Indiana’s Sneaky SAT Agenda and the College Board

By Doug Martin 

In yet another sneak attack on Indiana public education and communities, the State Board of Education’s Graduation Pathways Panel, in a move to eliminate the abusive and redundant end-of-course assessments, “has recommended that students take the SAT, ACT or a similar college entrance exam instead” in order to finish high school, a move which would sit well with Hoosier Republican lawmaker and past Indiana State Board of Education member, Todd Huston, who is now Senior Vice President of State and District Partnerships at the College Board— the owner of SAT.   

The Graduation Pathways Panel is chaired by Byron Ernest, the state board of education member who recently resigned as leader of K12, Inc’s “beleaguered Hoosier Academies charter school network amid state sanctions due to years of failing academics.”

Concerning the SAT recommendation, the South Bend Tribune notes: “The change was introduced to the draft proposal less than a day before the panel voted to send it to the state Board of Education. While other parts of the plan have been available for public comment for weeks, few schools, teachers or families have been able to give input about the exam requirement change.” The State Board will vote next month on new graduation requirements, and state lawmakers “would then codify the plan in the 2018 session.” The new recommendations, if approved, will start with the class of 2023. 

Since the U.S. Department of Education has declared that “Indiana will no longer be able to include students who earn the general diploma in calculating school graduation rates,” 30 percent of those being special needs students, the State Board, actually, is adding another assault by proposing an exam which will weaken schools’ graduation passing rates and prime them for possible takeover by charter school operators. 

And then there’s Todd Huston and the College Board.  Huston, who has received $36,000 from the DeVos-Walton funded Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC and $2,500 from Charter Schools USA, along with $1,000 from Michelle Rhee’s Students First PAC, was one of Al Hubbard’s “GOP Powerbrokers” who met privately years ago to hash out the Indiana school privatization plan before any laws were introduced.

Not only is Huston paid handsomely by the College Board—for which he is listed as a lobbyist in New York—raking in $325,433 in the period from July 1, 2013 to June 31, 2014, with $47,000 listed as additional compensation from the organization and other related organizations, he promotes Silicon Valley’s online future-of-schools agenda by convincing schools to use “the SAT Suite of Assessments to give students a chance to show their best work and get better results with tools like Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy®,”  a tool which now has the blessing of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose Zuckerberg Initiative, in partnership with the College Board, seeks to give “students in lower-income communities and rural areas greater access to college pathway advisors and SAT prep mediums like Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy. 

Huston and the College Board both accept edtech’s dream of a future education system where there are no school buildings, Huston telling the media a few years ago that “educators must remake the high school day to catch up with evolving technologies and methods.”  In 2016, unsurprisingly, K12 Management, the online corporation from Herndon, Virginia, handed Huston’s campaign $500.

Huston is also the past Indiana Charter School Board member who, after leaving his job as Tony Bennett’s chief of staff, went back to his old job with Cisco Systems.  Bennett, in turn, then used $1.7 million of state money to purchase video-conferencing equipment from Cisco which wasn't used.  Some of the equipment was never even delivered.

 

David Coleman, the leader of the College Board and the master behind the Bill Gates-funded Common Core, gave Huston $10,000 for his 2012 Indiana House campaign and Tony Bennett received $2,500 from Coleman the same year.  Coleman, in 2015,  made $742,278 for his role as the College Board CEO and a little over $155, 000 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations.        

Huston went to work for the College Board in October 2012 , and Lewis Ferebee, the Indianapolis Public Schools supt., has been a member of the College Board’s board of trustees since November 2015. 

In 2017, the College Board’s board of trustees was highly criticized by nonprofit governance experts for not doing anything to rein in “the College Board, which had about $77 million in annual profit and $916 million in revenue in 2015” and a whole slew of problems in 2016.  As Reuters notes in 2016, there were “cheating rings in Asia that exploit security weaknesses in the SAT and enable some students to gain unfair advantages on the exam.”  In 2016, a  “massive security breach” exposed around 400 questions “for upcoming SATs,” and College Board members knew that a redesigned test “was overloaded with wordy math questions, a problem that handicaps non-native English speakers and reinforces race and income disparities that Coleman has vowed to diminish.” Lloyd Thacker, from the Education Conservancy, asked “What is the mechanism that holds them accountable? I’m scratching my head.  There doesn’t seem to be a countervailing voice here at all.”  Reuters found that many trustees were sent an email in 2015 telling them not to do interviews with the news outlet concerning the SAT.  

In July 2017, San Diego's school board took legal action against the College Board “after the Advanced Placement tests of more than 500 of the city's high school students were declared invalid because their seats were too close together.”  The College Board didn’t notify Scripps Ranch High, where the test was given, about its new seating arrangement protocol, according to the school, “until two days before the testing.”

The College Board has a history of questionable practices.  In 2008, it settled with New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office after an investigation found that the College Board was running a kickback scheme where “the College Board, which developed and marketed numerous products and services related to student financial assistance, gave significant discounts on those products and services to certain colleges which agreed to place the College Board's loans on their 'preferred lender' list. This effectively directed students towards loans that might not be the best or least expensive option for them."  The College Board “is no longer a lender,” for other unrelated reasons, “although it continues to provide financial aid advisement services to students,” ABC News wrote at the time.

The College Board, too, came under fire for not giving better oversight when a cheating scandal in New York in 2011 led lawmakers to ask questions, and in June 2015, a printing error which gave some SAT takers extra time to finish sections of the test involved 487,000 students. 
 
The College Board (and the makers of ACT) sell your children’s data freely.  As the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy’s Rachael Stickland and Leonie Haimson write, students, while taking the SAT, may be asked to hand over personal information (which may include social security number, “grade point average, religious affiliation, ethnicity, family income, interests, citizenship, disabilities  and more”) on an opt-in questionnaire and click a box which says they agree to be a part of the College Board’s Student Search Service. The College Board and ACT then sell some of the information to colleges and universities, which can use the data against students applying for admission.  

According to recent information on the College Board website, the social security numbers, disability information, grades, scores, and parental income are off limits, but POLITICO in 2014 wrote that these marketed "profiles can include information about the students’ grades and academic coursework — and also religion, ethnicity, citizenship status and expected need for financial aid in college. The ACT also lets customers filter student profiles by family income, parents’ education levels and student disabilities."  

POLITICO, in 2014, also noted that "the College Board did recently update its privacy policy, after Vice President John McGrath told POLITICO it might not have been clear to students exactly how much information is shared with third parties."

POLITICO also stated that a woman from Illinois sued both the College Board and ACT for selling her personal information, but the case was dropped when it was discovered that the woman "had never even taken a College Board exam".  

In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago rejected another lawsuit against the College Board and ACT (which a federal judge had thrown out earlier) which sought damages for the selling of personal information which may have included "name, address, sex, birthdate, school, grade level, ethnic group, email address, and intended college major."  EdWeek summed up the verdict by writing that “The court said the plaintiffs could not show that the test organizations' profiting from their information deprived them of any economic value of that information.”
 
Although the College Board would not disclose how much it makes from such information, Stickland and Haimson, using POLITICO figures, estimate that “ACT’s profits generated from selling student profiles were approximately $15 million in 2012.”  The College Board, according to information on its website, now sells student personal information at 43 cents per name.

A lot of Indiana taxpayer money will be wasted on SAT fees, if this issue goes through.  According to Eric Weddle, the “state education department has estimated a $5 million cost for every high school student to take the SAT or ACT.”  Although the actual cost of the changes being proposed is unknown, “the panel avoided answering concerns from local districts about the fiscal impact.” Bob Behning “suggested state agencies would put together budget requests for the General Assembly if additional funds are required.” 

As Furman University education professor and researcher Paul Thomas writes concerning the SAT in South Carolina schools in his “New SAT, but same old problems” piece published on October 22 2017, “SAT average scores should never be used to rank schools, districts, or states in terms of academic quality; this caution, in fact, comes from the College Board itself.”  Regardless of what promoters say of the new and supposedly approved SAT, the research still shows that “High-stakes test scores are mostly markers for race, social class, and gender; and are in only small ways reflections of achievement. Most standardized test data are 60 percent or more correlated with factors outside the schools, teachers, and students,” Thomas writes.  Better yet, as Thomas sums up, “we need the political will to address crippling social issues related to food insecurity, stable work and housing, and healthcare, but we also need the political will to stop changing standards and tests every few years and, instead, confront directly the inequities of our schools (such as tracking and teacher assignments) that mirror the inequities of our communities.”

Indiana DOE Stalls FOIA Naming Joel Klein and Jeb Bush and Detailing the Dog and Pony Tony Tour

*Updated in body of text

GUEST POST: 

Indiana Department of Education Fails to Release Documents on Tony Bennett, Jeb Bush, and Other School Privatizers

By Doug Martin

On Friday afternoon, just days before the next state supt. of public education will be elected, Indiana’s Public Access Counselor, Joseph B. Hoage, quietly voiced his opinion on the Indiana Department of Education failing to release Freedom of Information Act documents that likely, when forced by law to be made public, will show the crony capitalism behind Tony Bennett and Jeb Bush’s school privatization plan for Indiana.

Here is the background.  On February 16th, the Washington D.C. nonprofit, In the Public Interest, requested private emails and other files from Tony Bennett, and the IDOE has failed to do comply with this in a timely matter.  Thus, ITPI, on October 4th, filed a formal complaint with Hoage’s Indiana PAC office, which reads in part:

In this request, the Indiana Department of Education has yet to produce documents despite acknowledgement of the request and the beginning of the review of responsive records on March 15, 2012.  Even after In the Public Interest limited the scope of the request in August 2012—a limitation within the records the Department claimed it had begun collecting over six months ago—the Department has yet to produce documents.  This failure to produce in such a long period of time is unreasonable. See Opinion of the Public Access Counselor 08-FC-162 (finding unreasonableness for a public records request dated January 2008 when the complaint was filed June 27, 2008 despite the public records request being “more involved than is standard”).

Undoubtedly, the original request was specific enough for the IDOE to take immediate action, even though they deny this.  In part, this earliest demand reads:

From January 1, 2010 to the date of this request, please provide a copy of all communication (including, but not limited to, email, fax, and written) “created, received, maintained, or filed with” Tony Bennett , Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction and/or his designees and the following people and organizations.

The request names Jeb Bush, as well as Joel Klein of Wireless Generation.

It continues with:

Additionally, please provide copies of any and all records of the Superintendent’s expenses that were paid for by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Foundation for Florida’s Future, or the Alliance for Excellent Education from January 1, 2010 to the date of this request.

As Fort Wayne Journal Gazette’s Karen Francisco has noted, Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education paid for Bennett’s visit to D.C. on November 15, 2011, to commingle with Arne Duncan and chairman of the U.S. House Education Committee, John Kline. Besides charter schools and virtual learning outfits, the Foundation for Excellence in Education markets the fake parent trigger law, too, a hot button in Indiana.

To hint at what we might find when Bennett is finally forced to release his emails, let us look to a similar FOIA request from ITPI in Maine, which had no problem releasing the files.  In September, Portland Press Herald‘s Colin Woodard detailed over 1,000 FOIA documents concerning Jeb Bush’s role in promoting for-profit online learning schools with Maine’s educational commissioner, Steven Bowen, and Governor Paul LePage.  Essentially, Maine officials let Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education execute its Digital Learning Now! plan for the state, which includes, among other things, a requirement that all students take an online course in order to receive a high school diploma, as does the Indiana plan.  In this passage, Woodard connects the cronyism:

K12 was especially engaged in lobbying on the charter school bill and other legislation connected with digital learning. K12 has paid $33,074 to Augusta lobbyists since 2009, and contributed $19,000 to LePage’s election effort through the RGA Maine PAC. Connections paid Maine lobbyists $3,950 last year, all of it in connection with the charter bill, which allowed virtual schools but required that they be governed by local nonprofit organizations.

K12, Inc. and Connections Academy (now owned by Pearson) have been flooding campaign donations to Bennett and Indiana Republicans.  Contributions to Bennett go back to 2008, when K12 threw $2,000 his way and both online privatization outfits donated to Indiana corporate school representatives Brian Bosma, Theresa Lubbers, and Robert Behning, as they made their plans to privatize Indiana schools.  Last year, Bennett received $5,000 from K12. Both K12 and Connections Academy fund Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, as well.

In Indiana, K12 runs three Hoosier Academies, two of which have been given an “F” grade and one a “D.” They also operate Indiana blending-learning schools. Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein’s Wireless Generation is also active in the state, fundingBennett’s campaigns.

As I and others have extensively pointed out, Jeb Bush has hyped his anti-public school operations in Indiana for years now. In2009, he spoke at the Bill Gates-Fordham Foundation sponsored Indiana Education Roundtable, whose representatives include Carol D’Amico, a former George W. Bush-appointed National Board for Education Sciences board member. This year, Jeb picked Tony Bennett to boss his D.C.-based corporate school reform group, Chiefs for Change, alongside Maine’s Steven Bowen and former Edison Schools’ Chris Cerf (now New Jersey’s commissioner of education) who profited handsomely when the then-Florida governor bought out the company’s failing stock with teachers’ retirement funding, a maneuver sticking state pensioners to this day with a $182 million investment in a company out to destroy public education and unions. And Bush friends at Charter Schools USA have been given several so-called failing schools in Indiana, where parents have recently been protesting the corporate takeover.

Besides Jeb Bush, ITPI names Patricia Levesque and other school privatization/online learning marketers in Indiana, Florida, Maine. 

Earlier this year, when Bennett was supposedly being scrutinized by Indiana’s Select Committee on Education, Levesque and fellow Bush operatives Mary Laura Bragg and Jaryn Emholf, both also listed in the ITPI FOIA requests) blasted several emails to them, which were leaked to me. 

Levesque directs Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and his Foundation for Florida’s Future. Levesque is proud that as the current board of director of Bush’s corporate school organizations, she doesn’t take a paycheck, but this is deceptive. Levesque’s own consulting company, Meridian Strategies, raked in $100,000 in 2008 (page 8) and $123,000 in 2009 working for the Foundation for Excellence in Education (page 8). For work with Foundation for Florida’s Future, where Levesque is also executive director, her company made $276,000 in 2010 (page 8).

Levesque, who also lobbies on behalf of many virtual schools, outlined a new strategy in October 2010 at a school reform conference to privatize public schools. In an article entitled “How Outline Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools,” The Nation’s Lee Fang writes that:

Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, “even if it doesn’t pass…to keep them busy on that front.” She also advised paycheck protection, a unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly “under the radar.”

THE INDIANA PUBLIC ACCESS COUNSELOR’S COP OUT

Here is the Indiana PAC’s conclusion, which is nowhere as harsh as it should be:

Based on the foregoing, it is my opinion that the Department has acted contrary to section 3(b) of the APRA by failing to provide all records in a reasonable period of time that were responsive to the reasonably particularized portions of Ms. Kaissal’s February 22, 2012 request. However, it is my opinion that at this time the Department has complied with section 3(b) in its efforts to provide all records in a reasonable period of time that were responsive to the reasonably particularized request that was received on August 29, 2012.

As I mentioned above, the original February request is “particularized” enough.  There is no legitimate reason for IDOE’s hold-up, even though it blames a small staff in the Office of Legal Affairs, among other things.  Perhaps more IDOE members who are spreading corporate-run charter school and school vouchers across the state should be switching to this office.  Having read over all the documents on the case, I believe the Department is stalling on releasing these potentially damaging emails and other written files from Bennett because it is waiting until after Tuesday’s election.  Public Access Counselor Hoage wants it both ways, claiming the IDOE was, in fact, holding up the request, but not really.

To make matters worse, IDOE’s Heather Neal is also named in the FOIA request.  Neal, if one remembers, was Indiana’s Public Access Counselor before she started working for Tony Bennett.

Bennett desires info on every Indiana teacher, so he can deem them “unaccountable” and replace them with Teach for America recruits on their temporary stop in the schools before they head off to Wall Street.  He wants data on all students, so that he can declare schools as “broken” and package them up for the privatizers. But when it comes to passing cash onto friends of Jeb Bush and others who have donated to Bennett’s campaigns, like K12, Inc., Indiana’s supt. of public instruction and the IDOE feel it is not in their best interest to be examined.  

* [Updated] ITPI’s Donald Cohen agrees. Via email, Cohen had this to say: “We submitted these requests to discover the extent of private influence on education policy. They are refusing, stonewalling, even though they are clearly violating the state's open records law. I can only wonder what they are hiding from Indiana voters.”

I can pretty much guess what they are hiding.  When these files are finally released by law, I will gladly connect all the dots and expose Tony Bennett for the corporate school reform flunky that he truly is.  In the meantime, I suggest we all file FOIA requests with the IDOE.  

Nineteenth Century English Schools for the Poor in Yuma, AZ: Only the Monitors Have Been Swapped Out

Above is an illustration of cutting edge pedagogy in the early 19th Century for English children who could not afford private schools.  The monitorial system was based on older boys monitoring younger ones who parroted back memorized lessons before they could move up to the next row.  As many as 500 boys could be schooled in these learning sweat shops by a single teacher.  The monitorial system was invented by Joseph Lancaster, who argued for education of the poor based on the need for social control and efficiency.

And below is the inside of Carpe Diem Charter School in Yuma, AZ, where the older boy monitors of the Lancaster Schools have been replaced by flat screen monitors, who don't have to eat, sleep, or go the bathroom.  Not much has changed, otherwise, except the student teacher ratio has improved to 60:1.  There is, too, one 21st Century twist: the State now pays corporations, in this case K-12, Inc. to set up and run these computerized learning cube farms for a handsome profit.

Maybe Carpe Pecuniam would a more appropriate school name.  Translation: Seize the Cash.

Tennessee's K12, Inc. Virtual School Receives Lowest Score Possible and $16,000,000 a Year to Pay for It

Last week even TFA lawyer and Commissioner of Education in TN had described the for-profit K-12, Inc.'s Tennessee operation as "unacceptable," which is no surprise to anyone who has followed K-12's checkered history, which began when gambling addict, Bill Bennett, leveraged his influence with the Bushies to cart away $14 million in discretionary federal grants to start his online empire.  Bennett resigned in 2005, but the company has continued to expand into 30 states.

Tennessee newspapers reported last week that the Tennessee franchise, which is run through the impoverished Union County Schools in East Tennessee, scored the lowest possible score on the state testing scale: 1 out of 5. That represents the bottom 10 percent in a state that is in bottom 20 percent nationally on NAEP

In July of this year, a new research study was released that demonstrated what a waste of money K-12 represents for a cash-strapped state like Tennessee.  The summary:

• Math scores for K12 Inc.’s students are 14 to 36 percent lower than scores for other students in the states in which the company operates schools.
• Only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc.’s schools reported meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards in 2010-11, compared to 52% for brick-and-mortar schools in the nation as a whole.
• Student attrition is exceptionally high in K12 Inc. and other virtual schools. Many families appear to approach the virtual schools as a temporary service: Data in K12 Inc.’s own school performance report indicate that 31% of parents intend to keep their students enrolled for a year or less, and more than half intend to keep their students enrolled for two years or less.
• K12 Inc.’s schools spend more on overall instructional costs than comparison schools – including the cost of computer hardware and software, but noticeably less on teachers’ salaries and benefits.
• K12 Inc. spends little or nothing on facilities and maintenance, transportation, and food service.• K12 Inc. enrolls students with disabilities at rates moderately below public school averages, although this enrollment has been increasing, but the company spends half as much per pupil as charter schools overall spend on special education instruction and a third of what districts spend on special education instruction.

K-12 is currently under investigation in Florida for hiring uncertified teachers and trying to force certified teachers to sign rolls that are not their own.  In Georgia,

The Office of the Georgia School Superintendent has threatened to terminate the K12-run Georgia Cyber Academy’s charter with the state unless the online school reduces its teacher-student ratios, hires more staff to help students with disabilities and irons out some financial issues, according to an Aug. 7 letter from the state agency posted by the Financial Investigator."

In Ohio, teacher student ratios are one teacher to 51 students, while millions are drained from the public school funds.

In Tennessee, enrollment this Fall is projected at 3,000.  That's $16,000,000 dollars a year going to fund a bottomless hole in the ground that has no value to be added to Tennessee's vaunted value-added system.  What has been the reaction by ALEC-owned Tennessee legislators, who can't get enough of those corporate education solutions?  They have decided to evaluate K12, Inc. every year, rather than every other year.  Really?  Really.

If this were a public school, the school would be on the legislative list of schools to be turned over to the charterizers to use public assets to run the school for corporate gain.  Oh, I forgot--this one already has.