Duncan Dishes $21.5 Million to College Board and Calls It Helping the Poor

Arne Duncan has a No Excuses approach to education, and to prove it once more, he has just signed off on a plan to give every American child living in a car, motel room, or urban hovel a chance to take another test to show how hopelessly behind she is.  As a side benefit for the testing-industrial complex, the College Board collects the entire sum:

 The U.S. Department of Education announced the award of more than $21.5 million in grants to 43 states to cover all or part of the fees charged to low-income students for taking Advanced Placement tests. . . .

"These funds will help eliminate financial roadblocks for more low-income students and allow them to fully benefit from the AP program,” Duncan said.

Yes, those nasty financial roadblocks for which there are no excuses.  Does one know whether to laugh or cry?

Clearly, it looks like the $750,000 that the College Board spent on lobbying last year is paying off big time. Here is a clip from PalyVoice, which had an informative spread in May 2012 (my bolds):

. . . . As the records from the most recently released Form 990 indicate, the College Board has been breezing through the 2009-2010 fiscal year with profits enviable by comparable industries in the private sector.

Of the over $594 million in total expenses in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, $7.8 million was allocated for the compensation of current officers, directors, trustees and key employees, $111.1 million went towards other salaries and wages, $13.7 million was for traveling expenses and $2.9 million paid for advertising and promotions, among other items.

Among the total of 1370 employees hired by the College Board, 456 individuals received more than $100,000 in compensation.

The multitude of Senior Vice Presidents and Officers received even more in total compensation and nontaxable benefits; Chief Executive Officer and President Gaston Caperton, the highest paid employee, received $1.3 million of such compensation and benefits, while the second highest paid employee, Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President Herbert Elish, received nearly $600,000.

Even after all of these expenses, there is still a $65.6 million gap between the expenses and the total revenue. From the College Board’s Form 990, it is unclear as to what the nearing $70 million profit is going towards.

However, one expense in particular is salient: over $750,000 spent towards lobbying in the 2009-2010 year. While it is illegal for a nonprofit organization to participate in “direct or indirect political campaign activities,” it is still allowed to engage in lobbying activities.

The Form 990 indicated that the College Board has attempted “to influence foreign, national, state or local legislation, including any attempt to influence public opinion on a legislative matter or referendum, through the use of... paid staff or management [as well as] direct contact with legislators, their staffs, government officials or a legislative body.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Washington D.C., three separate lobbying firms and seven different lobbyists represent the College Board on Capitol Hill.

The organization has been lobbying the federal government on issues and bills pertaining to education since 1998, as well as matters regarding Federal Budget and Appropriations since 2002. . . .

AP History Exams Help Students (a) understand history, (b) memorize history facts, (c) pay Caperton's $872,061 salary, (d) both b and c?

The "non-profit" College Board rakes in almost 10 percent profit each year on the millions of tests that American students choke down every year in an institutionalized trivial pursuit game that substitutes for big chunks of the curriculum in American high schools.  Meanwhile, the College Board's CEO is paid nearly a million bucks a year and the CB has almost a billion dollars of "non-profit" in the bank.  The biggest insult, however, is how the College Board's AP tests determine what our brightest kids get taught or not taught about history, literature, and science. 

Michael Winerip reports this week on a Connecticut high school teacher, Chris Doyle, who won't settle for the sanitized, memorized factoids that are demanded by the AP exam:

. . . .When Mr. Doyle began his career 25 years ago, schools taught current events. But standardized testing and canned curriculums have squeezed most of that out of public education. The A.P. history course is a yearlong race to master several centuries’ worth of facts that may or may not turn up on the exam in May.

“A lot of A.P. is memorizing timelines,” explained Anna Hagadorn, who memorized enough last year to earn a top score of 5.

Even the College Board, which makes so much money selling SAT and A.P. tests that it can pay its president, Gaston Caperton, $872,061 a year, has acknowledged that its A.P. American history exam needs to be revamped. Mr. Caperton has promised by 2013 to deliver a new test that will do a better job of fostering analytic skills.

Mr. Doyle is way ahead of him. For the past several years, after his students have completed their A.P. exams in early May, he has taught a five-week course on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Public education must engage the most pressing and troubling issues of our time,” he once wrote in an essay for an education journal.

There is no textbook yet for these wars, so Mr. Doyle does what teachers did in the olden days: creates his own curriculum. Students read excerpts from “Plan of Attack,” by Bob Woodward; “The Forever War,” by Dexter Filkins; “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; and many more.

He brings in combat veterans to speak, including Jonathan Lebeau, a retired Navy medic who is a half-brother of a former student; Richard Williams, a retired major in the British Army and a former neighbor; and Peter Van Loon, a retired Navy captain who attends the same church as Mr. Doyle.

Mr. Van Loon told the students about the time an American convoy in Afghanistan killed a 12-year-old boy, who “was my own boy’s age.” He described his feelings when he and a village elder negotiated over how much money the American military would pay to compensate the family for their dead son.

The moment they put down their No. 2 pencils, most A.P. history students forget the three ways the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Hartford Convention and the South Carolina Exposition and Protest were similar.

Mr. Doyle’s students aren’t likely to forget Mr. Van Loon. Caitlan Miranda took the class last year. Asked if she remembered whether Mr. Van Loon supported or opposed the war, she said, “I wouldn’t exactly say it was either,” adding, “I’d say he was conflicted” — which was exactly right.. . . .

New Documentary, Race to Nowhere, Examines AP Testing Abuse

In 2008, 2.3 million AP exams were given in the U. S., which put $190,900,000 into the coffers of the College Board. And as family budgets shrink, along with the amount that colleges have to offer the needed number of classes for undergraduates, the AP exam seems poised to, indeed, replace many college freshman courses that offer real learning to students. Trading real coursework for cram courses that prepare students to take a test and forget it will have dire consequences, however, when it comes the important job of transmitting our culture to the next generation.

A new documentary, Race to Nowhere, examines this spreading phenomenon of AP classes replacing real learning. Here is a clip posted originally posted at the New York Times on Jan. 25: