Archives for category: For-Profit
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Philadelphia: The New Teacher Project, TFA, Bain Capital, and the Leeching of $$$ From Urban Schools

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2018 //
8

Greg Windle, a journalist at The Notebook, has drawn together the many strands of the tangled web of Reformer groups in Philadelphia, as seen through the lens of a contract awarded to The New Teacher Project for principal training. TNTP, Michelle Rhee’s creation, was designed to hire new teachers. When did it develop an expertise in training principals? Were there no veteran educators, no one in the Philadelphia School System, capable of training new principals? Or were they recruiting principals who had been a teacher for a year or two?

As Windle gets deeper into the story of a contract dispute about hiring TNTP to train principals, a familiar cast of money-hungry Reform groups washes up on the beach.

“Marjorie Neff, a former School Reform Commission chair who voted against the TNTP contract to recruit and screen teachers, said that in her experience such national education vendors use an approach that is “formulaic” and doesn’t tailor well to the needs of an individual teacher or the “context” of teaching in Philadelphia, where a teacher’s needs are different than in the suburbs. Neff is a former principal at Samuel Powel Elementary and J.R. Masterman who earned a master’s degree in education from Temple University.

“They’re selling a product. From that perspective, their formula is their vested interest,” Neff said. “Their bottom line is profitability, and we need to take that into account. Is it the most effective way to do this, or is it the most profitable? I don’t think those necessarily have to be in conflict, but sometimes they are.”

“In 2017, TNTP reported that its expenses were $20 million higher than revenue. In 2016, its revenue was nearly $21 million higher than expenses, but this was entirely due to the $41 million it brought in from “all other contributions, gifts, grants” (excluding government grants). That pot includes grants from outside philanthropies, such as foundations, but also investments from venture capital firms. In 2015, the nonprofit lost $6.1 million, despite millions in outside funding.

“Shifting funding, but consistent ideology

“Bain Capital’s consulting firm has two members on the board of TNTP. Since 2009, Bain’s consulting arm has partnered with Teach for America to develop “high-impact leaders in education” by placing TFA alumni in “leadership” positions in public education. Together, TFA and Bain designed “a series of programs to inspire, prepare, match and support Teach for America alums on the path to leadership.” Bain aimed to bring leadership development practices from the private sector into public education.

“In 2012, the two organizations got together to “expand the scope of work” of their partnership — the same year that Teach for America founded School Systems Leaders to train TFA alumni to “serve at the highest levels of leadership in public school systems.”

“Matt Glickman, an employee of the Bain consulting firm and board member of TNTP, has also served on the board of the NewSchools Venture Fund. That fund has invested in free-market education reforms since 1998. The Sackler family – whose fortune is based on profits from Purdue Pharma, developer of OxyContin – decided to invest heavily in the fund.”

When will education be returned to educators?

Anyone advocating for edupreneurs should be fired. As Neff said quite well, these national vendors are in it for the money.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Hypocrisy, Philadelphia, Principals, Teach for America

New Jersey: How Chris Christie Allowed Charter Entrepreneurs to Rip Off Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2018 //
8

Bob Braun, the veteran investigative reporter who has covered New Jersey politics for many years, describes an astonishing ripoff of taxpayers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

California Legislature Passes Ban on For-Profit Charters: Will Governor Brown Sign It?

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2018 //
14

The California Legislature passed a bill banning for-profit charters. The sponsor is Assemblymember Kevin McCarty of Sacramento. The bill is aimed primarily at the virtual charter school run by for-profit K12 Inc.

Last time such a bill was passed, Governor Brown vetoed it. Having opened two charters when he was mayor of Oakland, he is very protective of them. This is a stain on his otherwise progressive record.

Even the California Charter Schools Association has endorsed this bill.

The San Jose Mercury News ran a powerful expose of K12 Inc. in 2016.

“SACRAMENTO — For-profit companies will be banned from running charter schools in California if Gov. Jerry Brown signs a hard-fought bill that won final approval from the state Legislature on Thursday.

“The proposal is the latest of several attempts to crack down on what critics say amounts to profiteering at the expense of children and taxpayers, the subject of a 2016 investigation by this news organization. Its passage came only after proponents were able to forge agreement between two groups that are almost always at odds: teachers unions and the trade association representing charter schools.

“The exposé in the Mercury News highlighted the need for reform,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat who serves on the education committee.

“That investigation zeroed in on K12 Inc., a for-profit operation based in Virginia and traded on Wall Street that manages publicly funded charter schools in California and other states. The K12-run network California Virtual Academies, the largest of its kind in the state with an enrollment of roughly 15,000, graduated fewer than half of its high school students, the news organization reported, and some teachers said they were pressured to inflate grades and enrollment records.

”This news organization’s probe also found that children who logged onto the company’s software for as little as one minute per day were counted as “present” for the purposes of calculating the amount of taxpayer funding the company would receive from California.

“As with policies from immigration enforcement to fuel standards, the Legislature’s approval of a for-profit charter school ban is at odds with the policies of the Trump administration. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is not only a vocal supporter of for-profit education, but her husband disclosed they were early investors in K12 Inc.

“Assembly Bill 406 would change California’s charter school law to prohibit for-profit corporations and for-profit educational management organizations from running the state’s taxpayer-funded and independently run schools — even if the schools themselves are technically nonprofits.

LCalifornia currently has about 35 such charter schools, according to McCarty’s office. In 2016 K12 settled a lawsuit with the state for $168.5 million over claims that it manipulated attendance records and other measures of student success.”

Governor Brown has until September 30 to sign or veto the bill.

Jesse Calefati’s reporting for the San Jose Mercury News is education journalism at its finest, independent and owing nothing to philanthropists or investors.

Categories California, Education Reform, For-Profit, K12 Inc., Virtual Charter Schools

Bill Phillis: Those Poor, Poor, and Very Few Bad For-Profit Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
5

Bill Phillis, retired for many years as deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and now the state’s most outspoken critic of charter fraud, writes on his blog about the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s lame defense of for-profit charters:

“The myth of Ohio’s ‘for-profit’ charter school system”: A Fordham Institute’s damage control effort

An August 20 Fordham article suggests the charter industry is getting a bad rap because of the cronyism of a few charter operators. The article also attempts to justify the use of for-profit management companies by charter schools.

The notion proffered is that ECOT and the White Hat Management Company are the only bad actors in the charter industry. What about the 250 or so charter schools that took state and federal money and closed or never opened leaving kids in an education lurch? What about the other charter operations that have been reported as fostering gross irregularities, such as the Gulen charters, but not appropriately investigated by state officials? What about the Imagine Schools Inc. charter school chain that requires the charter schools to pay absurdly high rent to a real estate company allied with Imagine?

Corruption in the charter industry in Ohio and elsewhere is not confined to just a few bad actors. The industry is rife with low performance, cronyism and corruption.

In the article, the author equates a charter board hiring a management company to operate its school to a school district purchasing buses, books, etc. from the private sector. An absurd stretch!

A management company that operates charter schools performs a governmental fiduciary function and thus should be subjected to the same accountability and transparency measures as school district officials. Bus and book companies don’t operate the schools to which they sell products.

The Ohio charter industry seems beyond repair but Fordham keeps defending it.

Be it noted that the NAACP report on charter schools not only called for a moratorium on them, but called for the elimination of all for-profit charters and the for-profit management organizations that manage charters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization

Arizona: CEO of Failing Online Charter School Gets a Bonus of $8.8 Million

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
19

Arizona is an amazing state. Taxpayers don’t care how their money is spent. You could collect it and burn it and they wouldn’t care.

That’s the impression you would get if you read this story about Primavera Charter School.

The online high school is a failure but the CEO is getting a bonus of $8.8 million.

“By most academic measures, Primavera online charter school is a failure.”

“Its student-to-teacher ratio is 215-to-1 — 12 times the state average — allowing little or no individualized attention.

“On recently released state standardized tests, less than a quarter of its students passed math and about a third passed English, both below the state average.

“And 49 percent of Primavera students end up dropping out, 10 times the state average.

“But by another measure, Primavera is an unmitigated success: making money.

“Beginning in 2012, the school began shifting large shares of its annual $30-plus million allotment of state funding away from instruction and into stocks, bonds, mortgage-backed securities and real estate.

“That year, 70 percent, or $22.4 million, of its state funding went into its growing investment portfolio — instead of efforts to raise test scores, reduce class sizes, or address an exploding dropout rate that is now the state’s third-highest.”

That’s in line with the usual formula for online charter schools. They fail but they are profitable. State legislatures authorize them despite their consistent record of failure. Usually they do so because a key politician or two received a campaign contribution of a few thousand dollars. Think ECOT in Ohio, which paid off important pols to the tune of a million a year, assuring a return of hundreds of millions every year.

Do taxpayers care? It’s their money.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Failure, For-Profit, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Gail Collins on The Bane that Is Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
13

A very welcome column about our odious Secretary of Education by the brilliant Gail Collins.

The Bane That Is Betsy DeVos https://nyti.ms/2MvmgC5?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Today let’s talk about the evil deeds of Betsy DeVos.

We’ve been distracted, what with Omarosa and the Manafort trial and that $90 million military parade we were so looking forward to. At the same time, our secretary of education has been busy, working to protect for-profit colleges from their students.

Yes! We keep being told that Donald Trump was elected because working-class Americans were worried that their kids wouldn’t be able to move up in the world. And now DeVos is making it easier for those very same kids to be cheated when they try to prepare for a career.

It’s quite a story, just as DeVos is quite a gal. Probably the first secretary of education with a $40 million family yacht that’s registered in the Cayman Islands, presumably to avoid American taxes.

Is that the yacht that got mysteriously untied the other day?

Yes, it was moored in Ohio and an unknown person set it adrift, causing up to $10,000 in damage. We do not approve of this sort of behavior, people! Somebody could have gotten hurt. And the DeVos family might have been without a floating residence, except for the other nine yachts they own.

But before I permit any more distractions, we need to discuss policymaking at the Department of Education:

The Obama administration worked very hard to weed out bad for-profit colleges. The policy it finally came up with was to compare an average graduate’s debt with the average graduate’s earnings. Then cut off federal grants and loans to the schools that had a really terrible ratio. And give the students who’d gotten a raw deal a chance to get their loans forgiven.

Excuse me, but does this apply to, say, philosophy majors? My grandson is finishing up at the state university and I do not see how all these courses on Heidegger are going to get him work.

No, we’re talking about schools that are just there to prepare students for a career, whether it’s computer engineering or cooking or auto mechanics. Your grandson is in a privileged minority. If you want an American college student to worry about, Suzanne Martindale of Consumers Union says you should think less about a kid on a four-year campus and more about “someone 29 with three kids.”

Or Stephanie Stiefel, who enrolled at the now-defunct for-profit International Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa to get a B.A. that she was assured would lead to a good-paying position in interior design: “They made it seem so simple — just do well in class and finish the program.” She graduated with a 3.8 and $62,000 in debt, then discovered that the only jobs she could land were minimum-wage positions she could have gotten without any training at all. Other schools wouldn’t accept her credits when she tried to get an advanced degree. Now, 10 years later, she’s finished a tour of duty in the Army and owes $110,000. “At this point I just make the payment and cry about it,” she said.

DeVos, meanwhile, is worried about the government making “burdensome” demands on the for-profit schools. We will take a break for a minute to sigh.

Oh gosh, this is so depressing. I hate thinking about the things this administration is doing to ordinary people. Is there any chance you could distract me by working in Omarosa?

Well, be a good citizen and stay with me for a minute.

DeVos loves for-profit education — you may remember she championed an overhaul of the Michigan school system, which replaced troubled public schools with truly terrible charter schools, most of them for-profit.

So she’s chipping away at anything the for-profits don’t like. Like the Obama rule allowing aggrieved students to petition to get their loans forgiven. The new idea would pretty much limit relief to people who’ve fallen into deep financial distress. Nobody seems to have seen that one coming.

And lord knows what’s next. Amy Laitinen, at the nonpartisan think tank New America, is worrying that the department will “allow a college to outsource its program to an unaccredited provider.” Which in theory could mean that when you pay your tuition to what seems to be a legitimate school, you could find yourself bused over to Trump University for classes.

I’m so glad you got Trump University in there.

DeVos has stuffed her department with people from the for-profit education industry. The guy who’s supposed to be overseeing fraud investigations is a former dean of a for-profit named DeVry University, which paid $100 million to settle a lawsuit over misleading marketing tactics.

But you still promised me Omarosa. Find a way to work her in.

The famous memoir claims Trump calls his secretary of education “Ditzy DeVos” and vowed to get rid of her. The first certainly sounds likely. But by now we are well aware that the current president of the United States is incapable — oh, irony of ironies — of firing anybody. And I don’t want to give you the impression that Trump has any reservations about for-profit colleges that make grandiose promises to their students about future careers, while taking their money and preparing them for nothing whatsoever.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

California: Torlakson Creates a Task Force to Review State Charter Laws

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
12

Tom Torlakson, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction in California, has created a task force to review the charter school laws in the state.

California has more charter schools than any other state. The California Charter School Association is the richest, most powerful lobby in the state and has been able to stymie any overhaul of the law. The CCSA has staunchly opposed any revision of the law that might require accountability or transparency from charter schools and that would, for example, bar conflicts of interest or for-profit charters.

Governor Jerry Brown, who has been a progressive leader on so many major issues, has been a faithful defender of charter schools, vetoing any legislative efforts to update the law.

But, it now appears that the new governor will be Gavin Newsom, and he has no debts to the CCSSA, which directed millions of dollars to Antonio Villairaigosa in the primaries, who ran a distant third.

Given the reshuffling at the top, it is time to fix the conditions that allow frauds and scandals to go undetected in the charter sector.

Responsible members of the charter industry should work diligently to remove the fraudsters and grifters from their sector, as should everyone.

Charters should not have the ability to appeal from the district board to the county board to the state board, where they are certain to win approval, no matter how ill-qualified their staff.

At present, given the lack of any accountability for the expenditure of public money by charters, the state has experienced many scandals. To learn more about the woeful state of California’s charter industry, read Carol Burris’s carefully researched “Charters and Consequences.”

The Torlakson commission has the chance to get the law right, which would benefit both public schools and charter schools.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Scandal

Omarosa: DeVos Wants to Privatize All Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
51

Valerie Strauss writes about Omarosa’s new book “Unhinged” and what she says about Betsy DeVos.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/08/14/omarosa-claims-betsy-devos-wants-to-replace-public-education-with-for-profit-schools-and-that-trump-calls-her-ditzy-devos/

“A new book about President Trump by one of his former senior advisers, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claims that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants “to replace public education with for-profit schools” and that Trump has called her by the nickname “Ditzy DeVos….”

“Manigault Newman writes:

“Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools. She believes it would be better for students, but the truth is, it’s about profit. She’s so fixated on her agenda, she can’t give any consideration to building our public schools, providing financing for them, particularly their infrastructure needs.

“Manigault Newman writes that she accompanied DeVos on a trip to Florida in 2017 and that DeVos was booed while giving a graduation speech at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Florida. Graduating students heckled DeVos in large part because a few months earlier, she had called historically black colleges and universities — which were created because blacks couldn’t attend white schools — “pioneers” of school choice.

“Manigault Newman writes that after the speech, she asked the secretary how she thought she did. DeVos responded, according to the book, by saying she thought she did “great,” and then is quoted as having said the students at the Bethune-Cookman graduation “don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.” Manigault Newman then wrote this: “Meaning, all those black students were too stupid to understand her agenda.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

Valerie Strauss: “Why Would Anyone Deliberately Hurt Students” Who Were Defrauded By Scam Colleges?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
15

Valerie Strauss wrote here about Betsy DeVos’s plan to remove consumer protections from students who were scammed.

“Why would anyone want to make it harder for defrauded students? Well, the Education Department says that college students are “adults who can be reasonably expected to make informed decisions and who must take personal accountability for the decisions they make.” Supporters of the proposed changes say it is too easy for students to apply for loan forgiveness and that too much public money will have to be used to repay bad loans.

“To be sure, college students are indeed adults who can be reasonably expected to make informed decisions. And adults should indeed take personal accountability for the decisions they made.

“But the proposed regulation says, among other things, that to qualify for loan forgiveness, students who claim they have been defrauded have to prove the college intended to defraud them and show that the college had exhibited a “reckless disregard” for the truth.

“That is not, for example, the standard for state lemon laws, which offer compensatory remedies to consumers who buy cars and other goods that prove to be defective. They don’t insist that the consumers prove that a car dealer or manufacturer intended to commit fraud by making and selling a flawed product.

“Let’s say DeVos, a billionaire from Michigan, decided to buy a new yacht and it turned out to have a bum engine that broke down repeatedly. Would she have to prove the seller intended to defraud her to seek replacement or some kind of compensation?

“Consumer products are not college education, for sure, but the Trump administration believes in operating schools as if they were businesses, so the comparison seems apt.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Students

Betsy DeVos: Stealing from Students to Enrich For-Profit Colleges

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
15

Is Betsy DeVos the meanest woman in America?

She has just taken the steps needed to remove protections from students defrauded by predatory for-profit “colleges.”

Like others in the despicable Trump maladministration, DeVos thinks that consumers should fend for themselves. If they get defrauded, it’s their own fault for making a bad choice.

You can see where this is going. Government protects the marketplace, not the consumers. If you happened to get suckered by slick advertising, that’s your fault. Don’t expect the government to police the marketplace. Caveat emptor is your job.

DeVos previously rolled back regulations that allowed students who were defrauded to get a refund.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos formally moved Friday to scrap a regulation that would have forced for-profit colleges to prove that the students they enroll are able to attain decent-paying jobs, the most drastic in a series of policy shifts that will free the scandal-scarred, for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

“In a written announcement posted on its website, the Education Department laid out its plans to eliminate the so-called gainful employment rule, which sought to hold for-profit and career college programs accountable for graduating students with poor job prospects and overwhelming debt. The Obama-era rule would have revoked federal funding and access to financial aid for poor-performing schools.

“After a 30-day comment period, the rule is expected to be eliminated July 1, 2019. Instead Ms. DeVos would provide students with more data about all of the nation’s higher education institutions — not just career and for-profit college programs — including debt, expected earnings after graduation, completion rates, program cost, accreditation and other measures.

“Students deserve useful and relevant data when making important decisions about their education post-high school,” Ms. DeVos said in a statement. “That’s why instead of targeting schools simply by their tax status, this administration is working to ensure students have transparent, meaningful information about all colleges and all programs. Our new approach will aid students across all sectors of higher education and improve accountability.”

“But in rescinding the rule, the department is eradicating the most fearsome accountability measures — the loss of federal aid — for schools that promise to prepare students for specific careers but fail to prepare them for the job market, leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay back their taxpayer-backed loans.

“The DeVos approach is reversing nearly a decade of efforts to create a tough accountability system for the largely unregulated for-profit sector of higher education. In recent years, large for-profit chains, which offer training for everything from automotive mechanics to cosmetology to cybersecurity, have collapsed under mountains of complaints and lawsuits for employing misleading and deceptive practices.

“The implosions of ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges generated tens of thousands of complaints from student borrowers who said they were left with worthless degrees. The Obama administration encouraged the expansion of public community colleges as it forgave at least $450 million in taxpayer-funded student debt for for-profit graduates who could not find decent jobs with the degrees or certificates they had earned.

“The regulations passed in the wake of those scandals remade the industry. Since 2010, when the Obama administration began deliberating the rules, more than 2,000 for-profit and career programs — nearly half — have closed, and the industry’s student population has dropped by more than 1.6 million, said Steve Gunderson, the president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the for-profit industry’s trade association.”

There is a simple principle that every student should think about: Avoid for-profit “Colleges”and “universities.”

Don’t be scammed by the next fake “Trump University.”

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education
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