Assemblyman that it was not the NY legislature that signed on to Common Core. It was the NY Board of Regents that made that decisive commitment.
So let’s get this straight. Merryl signs NY up for CC. NY is forced to agree to raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in the state. Merryl is in charge of approving charter schools. So Merryl approves lots more charter schools in NY. Her husband’s brother, Andrew, gets lots of NY contracts for K12, inc. online learning.
Can we call it a conflict of interest? A breach of trust? Something akin to insider trading? Or just plain rotten, considering k12 is accessing taxpayer funding and not delivering a worthwhile product. Less than 50% of students enrolled finish the academic year and only 27% of K12 schools met AYP in 2012.
Even hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, effectively betting that the company would fail with an unsustainable education model.Tilson said in a September 2013 presentation document that although average revenues per student are on the rise and the concept of online education has “strong political support, especially among Republicans” as well as “enormous buzz,” “K12’s aggressive student recruitment has led to dismal academic results by students and sky-high dropout rates, in some cases more than 50% annually” and “there have been so many regulatory issues and accusations of malfeasance that I’m convinced the problems are endemic.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/K12_Inc.
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I’m in NYC. I’d post this on my FB page, but I already have another piece up there. Don’t want to overload my friends…but they are listening and this is soooo important. The corruption is rampant.
I’ll post it tomorrow. Your link led me to a blank page of theirs, btw. Got another?
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This information needs to be broadcast widely. Thank you for spreading the word.
I copy pasted most of that page just in case you can’t get there. Try these links:
http://www.k12.com/about-k12/our-team/board#.UpVVguKCWuI
http://www.sourcewatch.org
K12 Inc.
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Find the privatizers and profiteers at OutsourcingAmericaExposed.org.
Learn more about corporations VOTING to rewrite our laws.
K12 Inc. is a publicly-traded (NYSE: LRN) for-profit, online education company headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. As K12 Inc. notes in its most recent annual report, “most of (its) revenues depend on per pupil funding amounts and payment formulas” from government contracts for virtual public charter schools and “blended schools” (combining online with traditional instruction) among other products. In 2013, K12 Inc. took in $848.2 million from its business, with $730.8 million coming from its “managed public schools” and thus the U.S. taxpayer.[1]
K12 Inc. was founded by former Goldman Sachs executive Ron Packard and former United States Secretary of Education and right-wing talk show host William Bennett in 1999.[2][3] Packard was able to start K12 Inc. with $10 million from convicted junk-bond king Michael Milken and $30 million more from other Wall Street investors.[4][5] For more on this, read PRWatch investigation: “From Junk Bonds to Junk Schools: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades”, October 2013.
K12 Inc. on its own and as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has pushed a national agenda to replace bricks and mortar classrooms with computers and replace actual teachers with “virtual” teachers. K12 Inc. operated 58 full-time virtual schools and enrolled close to 77,000 students in the 2010-2011 school year, according to a May 2013 report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC, a research organization at the University of Colorado at Boulder).[6] Many have questioned the company’s extraordinary revenue and profit levels, largely generated at taxpayers’ expense.[7][8]
Although K12 Inc. was born on Wall Street, some on Wall Street have turned against the model. As of September 2013, hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, effectively betting that the company would fail with an unsustainable education model.[9][10] Tilson said in a September 2013 presentation document that although average revenues per student are on the rise and the concept of online education has “strong political support, especially among Republicans” as well as “enormous buzz,” “K12’s aggressive student recruitment has led to dismal academic results by students and sky-high dropout rates, in some cases more than 50% annually” and “there have been so many regulatory issues and accusations of malfeasance that I’m convinced the problems are endemic.”[11]
PROFITS AND OWNERSHIP: In recent years, K12 Inc. has experienced a windfall in profit growth, siphoning off taxpayer funds from public education services while state governments and others have struggled economically in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 2008. K12 Inc.’s revenues increased almost fourfold, from over $226 million in 2008 to over $848 million in 2013.[2] K12 Inc. reaches students in all 50 states, including more than 2,000 school districts across the United States, and it operates in 85 countries. In 2013, K12 Inc. took in $848.2 million from its three businesses, with $730.8 million coming from its managed public schools. Its net profits for the year totaled $28.1 million.[7]
According to NEPC, a 125 percent increase in operating profit and more than 200 percent increase in revenue just from 2008 to 2012 is “linked to the sharp increase in K12 Inc. enrollment, which has more than tripled from some 25,000 students it served in 2007. Enrollment has increased despite the fact that during that same period, some of K12 Inc.’s largest schools in Ohio, Colorado and Pennsylvania posted student ‘churn’ rates as high as 51%, meaning that fewer than half of students who enrolled completed the full academic year.”[6]
As of August 2013, the company reported its operating income jumped 58 percent in fiscal year 2013, with total revenue soaring to $848 million, much of that from state and federal education funds.[17]
BUSINESS MODEL: It describes itself as having three lines of business: managed public schools (full-time “virtual” public charter schools and blended schools which combine online time with classroom time), institutional business (which involves formation and sales of educational curricula), and international and private pay business (including managed private schools and independent course sales overseas).[7]
FOUNDING: The company was co-founded in 1999[3] by its current CEO, Ron Packard, a former Goldman Sachs mergers and acquisitions expert and consultant with McKinsey & Co.,[4] and by former U.S. Education Secretary under President Ronald Reagan and right-wing talk show host William Bennett, who served as the chairman of K12 Inc.’s board of directors until 2005, when he resigned amid controversial remarks he made surrounding black Americans and crime.[18] Packard was able to start K12 Inc. with $40 million in venture capital from such sources as Andrew Tisch of the Loews billionaire family, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Knowledge Universe, a for-profit education conglomerate chaired by Michael Milken, a felon and former junk bond fraudster.[4] The company was incorporated in Delaware, and went public in 2007.[3]
In recent years, there has been an explosion of virtual schools (also called internet schools and cyber schools). From 2008 to 2012, 157 bills passed in 39 states and territories (including the District of Columbia) that expand online schooling, regulate virtual education, or modify existing regulations, according to a National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) database.[19] Many of these bills are attributable to American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) politicians. As discussed below, ALEC passed a “model” virtual schools act in 2004.
Until recently, data on performance was scarce, but educators at the National Education Policy Center did two of the first empirical studies in 2012 and 2013 on the effectiveness of full-time online schools. The authors concluded that despite the amount of taxpayer dollars going towards these schools, there is “very little solid evidence to justify the rapid expansion of virtual education.” One of the studies, looking at state data on performance, shows major problems with cyber schools. The 2013 report by NEPC notes, “on the common metrics of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), state performance rankings, and graduation rates, full-time virtual schools lag significantly behind traditional brick-and-mortar schools.”[6] In particular, only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. online schools met AYP in 2010-2011, compared to 52 percent of public schools, and of the 36 K12 Inc. schools that were assigned a school rating by state education authorities, only seven (19.4 percent) of them had ratings that clearly indicated satisfactory status, as of an NEPC report published July 2012 specifically on K12 Inc.’s operations.[14]
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And Ron Packard, CEO of K12, Inc., comes out of McKinsey & Company, along with Sir Michael Barber and David Coleman. (And Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame.)
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In Michigan government, the money people are the most valued, even ahead of the governor.
http://www.eclectablog.com/2013/11/michigan-government-investment-experts-now-earn-more-money-than-the-governor-after-80-pay-raise.html
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Hi Diane– Thanks for the information on the highest paid public employee tamer. Americans should also consider the salaries of big-time coaches. Public universities with big-time football teams hire coachers who have multi-million dollar, multi-year annual contracts and are the highest paid public employees in their states. Their assistant coaches earn high six figure annual salaries. Class size is usually abut 100. Students for their classes are screened and paid. Football class have the latest in technology. Students may be removed.. Football classed mold character. Phil Kaldahl Retired Teacher Bellevue, Nebraska
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