Princeton Review Nailed for NCLB Tutoring Fraud

If there are any educational historians around in a hundred years to examine the records from this generation of corporate reform efforts to privateer public schools into corporate revenue streams, No Child Left Behind will stand out, no doubt, as one of the most useful tools in their arsenal.  To those less disposed to celebrate the demise of democratic institutions, NCLB has, thus far anyway, proved itself as the most expensive, toxic, and damaging federal education policy in the nation’s history. 

Based on the ideologically-driven faux science of the National Reading Panel, NCLB created Reading First, which poured $7,000,000,000 into phonics-based direct instruction (parrot learning) reading efforts that set a course for ineffective, unbalanced literacy programs for years to come in the early grades.  The U.S. Dept. of Education’s own study in 2008 tersely concluded that "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two, or three" (p. xv).  Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that reading instruction was aimed as much at behavioral control as it was reading, and children spent an inordinate amount of time being tested on how many nonsense syllables they could recognize in 60 seconds—something called decoding and DIBELS testing? 

What did children get out that kind of reading-in-a-straightjacket experience? Again from the Federal study: “Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first grade students in one school year (spring 2007).  The impact was equivalent to an effect of 0.17 standard deviations” (p. xv).  Not bad for $7 billion.

In another study from ED, the only literacy method that got positive results in all four domains of reading literacy was Reading Recovery, a balanced program that had been demonized as “whole language” and essentially eliminated from consideration by the Reading First officials who were deciding who would get the Reading First grants. 

Another example of waste and fraud occurred when more public billions were allocated for NCLB tutoring, or supplemental services (see here, here, here, and here) with the greatest beneficiaries being the privateer tutoring companies that operated for over five years without any federal oversight or evaluation studies to determine the effect of their overpriced tutoring on student achievement.  When school vouchers were finally stripped out of the NCLB bill prior to passage, advocates of privatization settled for charters and tutoring as the road to more privatization, while hoping for vouchers to be passed in future reauthorizations of NCLB.  Quoting from Elizabeth Debray’s book:

        . . . Senator Gregg saw another advantage to supplemental services.  As one aide who preferred anonymity recalled about the meeting with Republican Senate committee members right before the committee voted: “Gregg was explaining why they should vote for the bill . . . and he said: ‘Well, the supplemental services are a foot under the door for vouchers.  They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly, and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing.’”

Supplemental services operated for 5 years without any oversight whatsoever. When they finally got around to it, ED’s own research found that

     —Private providers accounted for 88 percent of all state-approved providers in May 2008, an increase from 60 percent in May 2003.

     —Expenditures for Title I supplemental educational services varied, $192 million to $375 million per year.

     —By 2007, only eight states had databases containing student achievement and participation information that would permit rigorous evaluations of achievement effects of providers on a statewide basis.

So today’s story in the New York Daily News comes as no surprise.  It simply provides another bit of evidence that historians will collect into their massive database that will contain the voluminous records of corruption, deception, thievery, and dehumanization of public education that occurred in our era, all under the bogus banner of accountability and high standards.

Test-prep firm Princeton Review swindled the federal government out of millions by falsely claiming it tutored needy city kids, the Manhattan U.S. attorney charges. 

From 2006 to 2010, Princeton Review was reimbursed for tutoring services that were either faked or inflated, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office filed a civil fraud suit Tuesday. 

“The Princeton Review and its employees were supposed to tutor needy students, not cheat a federal program,” said Bharara, who didn’t specify how much money is involved. 

During those years, city education officials paid Princeton Review $38 million for tutoring funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, the suit says. 

During that time, Princeton Review staffers submitted phony attendance forms and invoices for thousands of hours of instruction, the suit claims. 

Bharara said staffers changed hundreds of kids’ absent marks to present — in one case falsely signing in a student named Dontae as “Donate.” 

The company billed for sessions with kids who were on vacation and gave some site managers bonuses of up to $9,600 for reporting high daily attendance, the suit says. . . .  
 

More Millions Down the NCLB Tutoring Toilet

Less Public Oversight = More Corruption. The Bloomberg-Klein miracle model continues.

From the Daily News (ht to Monty Neill):

In its drive to improve school reading and math test scores, the city's Department of Education paid a private company more than $21 million in two years to tutor thousands of public school pupils at home.

But most of that money - more than twice the amount the DOE originally budgeted - went for overhead, management and profit for the company, Champion Learning Center.

Champion got $79 an hour to tutor each pupil for up to four hours per week, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Daily News.

That adds up to almost $320 a week in tutoring costs per child.

Champion paid its part-time tutors, mostly college students with no teaching experience, an average of $17 an hour.

That's right. The company received an astounding $62 in overhead for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.

Champion is one of dozens of private companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We received very little training in our orientation," said one college student hired by Champion. "They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us." . . . .

Title I Funds to Tutoring Companies Shown Dump Worthy Once More

President Obama today:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

From the Detroit Free Press:

. . . ."It's [tutoring] not being taken advantage of by students, those who are taking advantage of it are not showing improvement in test scores, and the providers are not being rigorously monitored," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, which recently released a nationwide study that found little academic gain from a program nationally. . . .

. . . .The No Child Left Behind law requires that students be offered tutoring, called Supplemental Education Services, paid for with federal Title I dollars, when their schools fail to meet performance standards for three consecutive years. Nationwide, it costs about $2.5 billion.

To gauge the effectiveness of the tutoring in Michigan, the Free Press reviewed fifth-, eighth- and ninth-grade MEAP results for 2005, 2006 and 2007 in selected subjects for schools required to provide tutoring. Among the findings:

• The average increase in fifth-grade students meeting expectations in English at schools where tutoring on the MEAP test was required was 1.7 percenage points, compared to a 2.8 percentage point increase statewide.

• Eighth-grade math showed a 4.7 percentage point bump for schools with tutoring but an 8.4 point increase statewide.

• Ninth-grade social studies saw an average 15.4 percentage point decrease among schools forced to offer tutoring, compared to a 4 point decline statewide.

The tutoring sounds good in theory but is failing in practice, Jennings said. There are no educational requirements for tutors beyond a high school diploma, and nothing to guarantee students are tutored in the areas they need the most help. . . .

Kaplan Gets Fat on School Money for Poor Kids

The flood of federal, state, and local education dollars into the coffers of corporations like Kaplan, Newton Learning, and Princeton Review remains unchecked, even though there is no evidence, scientifically based or otherwise, that these corporate interventions are doing any good for anything other than corporate bottom lines. In fact, there is growing evidence from insider accounts like this one in the September Harper's that the the spread of Kaplan's influence into scripted curriculum writing is further undercutting efforts to bring real teaching and learning to urban students who are being left further behind as corporate bosses get richer on money intended for education--not exploitation.

Here are a couple of pertinent clips from this excellent piece by Jeremy Miller:

. . . .In New York City, Kaplan provides NCLB- mandated tutoring for the high school Regents exams and the subject exams administered to students in the third through eighth grades.) Many educators argue that the gains from prep courses are negligible and the programs themselves ultimately harmful, since they drain precious funds and class time. A recent Chicago Public Schools study examining student performance on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills found “little difference between tutored students and those who were eligible but did not receive tutoring.” The price tag for supplemental tutoring in Chicago, which 60,000 students received in the 2004–2005 school year: $50 million. Teachers also are aware that Kaplan’s presence will continue to be felt long after its coaches have moved on: completion of the thirty-six-lesson SAT Advantage program, which includes three abbreviated tests and one full-length practice exam, requires a full forty hours of instruction time.
. . . .

Although hailed by its advocates as a step toward institutional accountability and full student proficiency, No Child Left Behind is, at its core, a highly punitive act. Ratified in 2002, the legislation mandates that states create a system of tests and other academic indicators that measure whether students meet “the minimum level of proficiency.” Schools that repeatedly fail to meet these benchmarks can be closed, taken over by private corporations, or restructured. Schools with high-poverty populations that receive federal aid (known as Title I funds) and fail for three straight years to demonstrate “progress” toward full proficiency are required to spend up to 20 percent of this federal money on tutoring or transportation costs for students who choose to transfer out of their current school. In New York City, the transfer option is derided by critics as a hollow provision, since other city schools generally are no better and successful ones are already oversubscribed.

Thus, failing students become trapped in a foundering system, and the schools where students land en masse are left to carry out the test-heavy requirements of NCLB. For the New York schools “in need of improvement,” this means preparing students—many of whom are utterly lacking in basic academic skills and subject knowledge—to pass a battery of standardized exams. Toward this end, it also means paying money to outside entities (often private companies such as Kaplan, the Princeton Review, and Newton Learning) up to $2,000 per student for courses focused not on improving content knowledge or on intensive educational counseling but on strategies for a “particular testing task.” (The total annual government expenditure per student in New York City is $15,000.)

The failure of schools serving low-income students has been a windfall for the testing industry. Title I funds earmarked for test tutoring increased by 45 percent during the first four years of NCLB, from $1.75 billion in 2001 to $2.55 billion in 2005. With the ever growing stream of funding flowing through the nation’s schools, the number of supplemental-service providers nationwide has exploded. In New York City, the number of providers approved by the state’s department of education jumped from forty-seven in 2002–2003, the first full school year of NCLB, to 202 today. To capitalize on these new revenue opportunities, Kaplan has acquired Achieva, a provider of online course materials to schools, and SpellRead, a national “reading-intervention” company. In 2003, Kaplan hired former N.Y.C. Chancellor of Education Harold Levy as an executive vice president and general counsel, and in 2006 relocated its headquarters for Kaplan K12, the division of the company that works in schools, from Midtown Manhattan to luxury offices downtown. According to Crain’s, the company made the move “to be closer to the New York City Department of Education.”

Not wanting to be limited in its offerings to schools, Kaplan recently entered the business of selling content-based lesson plans. Although the shift from testing strategies to classroom content is a departure for Kaplan, the company sees little difference between the two. Earlier this spring, I designed a genetics class for Kaplan’s “Lesson Bank,” an online repository of short lessons that, for a fee, teachers can download in PDF form. As writers of the curriculum, we were repeatedly told that the materials had to provide hassle-free prep for teachers. When I submitted a first draft of a high school lesson on Mendelian genetics, the Kaplan staffer overseeing production, Tyler DeWitt, told me it was too complex. “We’re really trying to almost script lessons,” DeWitt wrote via email, “so that teachers who may be new or not the greatest (or smartest) teachers in the world can follow the ‘script’ and still give a great lesson.” For $35 an hour, I obliged and watered down the material, removing all “advanced” content points, such as co-dominance and pleiotropy (though these were subjects that I covered in the basic biology classes I taught a couple of years earlier).

Kaplan’s increased workload has produced some remarkable results, though not necessarily in the classroom. The company’s revenues have jumped from $354 million in 2000 to more than $2 billion today, and it is now the most profitable subsidiary of its parent, The Washington Post Company, accounting for almost half of the conglomerate’s income. More telling are the margins: in 2003, Kaplan posted a loss of $11.7 million; in 2007, the company reported a $149 million profit. . . .

NCLB Tutoring Helps Tutoring Companies, Not Poor Kids

When the privatizers shoved a tutoring mandate worth a billion dollars a year into the NCLB Act (to be paid for with Title I allotments) as a way to assuage the conservative loss of vouchers from the Bill, not even critics could have guessed what a waste of education money the corporate tutoring program would become.

From the Washington Post:

By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; B01

Free tutoring that federal law prescribes to help students at struggling schools has yielded little or no positive effect on student test scores in Virginia, Maryland and several other states, according to early evaluations.

Under the six-year-old No Child Left Behind law, certain schools in which too many students fail math or reading exams must use federal funds to offer after-school or weekend tutoring to students from low-income families. In the 2006-07 school year, $595 million went to the fast-growing industry of for-profit and nonprofit tutoring providers. But it remains unclear whether or how much those extra lessons are boosting student performance, even though the law envisions them as a key way to narrow achievement gaps.

In Virginia, researchers compared the performance last year of students with identical or very similar math scores in 2006 and found that those who were tutored did no better than their peers, according to an analysis the state Department of Education released in April. In a similar comparison of reading scores, students who were tutored lagged behind those who weren't.

Studies in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan and Kentucky also showed that the mandated tutoring, known as "supplemental educational services," didn't bump up test scores.

"This isn't helping poor kids," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in the District, which monitors implementation of the federal law. "All it's doing is taking money out of classrooms and putting it into the hands of private companies." . . .