Archives for category: For-Profit
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John Austin, President of the Michigan State Board of Education, Writes the Readers of This Blog

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
15

I have posted several articles about Governor Rick Snyder’s all-out assault on public education, most recently, this one earlier today. Some 80% of charters operate for profit, fiscally troubled districts have been handed over to for-profit charter corporations (with poor track records) that extract as much in profit as the district’s deficit (this happens only in majority African-American districts), schools and districts are incentivized to poach students from each other to get the money they need to function (and waste millions of taxpayer dollars advertising for students from other districts). In addition, the governor created the ill-named Education Achievement Authority, a super district made up of the state’s lowest-performing schools and overseen by John Covington. Covington, trained in the unaccredited Broad Academy, previously was superintendent of Kansas City, which lost its accreditation under his leadership. Tomorrow, I will post an article containing interviews with teachers who work in the EAA and describe it as a dangerous environment, unsafe for teachers and students alike.

Governor Snyder is achieving his goal: dissolving public education as a civic obligation and turning it into a free-for-all marketplace.

In response to a post about Governor Snyder’s actions, the blog received this comment from the president of the elected Michigan State Board of Education. The state board is dominated by Democrats (like Austin) but seems unable to slow the governor’s wrecking ball. The most outspoken critic of the Snyder assault on public schools is State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton. In a few minutes, I will post an interview with Representative Lipton about the EAA.

John Austin writes:

John Austin, President of Michigan State Board of Education here. We do have an unfortunate proliferation in Michigan of new charter and cyber schools, both good, mediocre and truly bad at educating children. The legislature’s, and to date the Governor’s unwillingness to insist on quality control in new school creation, to ensure they educate kids, and the fueling of a wild-west free market of largely for-profit new school creation is doing damage both financially, and educationally to all our schools and children.

The EAA was an effort, well-intentioned, to create a functional and effective state turnaround district to improve performance in our worst schools. Unfortunately, it too was tied up in knots, when legislation to codify it was loaded up with ornaments of the unlimited new school creation policy being pushed last year. It also has had real growing pains, problems and transparency issues.

However, different from the account my friend Ellen Cogen Lipton seemed to suggest in the Electabog article, the State Board of Education twice asked Dr. Covington to come and discuss progress or lack thereof with us, and he certainly did so, and we had as recently as last September a useful and robust public discussion of all the issues– hopefully towards helping the EAA work better, and do better with the legitimate concerns raised by Rep Lipton and many others.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Michigan

Michigan: Governor Snyder Is Succeeding…..in Destroying Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
24

One of our readers brought this sad article to my attention.

Under Governor Rick Snyder, more school districts have collapsed into emergency status than during the time of any of his predecessors. Failing districts get taken over by the state and put into its Emergency Achievement District, an oxymoron. Once in the EAA, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy arranges to dissolve democratic control and turn the schools over to for-profit charter chaplains.

Snyder encourages charters and loves for-profit charters.

80% of Michigan’s charters operate for-profit.

What a racket!

How much longer will Michigan voters tolerate the plundering and sacking of public education?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan

Tom Friedman Is As Clueless As Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
71

Most educators and even most legislators seem to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to “reform” American education. After 13 years of test-based evaluation and school closings, no one claims success. We need what: More of the same! Congress doesn’t know what to do to change a failed status quo. Feckless Arne Duncan, having failed in Chicago, now looks for scapegoats for the failure of the Bush-Obame bipartisan consensus.

Duncan has one sure ally: Tom Friedman of the Néw York Times

They are certain that American schools are terrible, even though test scores and graduation rates are at a historic high. They want us to be just like South Korea, where exams determine one’s life (see Mercedes Schneider on examination hell in Korea).

They blame parents. They blame teachers. They blame students. They blame schools.

They blame everyone but the obvious perpetrators: failed federal policies that undermine the autonomy of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and states; budget cuts that have increased class sizes and narrowed curricula, closed libraries and eliminated social workers, nurses, psychologists, and guidance counselors; the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation; the largest inequality gap in a century; rising levels of segregation; a popular culture that celebrates instant success, not the earnest hard work required for academic success; the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys: the intrusion of philanthropic behemoths like Gates, with its own failed solutions; a media indifferent to a rapacious privatization movement that cares more about budget-cutting and profiteering than education.

They are looking for blame in all the wrong places.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Private Firms=No Accountability

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2014 //
22

Morgan Smith of the Texas Tribune (published in thr New York Times) wrote about the secrecy that surrounds the finances of private corporations that manage schools and claim to be “public.”

They are “public” when it is time to get the money but their finances are private when asked to account for taxpayer money.

Basis, an Arizona charter chain, submitted an application to open a charter in San Antonio and this is what happened:

“On a recently approved Texas charter school application, blacked-out paragraphs appear on almost 100 of its 393 pages.

“Redactions on the publicly available online version of the application often extend for pages at a time. They include sections on the school’s plan to support students’ academic success, its extracurricular activities and the “extent to which any private entity, including any management company” will be involved in the school’s operation. The “shaded material,” according to footnotes, is confidential proprietary or financial information.”

Smith writes:

“In Texas, commercial entities cannot run public schools. But when a school’s management — including accounting, marketing and hiring decisions — is contracted out to a private company, the distinction can become artificial. Such an arrangement raises questions about how to ensure financial accountability when the boundary between public and private is blurred, and the rules of public disclosure governing expenditures of taxpayer money do not apply.”

Some of the most secretive companies run virtual schools, paid for with public money:

“When The Texas Tribune made an open-records request for employee salary records and marketing expenses at the state’s full-time virtual schools, it received responses from all but one of those connected with for-profit entities indicating either that the records were not available or were not subject to public information laws.

“The Huntsville Independent School District, which went into partnership with K12 Inc. to open a virtual academy this year, said the district did not have documents responding to the request at the virtual campus as “it contracts with a private company to handle all employment of personnel and staffing-related data.”

“In other instances, The Tribune was directed to make a request to the private company. A lawyer for Responsive Ed Solutions, a charter school that also contracts with K12 Inc., wrote that most employees of its virtual school were hired by the company and provided the email address of a K12 lawyer. A K12 Inc. spokesman then told The Tribune that “confidential information about K12’s employees” could not be disclosed.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, K12 Inc., Privatization, Texas

Anthony Cody: Confessions of a Teacher in “Virtual Charter School Hell”

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2014 //
76

Darcy Bedortha is a guest writer for Anthony Cody’s blog.

She tells her story as a Lead Teacher for a K12 virtual charter school.

She confirms all the worst fears of critics of virtual charters.

They make a lot of money. They are passionate about profits, not students.

Students need one-to-one contact with a human being. They don’t get it.

In a long and heartbreaking post, she writes:

I was an English teacher, so my students would write. They wrote of pain and fear and of not fitting in. They were the kinds of young people who desperately needed to have the protective circle of a community watching over them. They needed one healthy person to smile at them and recognize them by name every day, to say “I’m glad you’re here!” Many of my former students do not have that.

The last thing these young people needed, I came to realize during my time with K12 Inc., was to be isolated in front of a computer screen. A week or two or three would often go by without my getting a word from a student. They didn’t answer their email, they didn’t answer their phones. Often their phones were disconnected. Their families were disconnected. My students also moved a lot. During my first year at the school I spent days on the phone trying to track students down. This year I struggled to not simply give up under the weight of it all.

In the fall of 2013, 42 percent of our high school students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.” I had a number of students who were not native English speakers. I cannot wrap my head around how to serve a student who is unable to read or comprehend the language that the virtual curriculum is written in, let alone learn the technology (when it is functioning) without sitting beside them in the same space. Many of my non-native speakers had parents who did not speak English at all. These students often struggled for a very short time, and then I never saw their work again. They dropped out, moved on.

The school officials make millions of dollars. The virtual charter works for them.

Why are we allowing public dollars to flow to these non-educational institutions?

Silly question. They give campaign contributions. They lobby. They are strategic in advancing their goal: Profit.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, K12 Inc., On-Line Education

Red Queen in L.A.: Where Is the Outrage?

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2014 //
17

Blogger redqueeninla takes a hard look at what is happening to the schools and the children and asks the inevitable question: “Where’s the outrage?”

Why do parents tolerate classes with 50 students? Teachers can’t teach such large classes. Does anyone care?

Why does the media report calmly about self-enriching deals for corporate interests without treating it as a scandal?

Why do we ignore segregation of our most vulnerable children when we know it’s wrong?

She writes:

“And yet therein lies the irony. Reported anger does not register; only blandishments do. The means to move change are so hampered by our unwillingness to hear unpleasantness. We wrap up the old year and hope for betterment in the next, but we school ourselves to ignore what ought to be infuriating. Bad things – injustice, poverty, denied opportunities — are being meted out upon our very own children. As a parent, I see the structure of our society as intended to support this next generation. Why do we do any of what we do if not to provide opportunity for them? Opting for disengagement equates to sanctioning inequity. The most important accounting this new year could bring is an acknowledgement of the harm our complacency catalyzes. Let these lists infuriate you. Hear the anger and do not just shut it off. Demand an accounting with accountability.”

What should we do this new year?

Get angry. Demand an accounting.

Get active. Reject complacency.

Find allies. Make noise.

Defend the children. Defend their teachers. Defend their schools.

United, we have the power to make a difference.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Poverty, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Students

Robert Freeman: How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
49

We know the formula by now for destroying public education and handing it off to entrepreneurs who can cut costs, package it, extract a profit (or remain nonprofit while paying exorbitant executive salaries):

Cry “crisis.” Set impossible targets (100% success on tests normed on a bell curve). Demoralize teachers. Fire the most experienced teachers. Hire low-wage temporary teachers who will leave within three years, thus eliminating future pension obligations. Close schools and disrupt communities. Turn schools over to entrepreneurs, to amateurs, to non-educators, to sports stars, to charter chains. Watch as public schools are dissolved and disappear. Watch as people become consumers, not citizens.

But now others get it, even if most of our major editorial boards do not.

Robert Freeman writes here about the public theft that is underway.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Lee Fang: Obama Picks Prominent Privatizer for Key Role in Department of Education

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2013 //
65

Lee Fang is one of our most extraordinary investigative journalists. He is one of the few who has looked behind the rhetoric of the privatization movement that calls itself a “reform” movement. Unfortunately, the goal of “reform” is to dismantle the public sector and turn it over to entrepreneurs. In 2011, Fang wrote a blockbuster exposé about the online industry and its ties to politicians.

In this article, Lee Fang describes Ted Mitchell, who has been nominated to serve as Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful spot in the U.S. Department of Education.

Mitchell is chief executive officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which promotes and funds charter schools and for-profit ventures.

Fang writes:

“As head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Mitchell oversees investments in education technology start-ups. In July, Zynga, the creators of FarmVille, provided $1 million to Mitchell’s group to boost education gaming companies. Mitchell’s NewSchool Venture Fund also reportedly partners with Pearson, the education mega-corporation that owns a number of testing and test-book companies, along with one prominent for-profit virtual charter school, Connections Academy.

“Jeff Bryant, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, says it seems likely that Mitichell will “advocate for more federal promotion of online learning, ‘blended’ models of instruction, ‘adaptive learning’ systems, and public-private partnerships involving education technology.”

“Mitchell did not respond to TheNation.com’s request for comment.

“His ethics disclosure form shows that he was paid $735,300 for his role at NewSchools, which is organized as a non-profit. In recent years, he has served or is currently serving as a director to New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

“In addition, Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio.

“Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University. “As a foundational investor and director, [Salmon River Capital’s] Josh Lewis made invaluable contributions to Capella’s success. From leading our landmark financing in 2000, when Capella was a $10 million business operating in a difficult environment, through a successful 2006 IPO and beyond, he proved a great partner who kept every commitment he made,” reads a statement from Steve Shank, founder of Capella.”

In sum, the fox has been put in charge of the henhouse.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Obama

HuffPost: How a For-Profit College Created Fake Jobs to Win Taxpayer $$$

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
14

Huffington Post has a startling expose of how a particular for-profit college paid employers to hire its graduates, but only temporarily.

This was done to pad its job-placement numbers.

This will please federal regulators and enable the college to say that its graduates are easily hired.

What they don’t admit: They are soon laid off.

Here is the story:

Eric Parms enrolled at an Everest College campus in the suburbs of Atlanta in large part because recruiters promised he would have little trouble securing a job.

He’d seen the for-profit school’s television commercials touting its sterling rates of job placement, and he’d heard the pledges of admissions staff who assured him that the campus career services office would help him find work in his field.

But after completing a nine-month program in heating and air conditioning repair in the summer of 2011 — graduating with straight As and $17,000 in student debt — Parms began to doubt the veracity of the pitch. Career services set him up with a temporary contract position laying electrical wires. After less than two months, he and several other Everest graduates also working on the job were laid off and denied further help finding work, he says.

It turns out that the college paid the contractor $2,000 to hire its graduates for at least 30 days.

Why would the college pay a contractor to hire its graduates?

Everest College’s $2,000-per-head “subsidy” program in Decatur, Ga., stands among an array of tactics used for years by the institution’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., to systematically pad its job placement rates, according to a review of contract documents and lawsuits and interviews with former employees.

More than a marketing tool to lure new students, solid job placement rates allow the company to satisfy the accrediting bodies that oversee its nearly 100 U.S. campuses, while enabling Corinthian to tap federal student aid coffers — a source of funding that has reached nearly $10 billion over the last decade, comprising more than 80 percent of the company’s total revenue.

When the Obama administration begins its public ratings of colleges, imagine the games that will be played to burnish the data that affects a college or university’s ability to get federal student aid.

Note: It is called Campbell’s Law.

Categories For-Profit, Higher Education

Breaking News: Pearson Foundation Fined Millions for Violating Laws

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
45

New York state’s attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman won an agreement from the Pearson Foundation to pay $7.7 million in fines for using its charitable activities to advance its corporation’s profit-making arm.

According to the story by Javier Hernandez in the New York Times,

“An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software. The investigation also showed that the foundation had helped woo clients to Pearson’s business side by paying their way to education conferences that were attended by its employees.

“Under the terms of the agreement to be announced on Friday, the money, aside from $200,000 in legal expenses, will be directed to 100Kin10, a national effort led by a foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, to train more teachers in high-demand areas, including science, technology, engineering and math.

“The fact is that Pearson is a for-profit corporation, and they are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit products,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement. “I’m pleased that this settlement will direct millions of dollars back to where they belong.”

“Officials at Pearson and the foundation defended their work.

“We have always acted with the best intentions and complied with the law,” they said, in a joint statement. “However, we recognize there were times when the governance of the foundation and its relationship with Pearson could have been clearer and more transparent.”

“The case shed a light on the competitive world of educational testing and technology, which Pearson has come to dominate. As federal and state leaders work to overhaul struggling schools by raising academic standards, educational companies are rushing to secure lucrative contracts in testing, textbooks and software.

“The inquiry by the attorney general focused on Pearson’s attempts to develop a suite of products around the Common Core, a new and more rigorous set of academic standards that has been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

“Around 2010, Pearson began financing an effort through its foundation to develop courses based on the Common Core. The attorney general’s report said Pearson had hoped to use its charity to win endorsements and donations from a “prominent foundation.” That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Pearson Inc. executives believed that branding their courses by association with the prominent foundation would enhance Pearson’s reputation with policy makers and the education community,” a release accompanying the attorney general’s report said.

“Indeed, in April 2011, the Pearson Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced they would work together to create 24 new online reading and math courses aligned with the Common Core.

“Pearson executives believed the courses could later be sold commercially, the report said, and predicted potential profits of tens of millions of dollars. After Mr. Schneiderman’s office began its investigation, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for $15.1 million.

“The attorney general’s office also examined a series of education conferences sponsored by the Pearson Foundation, which paid for school officials to meet their foreign counterparts in places like Helsinki and Singapore…..”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pearson
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