Our regular reader Chiara, who lives in Ohio and is a public school parent, is disturbed by the diversion of public dollars for private purposes.
She wrote earlier today:
“The US Department of Education is using public funding to support and expand a whole new category of for-profit providers:
“Arne Duncan @arneduncan Aug 18
So important that short-term tech courses, where skill acquisition leads to real jobs, have access to Pell funding.”
“But don’t worry. They say they’ll regulate it this time. Which is exactly what they said about for-profit colleges and for-profit charter school operators.
“I’m not clear on why the public is funding GE employee training. Has GE fallen on hard times or something? Why are we paying to train their employees? Can’t they pay to train their own employees or did all the extra cash go to executive compensation?
“When did it become the responsibility of the public to pay for job training for specific companies and sectors? What happened to entry level jobs at these places, where they invest their own money in their own employees?
“This is risk-shifting, from the private sector to the public sector. We’re picking up the risk and the sector is getting a windfall benefit. If these employees we trained don’t work out at these companies the private sector entity has their exposure covered. It’s win/win for them and win/lose for the public.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have been baited into saying it again, via net paste:
The private sector may be more efficient and economical than government in certain respects, often by being less ethical, however the private sector can be much, much worse than just unethical in certain respects. Being for profit, it encompasses the realms of investment, false advertising, cheating, gaming and gambling. People don’t provide a needed service conscientiously, they essentially say, I’ll bet this much we can do that. And then they use all devices to make sure it at least appears they have done it. And the beat goes on.
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“Put America’s boardrooms inside the classroom today! Privatize education: Lie, Cheat, Steal–All In A Day’s Work!”
Yep, Michelle Rhee certainly knows about this.
And their mantra is to find and retain the best teachers? Oh yeah, by eliminating tenure, pensions, benefits and a salary schedule. Oh yeah, they’re signing up in droves for sure!
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The winners in capitalism are often the ones who market themselves best. And what kind of people would spin a bad product into a good one? A trivial one into a necessary one? The worst kind of people — who won’t stop at obstacles like “ethics.” The most successful businesspeople will typically put profits over people whenever they can.
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Long post to amplify.
A new Obama initiative is marketed as “Educational Quality through Innovation Partnerships” or “EQUIP.” The DOE will make $5 million in Pell grants available for the first year of the EQUIP, and expects roughly 1,500 students will participate in these programs.They can each receive up to $5,815 for the 2016-17 school year. Another $12 million in the form of subsidized and unsubsidized loans will also be available for online classes and for boot camps in coding.
The financial aid goes to students. Each BUILD program has a university “partner” and a “quality assurance provider.” Contracts written by the university will specify how the “partners” divide and use the money. According to Ted Mitchell at USDE, “The institution will be the banker.”
For example, The University of Texas (UT), is partnering with coding bootcamp MakerSquare to offer a 13-week certificate program in web development. UT will charge between $13,000 and $14,000 for the program. Students will pay UT tuition (including Pell grants or other federal financial aid); UT will participate in a revenue-share model with MakerSquare and pay a fee to third-party accreditor. (Some of these third-party “accreditors” already exist for online courses, but there are some potential conflicts with university accreditors).
Mitchell says the “quality assurance entity” (QAE) is there in order to evaluate the outcomes that programs say they’ll provide.” “In some cases the nontraditional provider will provide a full tuition refund if students don’t find jobs at the end of the programs.” Build is supposed to focus on low income students. Here are some of the arrangements.
Coding bootcamps:
Epicodus with Marylhurst University, OR.
Flatiron School with SUNY Empire State, NY
MakerSquare with University of Texas, and
Zip Code Wilmington, with Wilmington University, DE. Zip Code offers a 2-week boot camp to prepare students for entry-level programming jobs at companies headquartered in Delaware, especially financial companies. Twelve week training is $12,000. So, taxpayers are subsidizing the entry-level training for financial companies located in Delaware with a cut of the money going to a “quality assurance provider” in addition costs assigned to the “banking” function of the university.
General Electric will use Northeastern University to provide training in advanced manufacturing. Program completers are supposed to be hired by GE.
Add these online providers of content
Guild Education with Colorado State University,
StraighterLine with Western Governors University and Dallas County Community College District and
Study.com which has partnerships with 18 colleges and American Council on Education (ACE) universities). As a sample of the fare, look at this bubble test for a course in special education http://study.com/academy/exam/topic/differentiating-instruction-in-content-areas.html#unanswered
Here is an ad for the Study.com program included in BUILD.
“The Thomas Edison State University and Study.com program will provide an accelerated and flexible path to a bachelor’s degree at a fraction of the cost.”
”The self-paced Study.com courses are broken down into 5-8 minute lessons which can easily be taken anytime, anywhere—even on a mobile device. The flexibility of program makes it ideally-suited for the increasing number of non-traditional students that are juggling school, work, and other responsibilities. “ http://www.educationdive.com/press-release/20160816-studycom-selected-by-department-of-education-for-educational-quality-throu/
I will leave to others the calculations of how many 5-8 minute lessons are required for a bachelor’s degree. I guess someone at Thomas Edison State University and their “quality assurance entity” will figure that out.
Third-party “Quality Assurance Entities” are supposed to approve and validate all of these programs and partnerships as: (a) of value in the workforce, (b) valid for academic transfer, or (c) both.
Among these Quality Assurance Entities are the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), American Council on Education, Quality Matters https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/QM-FeeSchedule-June-16.pdf). and possibly this upstart http://entangled.solutions/docs/quality-assurance-for-higher-education.pdf
This is not just another federal program. It is a by-pass of the federal requirement that Pell grants cannot be used for online programs unless at least 50% of the content/instruction is developed by the university that a student enrolls in. All of the BUILD programs are free of that restriction and there appears to be no required reduction in the tuition universities are charging or those “entities” assuring “quality.” The bootcamp programs run for about 12 weeks and cost about $12,000. The estimated cost for a certificate program in web development from Flatiron School and SUNY Empire State will cost roughly $15,000.
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If the industry needs coders why don’t they get together and fund a training and apprenticeship program like contractors did when they needed skilled trades?
How is coding different from a skilled trade?
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Too funny! GE trained my brother-in-law to be an engineer. He only had a high school education. He went on to create his own company. How times have changed.
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We should shut down all work-study programs that don’t involve government or non-profit employers.
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Trump U., Corinthian Colleges. That’s the kind of people who should be doing the educating. As long as they can convince people to sign up, they deserve our support.
According to people who love charters, if these “education providers” weren’t any good, no people would have signed up; therefore, they are very good. No doubt there were even claims of thousands of students on the “wait list” and why wouldn’t we believe it.
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“The accelerated programs report graduation and job placement rates above 90 percent. Of course, these are no more independently verified than similar numbers reported over the past decade by for-profit colleges and technical schools.
And here’s where it really gets interesting. The old players are starting to move into the new market. In 2014, Kaplan Inc., the owners of Kaplan University, purchased Dev Bootcamp and co-founded Metis. And just this month, the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, has invested in a boot camp program called the Iron Yard, based in South Carolina.
Perhaps coincidentally, just as these legacy companies move into the boot camp world, the Department of Education has signaled its willingness to make traditional student aid available to short-term programs.”
Kaplan, Apollo and the University of Phoenix. Old wine, new bottles.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/14/448570520/federal-student-loans-for-coding-boot-camps
We have a modern steel plant in this area that pays to train workers. They’re called “mini-mills” the newer steel production facilities.
Boy, they’re sure suckers, huh? They should have just had the public pick up the tab.
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Why couldn’t we make it like this?
“Over the years, we have continually trained the best craftsperson in the industry without cost to the taxpayers. Students in the electrical training ALLIANCE training programs earn while they learn by doing apprenticeships. Not only does this allow students to earn an income while in school, it also creates new tax revenue for the economy. Each year, participants in the electrical training ALLIANCE programs pay in excess of six hundred million dollars in taxes. This is truly a model program as it takes little to nothing from the taxpayers while training some of the most productive workers in the world who thereby pay tremendous dollars to the country.”
The tech industry could fund their own training program(s), like building contractors do.
Coding isn’t any more complicated than being an electrician. They could train 40k people a year if they got together.
http://www.electricaltrainingalliance.org/AboutUs
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They are totally different but that’s not the point. Here is a thought . I do not believe the BLS differentiates the difference between coding and programing. So if if my numbers are correct we had 368,000 Americans employed in Programing including coding.(if anyone knows different I need a life line ) Lets run out and make everybody a coder, because that amounts to 0.23 % of a workforce of 159 million and the projection is decline by 2024 due to out sourcing. .
An Electrician apprentice in NYC goes through a 6 year program 120 hrs a year in electric tech / construction management classes for 4years combined with an associates (additional classes) 4years of apprentice training and 2 years as a secondary rate Journeymen working alone or with other intermediate journey for the experience of having no A class supervision. One extra year was added on because of market conditions. That is a significant amount of class room as well as in field training. It has gotten more and more”rigorous’ overtime . And has a ways to go but that is for a different discussion.
My first response was being typed while you added this post.
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The thing is, there ARE programs that train people for the tech workforce at no cost to the taxpayer. The Ada Developer Academy in Seattle is one, The Recurse center (which unlike the ADA does require candidates have some prior coding background) is another.
I’ve also heard of a few more.
They’re either funded by companies that ultimately hire their graduates or in at least one case (not either of the mentioned companies), the candidate pays for the program part up front and part within a number of months after placement.
Of course, it’s much easier to take taxpayer money rather than build a valuable competitive educational product
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I may disagree slightly here, many Union apprenticeship programs receive significant state aid. They produce tradesman that are capable of employment in various aspects of their trades and for many different employers . But these are long term programs, some of which have been combined with other studies to offer an associates degree in the end. So the question becomes is this training specific to GE or is it delivering much broader based benefits to the worker and society .
The separate question is to what degree our friends at GE are fulfilling their responsibility to pay the taxes that enable this training.
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Donald Trump is planning on “education week” after he finishes “immigration week”
That will be awkward for Democrats, I imagine. How to explain that he sounds exactly like all the other ed reformers ?
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I have a good friend who grew up in Los Angeles. He was there because Hughes Aircraft needed engineers. There was no billion people in India then, only little towns spread across an America filled with naturally smart people doing various jobs. His father was a small town watch repair man. Hughes found him as they combed the country looking for people they could train to be engineers.
We often hear from the right wing of American politics that the trouble with our country is that no one wants to work. I may be one of the only people on the left that agrees. No one wants to work. Some people would rather hang out with their friends than do the homework I suggest necessary to learn. Others would rather live on money from the government. Still others would prefer to game the government into subsidizing their business than to actually invest money in the development of their “human resources.” The right wing is correct. No one in industry wants to train the workers. They would prefer to hire temporary workers who are already trained so that they do not have to pay out more money to them in the form of salary and benefits. We have a crisis of will to work among our industrial giants. If it is accompanied by a similar attitude among others in the citizenry, who could be surprised?
I support and applaud the many wonderful vocational programs that we have here locally. These programs ready students to enter a changing work environment and give them reason to hope in their willingness to work. Now let industry ante up for these programs like I do when I pay my taxes without complaint.
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Which goes to a slew of questions about our mythical STEM shortage. Here is just one:
“And the modern counterparts of those wool workers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills?”
The other part of the puzzle is how much profit is returned to share holders vs reinvested in resources like employees.Be it for training or increases in their wages and benefits. When your friend was trained
only 50% of profits were returned to share holders,today 92%.
GREED
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“I support and applaud the many wonderful vocational programs that we have here locally. These programs ready students to enter a changing work environment and give them reason to hope in their willingness to work. ”
The problem is that reformists want to turn colleges and universities into vocational programs. Kids are trained to work for one company (using public money), and then they are completely at the mercy of that company. If the company wants to fire them, it will, and the kids can through out their college diploma.
Also, it’s time to ease up on this “work hard” attitude, and think about why work hard. Is it because we want to make CEOs even more insanely wealthy or because we want to be able to spend more time with family, enjoy our kids and friends, travel, discover nature and the world?
All these technological advances make it possible for people to work less boring, monotone jobs, and work less. Instead, we see the opposite: people work more for less and less money. The minimum wage in the ’70s is worth $21 now.
The extra gain from technological advances and decreasing salaries goes into CEOs pockets who make 300 times more than the average worker.
Those are the people, the CEOs, who don’t do enough work for their salaries, not the people on the bottom of the work force chain.
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Máté Wierdl
Agreed !!!
But what they don’t want, may be even more significant. They don’t want those colleges and Universities to be hot beds of intellectual activity that would challenge the establish order.
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You folks have made some good points. I agree that we are working much harder for less money and less time with our families. I also mourn the death of education as a way to build good communities that make good decisions based on good liberal arts education. Still, vocational programs have benefitted many of my students who have no desire to contemplate some of the academic puzzles in which I delight. I do not begrudge them their joy in learning how to fix HVAC or pour concrete. It just that I do not support companies requiring kids to pay for the education that benefits the companies. The poor kids go into debt, the employers get lower taxes because they do not had to pay for that education. Meanwhile the financial sector earns interest from the poor kids. No fairness here. Beam me up.
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Why My Wife and I Are Opting Out Our Daughter From Third-Grade High-Stakes Testing
https://youtu.be/FHXFQb8c8f8
Transcript of the original text:
Good evening. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of an eight-year-old daughter who attends one of our public elementary schools.
It seems like it was just yesterday when my daughter entered kindergarten. At that time, I talked about her at our August School Board meeting in 2013.
I said that my hopes and dreams for my daughter were that she would develop a lifelong love for learning that would serve her well as she learned to construct a life that would serve her and serve others as well.
I told this board that my wife and I were not particularly interested in having her be seen as a data point for others to make money from.
Now, three short years later, which seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye, she is entering third grade.
Tonight, I’m speaking as a parent, who also is a teacher.
In Florida, third grade is the beginning of high-stakes, standardized testing for our children.
What are the high-stakes?
• Our children, on the basis of one test, will receive a number, a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, which, will serve to define them.
Some students, may do well learning throughout the year, but do not test well and may receive a 1, a one being the lowest possible score.
Some may come from disadvantaged backgrounds and will receive a 1.
Some may be special needs students, who receive a 1.
These numbers work to define our students as to whom they are. “I’m a one. I’m a Failure.”
This high-stakes testing policy, mandated by state law, works to stigmatize our students and they grow up with a limiting self-concept of who they are and what they are capable of doing and becoming.
• On the basis of this one high-stakes test, some schools—those comprised of the poorest students, who need the most help—are labeled with an “F.” Failures. This stigmatizes these schools, whose faculty and staff may be working hard to meet the high needs of the surrounding neighborhood they serve. It also serves to increase the segregation at these already segregated schools. What parents, given the means to choose what community they will move into, will choose a neighborhood with a school labeled “F.”
• There is a lot of money being made on the part of testing companies, publishers, and vendors, based on this annual imposition of this high-stakes testing.
• This high-stakes testing is part of a corporate agenda, an agenda by the rich and powerful to demonize our public schools and privatize them through the rise of publicly funded, privately managed schools called charters. Our state legislature, bought and paid for by corporate interests, is cheating our children by defunding our public schools.
• “That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital,” says Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor.
• Our third graders are still babies, really. Do they really need the pressures of this high-stakes testing? Recently, I read one account from a parent recounting the experience of her son when he was a third grader taking the FCAT. He was a good kid. He worked all year to learn. But he missed passing the FCAT by one point. He went to summer school to do more work and took it again. And again, he missed passing the test by one point. His mother was afraid to tell him, but he could tell by her reaction that he had not passed. He was crushed by the sense of failure. His mother, working on making dinner in the kitchen, called him to come down to eat. He did not respond. She had a premonition that something was the matter. She rushed up to his bedroom and found him hanging by a bedsheet. She got him down.
• Is there anyone who thinks this high-stakes testing is worth such a price?
• As a parent, I can answer with a resounding NO!
• My wife and I believe that our public schools should work to develop the whole, creative child in all of our schools, and in all of our communities of all colors and all socio-economic backgrounds.
• For these reasons, I’m announcing to you, our school board, that my wife and I do not support high-stakes testing in Florida, and will be opting out our daughter. Evidence for her learning will be through a portfolio.
• Thank you.
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You don’t need anyone to tell you you’re right. But, you’re right.
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Thanks and spot on as always, Andy!!
“These numbers work to define our students as to whom they are. ‘I’m a one. I’m a Failure.’”
YEP! Foucault’s subjectivization, Hackings looping effect or what I refer to as internalization
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers.
And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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GE was a huge supporter of common core. This is a classic example of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours… and make you richer.”
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GE as a member of the Business Roundtable was a huge supporter of Common Core. The similarity is that a goal of Common Core is to direct education more toward employment. We can debate whether that should be.
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In TN, it’s emphasized that colleges and universities need to build stronger ties with TN companies, colleges need to “give back” to these companies. Some community colleges are to build strong “partnerships” with companies.
https://www.chattanoogastate.edu/engineering-information-technologies/partnerships/vw-academy
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And when those companies abandon TN for a cheaper labor market in another state,if that is possible or overseas ?
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