Reader Laura Chapman has done some research on the education entrepreneurs now meeting in Scottsdale to learn more about how to profit from the public education industry. Note that tickets for the event ranged from $1,000-2,000. In addition, there were many sponsors. Whatever comes from this conference, it is a gold mine for its organizers:
I was also doing research on this. My direct quotes come from press releases and one extended interview with Michael Moe.
The sell-out crowd of about 2000 ed tech promoters meeting in Scottsdale, AZ have been promised this event is their “Davos” for understanding how big profits be made in the education business— K-12 and higher education—where investors put $650 million last year. This market is expected to grow rapidly around the CCSS, and with spillover effects from the federal “college and career” mantra. The pace of innovation in tech tools for some profitable “educational use” is said to be breathtaking.
Over 230 “disruptive education companies” will present their wares to “industry leaders and visionaries – educators, investors, philanthropists… with “some of the world’s most passionate and energetic players in the education innovation space…” The purpose is “to stimulate opinions, debate, fundraising, strategic alliances and overall community activism toward global enrichment.” (We know what counts as “enrichment” and who wants to gets rich).
The summit theme is the “American Dream” — “a global aspiration rooted in the conviction that opportunity is limitless and that education makes possible social mobility and prosperity.” For the participants, limitless prosperity means scaling ”education innovation globally” thereby driving “a higher return on education.”
The annual Summit is the brainchild of two people: Michael Moe, serial investor in ed-tech startups and Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University since 2002. Moe is a champion of charter and for-profit schools and CEO of a big pot of money for tech industry projects. Michael M. Crow is known as a ”transformational” leader in higher education eager to have the university be a model of savvy (and cash-producing) liaisons with business.
President Crow’s view of the Summit is clear: “Universities must become effective partners for global development. Only through the proliferation of networks —such as those the Summit helps to build—can transformation occur at the scale that is immediately needed in order to advance our global knowledge economy.”
Both Michaels, Moe and Crow, think that “immediate scaling up” means disrupting public education. According to one press release, the most “disruptive organizations” in education will be presenting at the Summit, including DonorsChoose, edX, Code.org, Minerva, Inkling along with five of Moe’s investments: Coursera, Curious.com, DreamBox Learning, General Assembly, and Knewton
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2014-asugsv-summit-to-feature-gov-jeb-bush-earvin-magic-johnson-netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-and-more-than-225-game-changing-education-companies-250681841.html
The event is part of Arizona State University’s Education Innovation Network described as an “open innovation platform where entrepreneurs can find the resources to validate concepts, accelerate growth, and reach transformative scale” working with “the intellectual assets of ASU, the greater Phoenix public and private educational K-20 systems and investors of all types….”
In a 2011 interview, Moe (who seems to be connected at the hip to ASU’s president Crow) said that he hopes ASU will serve as a model for other universities, and as a hub of innovative activity. Moe heaps praise on Crow’s “bold leadership” of ASU and its “unique initiatives such as its partnership with Teach For America, which aspires to have a scale impact.” Not mentioned by Moe, and apparently ignored by ASU’s president, are the frauds perpetuated by Teach for America. See http://www.google.com/#q=teach+for+america+%2B+Fraud
Moe praises ASU’s president as a skilled and visionary manager of intellectual talent working in and on behalf of education. Crow’s bio shows that he lauded by free-marketers who want to see many more public universities function as service-providers for full-spectrum entrepreneurial activity and economic development. This agenda is not entirely new, but the trend is clearly against a tradition of academic freedom in scholarship, with the university nurturing a mental environment for basic research and many studies not tied to economic values.
Moe was also impressed with Crow’s recent success in recruiting faculty in education, specifically “a highly regarded head of research from Vanderbilt.” I have not been able to determine who that person is, but since 2006 Vanderbilt’s research in education has been devoted to teacher pay-for-performance, aided by a $10 million USDE grant in addition to a relationship with Mathematica on a five-year, $7.9 million study on the same topic. Well-designed experimental studies, including some by Vanderbilt researchers, have shown that such schemes have no significant and uniform influence on student test scores, even if the bonus is up to $15,000 !! USDE poured $600 million into similar grants to market this idea through “research.”
see https://my.vanderbilt.edu/performanceincentives/about-us/ also http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/education/tif.asp
The study with the $15,000 bonus is at http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED518378.pdf
In addition, Moe sees the state of Arizona leading the way, not only as an early adopter of charter schools but as home state of the University of Phoenix, the world’s largest for-profit, along with Grand Canyon University, and Universal Technical Institute. All three are widely known centers of fraud in recruiting and “educating” students. Moe ignores that inconvenient truth. See:
http://www.google.com/#q=fraud+university+of+phoenix http://www.google.com/#q=fraud+%2BGrand+Canyon http://www.google.com/#q=fraud+%2B+Universal+Technical+Institute.
Finally, in praising ASU, Arizona, and the Phoenix area as the milieu for the Summit, Moe notes the presence of corporate giants such as INTEL and Honeywell and innovators such as First Solar. Again, no mention of the multi-year class action lawsuit filed by investors in First Solar. See http://www.google.com/#q=First+Solar+%3D+Lawsuits
Here are some hints from Moe on where education innovations will go in the near term. 1. Investors will be drawn to the iphone, apps, and related networks as a learning platform for K-12 with adaptive technology for individualized learning similar to recommendation systems of Amazon and Netflix. 2. Teacher training and tools for the CCSS are “a sweet spot.” 3. In higher education, more “partnerships” of universities with online corporations offering courseware and social learning. More at http://higheredmanagement.net/2011/01/13/asus-education-innovation-network-an-interview-with-michael-moe/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sick. Glad I went to NAU, not ASU. I’d have to quit sending alumni donations.
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Wow, this is a great source of useful info, many thanks. Should NPE set up what amounts to a “shadow govt” to match the rheeformies projects and units with targeted research and dissemination>
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I read an article recently in which the reporter quoted the Executive Vice Provost at the Univ. of Arizona as saying that in three years’ time, 80 percent of the classes at his school would be taught online, with the kids meeting in a large, terminal-filled room and working online while a professor walked around to help them.
What’s the attraction?
Larger student-to-teacher ratios.
It’s a laboratory for this.
Coming to a K-12 school near you.
That;s THE PLAN.
Are you listening, teachers’ unions? That’s THE PLAN.
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Oculus Rift.
Ready Player One.
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LOL
LOVE THAT BOOK!!!!!
Scarily accurate for a crazy sci-fi kids’ book.
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I would love to see this on every kid’s reading list. A little eye opener. 1984 for the preteen.
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or, rather, for the tween
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“Young adults”?
I loved 1984 as a “tween.” Perhaps disturbingly, partly for the nudity.
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To me, at that age, female nudity was some distant world more remote, more exotic, more unreal and mysterious than any Shangri-La or Land That Time Forgot. Of course, I had heard distant reports of reports of reports. I used to dream abut finding a mesa, somewhere, on top of which there were still Triassic forests.
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Yeah, I forgot about the bit of sex in Read, Player One. I guess there was some, but I don’t really remember it. It was so innocuous. But I guess that stuff, which is less than most everyone in this culture is bombarded with daily, will keep the book off many reading lists, even though
a) the reading level is appropriate to 13 or 14 year olds,
b) it’s very well written (a really absorbing yarn/a page turner),
c) it tells a tale that a lot of young people will find completely absorbing,
d) it has a very strong, brilliant female hero,
e) it has great values and presents great role models, and
f) it warns against many of the ugliest trends in our culture–increased surveillance, oligarchical command and control, the concentration of wealth in a few hands, misuse of power.
I highly recommend it. I’ll have to look back for those other bits. They just didn’t make that strong of an impression on me. I thought when reading it, “This is perfect for readers 13-17.” So, a little older than tweens.
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(To be clear, I was referring to the nudity in Orwell’s 1984.)
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Ready, Player One
sorry about the typo
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I knew that. I thought you were questioning my comment that Ready, Player One was appropriate for tweens (kids between childhood and their teens). And now that I think back on the book more, I do think I would use it with older kids–sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year olds. Too much adult stuff there, though the reading level is pretty low. The book is very accessible, and interesting to young people because , of course, of the video gaming stuff and the kids saving the world stuff. Much like Ender’s Game. But yes, I did understand that you were talking about 1984. That’s funny. Those bits in 1984 are pretty grim.
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Respectfully, there would be no reason for students to come together in any location. The model is the cyber, University of Phoenix.
The wealthy will preserve the cloisters of higher learning, with face-to-face interactions, for their children, because they are special, unlike the children of workers.
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I don’t think so, Linda. The reason why they are doing trials of the kids in a room at computers bit is that they tried the distance learning thing and it was a major flop. Most kids don’t finish the courses, and if they do, they perform miserably. That was what they had hoped for–chucking the brick and mortar altogether. But it did not work. So now they are on to v2.
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There was a great river of big studies of distance learning all showing terrible results. The tech guys tried and tried and tried to spin those studies–well, they are showing improvement in completion rates over time, that kind of thing–but in the end they had to admit that it’s just not a viable model.
Human nature sure does cause problems, huh? These darned people, they are social animals and intimately guided, microconditioned, constantly, by social sanction, positive and negative.
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The major attraction is much lower tuition, more affordable college. Lower costs translate into higher minority enrollment. There is this from ASU:
In fall 2011, students of color enrolled at ASU totaled 22,678, or 31.4 percent of the total student enrollment at ASU. Among all undergraduate students enrolled, 33.9 percent were students of color; among all graduate students enrolled, 20.9 percent were students of color. Since 2002, minority enrollment has increased by 97.4 percent.
ASU enrolls more students of color than NYU (the largest private university in the country) has undergraduate students. ASU tuition per semester is slightly over $5,000 (in state) or a little more than $12,000 (out of state). NYU tuition about $21,500 per semester.
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much lower tuition for a much-debased “education” (I can barely bring myself to use the word to describe it)
We are social creatures. Education is a human handoff of cultural materials from one generation to the next
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If you want professors like Dr. Ravitch you have to pay $42,000 a year. Total cost of attendance is about a quarter million dollars. I guess authentic post secondary education is only for the 1%.
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When school really works, here’s what happens: a student gets the windfall of another’s passion for something, picks up those fruits, tastes, finds them sweet, wants to be like the one who knows the orchard and the seeds and the soil and the techniques.
There is much that technology can do for us. So very, very much. But it must aid in this, not supplant it.
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I know that seems quaint to some now. It’s not quaint to me.
It’s what this human thing is all about.
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Gee, TE, we can afford 6 trillion dollars for war games in Afghanistan and Iraq, and billions for standardized testing, but those teachers’ salaries, just too much. Funny that somehow we all had actual teachers in the past.
And Dr. Ravtich is an internationally acclaimed scholar. She would easily command far, far more than that.
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Not sure that the amount the federal government spends on prosecuting wars is relevant to the discussion of what ASU is trying to do. ASU is trying to find a way to bring post secondary education to the 99%, something that NYU, the largest private university in the country, seems blissfully unconcerned about.
I have no idea how much Dr. Ravitch is paid at NYU, nor did I post about that. I do not even know if Dr. Ravitch teaches any undergraduate classes (some distinguished professors at my institution do, some do not. Dr. Ravitch is listed as a research professor, so perhaps she does not have any teaching duties and students pay tuition so she can write her books).
Any thoughts about charging a quarter of a million dollars for a college degree?
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You forgot the adjective “phony” before “wars,” TE.
Clearly, if you believe, as I do, that education should be universal and free through college, then what government spends on other matters is clearly relevant. That’s not difficult to figure out.
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Education is never free. You might get someone else to pay for it, you might not give up too much in earnings when you attend class, but resources devoted to education can not be used for other things. As I said in another thread, costs are often worth paying, but ignoring costs when making decisions results in people making bad decisions.
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Of course it is never free. It is very, very expensive.
And it is even more expensive not to make it universally and cheaply available at a very high level of quality.
Education pays for itself, in real dollars and in quality of life.
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You make an excellent point, there, TE, about ignoring the costs when making decisions.
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TE, I did my undergraduate work at Indiana University. It was cheap enough, then, that between scholarships and part-time jobs, I paid for all but about $3,000 of it as I went.
I think that we have to say, this is part of the cost of being a citizen of this country. If you want to live in this cultured, educated, capable land, then part of the price of that, the cost to you of that, is sharing in the CONSIDERABLE cost of financing a free K-college educational system for all.
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When relatively few went to college society did not have to use many resources to provide them with an education. Many taxpayers supported a few college students in Indiana. If you want to expand education, you will need to have each taxpayer giving up more resources than before or see if you can use fewer resources per college student. The large classes (250 to 500 students) I teach are an attempt to use fewer resources per student, and is part of the reason that tuition at my institution is half that of NYU for out of state students. Would my students have a better education if I was teaching a class of 24? No doubt they would. Is it enough of an improvement to warrant the large increase in resources used to teach introductory economics? I think people might reasonably disagree about this.
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YUP, TE. That’s the plan. Professors for the 1 percent. Teaching machines and teaching assistants for the children of the proles.
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And NYU is showing us the way?
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TE, I do not think that the way to solve the problem of funding higher education is to give the 99 percent a steady diet of Powerpoint slides on a screen. Look, we managed to send a great many people to college with real professors in the past. Tell me, why do you think we can no longer afford to do that?
I believe that education through college should be free to anyone who wishes to attend. I think that we should be taxed to pay for that, and I think that those taxes should fall heavily on a) estates and b) resource consumption and use. But you are the economist, what do you think?
Fire all the teachers and replace them with Powerpoint slides? I have reviewed, TE, at this point, about 60 different online programs, easily, probably more. What a lot of drek. A few, very few, shining moments, but most suffering from the same issues that Tufte writes about so eloquently in The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. Slightly above the level of complete drivel, but only slightly.
But accompanied by lots and lots of hype. And I am speaking from real experience here, TE, from in-depth study of these programs over several years- time. I have written thousands of pages of reports on the current crop of online materials. I know that landscape very, very well, though it is continually changing.
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If the only way to provide an education that lives up to the Bob Shepherd standard is to do what NYU does very few will ever get a post secondary education.
For some reason a graduation speech given by Thomas Sargent, nobel prize winner in economics in 2011 and colleague of Dr. Ravitch at NYU is bouncing around the internet. One of his twelve points seems pertinent here:
Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
At a quarter million each, how many NYU graduates would the 6 trillion dollars you speak about create?
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That’s a great increase! Now to work on the quality education part.
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TE, sorry, I mistook your comment: “If you want professors like Dr. Ravitch you have to pay $42,000 a year.” I should have understood that that this was not what you intended, for I know you to be quite a bit smarter than that, and I have often been guilty, myself, of many infelicities in hastily written blog posts.
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This might seem like irrelevant nit-picking, and I know that NYU was used as an example because Diane works there, but everyone is making a big mistake by thinking that NYU is a training ground for the ruling class.
NYU is in reality a real estate development company with a higher education subsidiary, a second tier school blessed with a multi-billion dollar location that has allowed it to market itself as something it’s fundamentally not. It’s location, some decent graduate programs, combined with some celebrity faculty, never seen by undergrads, has given it prominence it does not deserve.
I received my MA from NYU, and in that two-year program, out of fourteen classes I took, a total of three were taught by full-time faculty (who were all excellent teachers). The rest of the classes were taught by adjuncts or TA’s, and ranged from OK to awful. This was graduate school, so I can only imagine what it must be like for those poor undergrads, paying $60,000 a year to finance multi-billion dollar real estate projects in Lower Manhattan.
Perhaps it comes down to the distinction not just between the 1% and the 99%, but the 0.01% and everyone else. At ASU, $20,000 a year in tuition and other expenses will get you a computer screen, 500 fellow students in a lecture hall, and a couple of adjuncts/TA’s overseeing things. At NYU, it will get you smaller classes taught by an adjunct earning poverty wages.
Meanwhile, our true overseers will be sending their own children to what Linda correctly called “cloisters,” where they will receive an education, not just training.
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I also used NYU as an example because it is the largest private school in the country while ASU is the largest public school in the country.
In my department you get up to 500 in a class with a non-tenure stream faculty member like myself teaching and a group of graduate and undergraduates as TA’s for the lower division classes. In the upper division classes you will get some non-tenure stream faculty, some tenure stream faculty, and some senior graduate students teaching classes of around 35. I would not be surprised if upper division courses at ASU are taught the same way.
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Michael F’s second paragraph above is brilliant.
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This does NOT please me. I’m an ASU grad from many years ago, and I am very aware of the power and PR Michael Crow has in this state. Arghhhhhhhh!
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So much for “we’re going to regulate the for profit colleges” huh?
They’re the sponsors of this thing, right? Great! Now they can lobby lawmakers WHILE making money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-obama-administration-proposal-to-regulate-for-profit-colleges/2014/03/13/40ad4768-aafa-11e3-98f6-8e3c562f9996_story.html
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K Quinn,
Instead, send donations to the Network for Public Education, Edushyster, Truthout, the Center for Media and Democracy, Sen. Sherrod Brown or any other worthwhile place.
Universities stockpile donations into huge endowments that attract hedge fund owners. Also, according to exposes in the Dayton Daily News, this year, there’s little oversight of donor money, first class travel and entertainment for executives, etc.
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Actually, when I send money (a rarity these days given how little I have), I usually donate to one of the Native American programs or scholarships. NAU is not like ASU. Considerably less money, endowments, cushion. They always get the short end of the stick from the state. Beginning Educ professors at NAU make much less than I do as a classroom teacher in Washington State, sad to say.
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Congress investigated for-profit colleges in 2008 and 2009. You can read the full report at the link.
5 years later, they still haven’t regulated them:
“Between 2008 and 2009, over a million students started attending schools owned by the companies examined by the Committee. By mid-2010, fully half (54 percent) of those students had left school without a degree or certificate. For Associates-degree students, 63 percent left without a degree.
Most for-profit colleges charge much higher tuition than comparable programs at community colleges and flagship State public universities. The investigation found Associate degree and certificate programs averaged four times the cost of degree programs at comparable community colleges. Bachelor’s degree programs averaged 20 percent more than the cost of analogous programs at flagship public universities despite the credits being largely non-transferrable.
Because 96 percent of students starting a for-profit college take federal student loans to attend a for-profit college (compared to 13 percent at community colleges), nearly all students who leave have student loan debt, even when they don’t have a degree or diploma or increased earning power.
Students who attended a for-profit college accounted for 47 percent of all Federal student loan defaults in 2008 and 2009. More than 1 in 5 students enrolling in a for-profit college-22 percent-default within 3 years of entering repayment on their student loans.”
http://www.harkin.senate.gov/help/forprofitcolleges.cfm
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Follow the money, just follow the money. One more example of the Common Core S.S. were designed for the benefit of the vendors, not the students.
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Forgive my error in syntax. One more example of how the C.C. State Standards were….
Sorry, I’m obviously not college-ready.
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you and me both; oh for the times I have wanted to correct some egregious typo or moment of idiocy on a blog!!!!
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Retweeted by ASU+GSV Summit
Gov @JebBush delivers keynote tonight at @asugsvsummit
I hope he talks about how much he loathes “government schools”.
When he says that he means public schools, so the schools 95% of kids currently attend. Those schools.
Here’s Governor Bush:
“We must expand [school] choice. Our governance model includes over 13,000 government-run monopolies run by unions.”
Got that? Your local public school is a “government run monopoly run by unions”
Thank goodness we have thought leaders to clear stuff like this up for us.
Here I was thinking mine was just a local public school.
HUGE rockstar in ed reform, Governor Bush. Has absolutely no use for “government schools”, and wants to privatize yours.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/31/jeb-bushs-disdain-for-public-education/
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They’re actually further deregulating privately-run, publicly-funded schools in Florida right now:
“Charter school critics said the Inspector General’s findings were a reason to push back on HB 7083, the bill that could weaken the power of school districts over new charter schools.
“Obviously, there are some serious questions about the way the system works in Florida,” Miami-Dade School Board member Raquel Regalado said. “The prudent thing for the Legislature to do would be to wait for the federal government to finish its work [on the audit] and then consider changes to the charter school law.”
Jeff Wright, of the Florida Education Association, agreed. “If an audit like this is going on, the Legislature should not give charter schools more opportunities to game the system,” he said.”
Someone could ask Governor Bush about that after his keynote at the summit, but they won’t, because he’s surrounded himself exclusively with cheerleaders and pom pom wavers.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/20/4070016/florida-charter-school-management.html#storylink=cpy
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Don’t forget to include in your list of aspersions the fact that Arizona State runs 5 charter schools.
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The question remains… When will Moe eat Crow?
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Arizona is ground zero for snake oil education. We replicate every bad idea from Florida.
(ALEC connection)
A small list:
1) The Tucson City Council wanted to give a tax break to Grand Canyon University (which is a private, Christian school) and build it on a popular westside golf course.
2) There are 58 charter schools in my school district alone. Quality is not a factor.
3) State Legislators are pushing “Empowerment Scholarships,” which gives people public dollars to attend private schools. Recently it was revealed that people were hoarding the money (perfectly legal under AZ laws) and amassing thousands of dollars in state savings accounts that they can use for college. (Legal)
4)The AZ constitution states that college for AZ residents should be “as free as possible,” but Jan Brewer has cut so much K-12 education and University funding, that tuition costs are rising rapidly. “in-state tuition and fees in Arizona increased 70 percent when adjusted for inflation from academic year 2008-09 to 2013-14. The national average was 27 percent. Out-of-state tuition and fees in Arizona increased 28 percent during the same period.”
Gov. Jan Brewer made the deepest cuts in the nation to K-12 education. We so desperately need a new direction in Arizona.
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Grand Canyon University is no longer the non-profit private Christian school they once were. They sold their name off years ago to become an for-profit “university”. Ironically, Michael Crow of ASU was not happy about allowing GCU into Division 1 sports. He doesn’t like their “business model”.
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/9518012/grand-canyon-business-model-causing-stir-division-hoops-college-basketball
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Cyber education equals vacant classrooms, a hedge fund opportunity to develop real estate. Four years ago, our dean proposed selling part of the public campus for retirement residences and medical offices.
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The future happened in 2010. The Western Governors College.
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With lots of hinky stuff going on there. They were “buying” online courses from professors at other universities. Caused some major dust-ups with intellectual property and university property. But when you see that the Leavitt family from Utah is a major player, it all makes sense.
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Here’s more information. BOONDOGGLE!
Western Governors University: http://www.wgu.edu
Advertising: WGU is an accredited online university offering online bachelor’s and master’s degree programs.
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