Extending the College Caste System with Online Diploma Mills

Good read.

Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education 

by David F. Noble

Abstract 

In recent years changes in universities, especially in North America, show that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. Automation — the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material — is often justified as an inevitable part of the new “knowledge–based” society. It is assumed to improve learning and increase wider access. In practice, however, such automation is often coercive in nature — being forced upon professors as well as students — with commercial interests in mind. This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with “educational products” to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old era of mass production, standardization and purely commercial interests.

Contents
The classroom vs. the boardroom
The birth of educational maintenance organizations
Education as a commodity
Redundant faculty in the virtual university
Student reactions
Conclusion

Duncan Creates Race to Bailout Online Diploma Mills

Race to the Top was a $4.35 billion bribery scheme to fund the corporate education reform movement for a few years.  We are living with the consequences today with Common Core, test based teacher evaluation, state education department austerity to pay for technology, and the proliferation of segregated charter "broken windows" chain gangs to behaviorally sterilize poor children.

Now Duncan has announced another corporate welfare plan, this time to bailout the for-profit Corinthian College.  Taxpayers will pay off the student loans for Corinthian students that amount to $3.5 billion.  You know, those student loans that students can never bankrupt on, the ones that have created a whole new generation of indentured corporate servants.  

Why must the federal government bailout Corinthian and pay off the student debt?  Because the feds allowed the scumbags who operated Corinthian to continue their predatory practices for years and years without oversight or accountability, as the $3 million a year CEOs bought yachts and built palaces. 

Why aren't Corinthian bigwigs on the hook for the student debt?  That's an easy one--the corporate crumbs at Corinthian DECLARED BANKRUPTCY.  

This is just the beginning.  Most of the $1.2 trillion in student debt is owed to the same kind of online matchbook colleges that are offering nothing in return for a lifetime of debt.

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. . . Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Monday that the Education Department would forgive the federal loans of tens of thousands of students who attended Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit college company that closed and filed for bankruptcy last month, amid widespread charges of fraud.

Mr. Duncan also said the department planned to develop a process to allow any student — whether from Corinthian or elsewhere — to be forgiven their loans if they had been defrauded by their colleges.

A special master would be appointed within three weeks, department officials said, to create procedures to apply for relief that are “durable, not just for Corinthian but beyond.”

Taxpayers could pay a huge price for forgiving so many federal loans; the government has never before opened debt relief to such a potentially large pool of students. The department estimated that if all 350,000 Corinthian students over the last five years applied for and received the debt relief, that cost alone could be as much as $3.5 billion.

In a news conference call on Monday afternoon, Mr. Duncan emphasized the plight of students who took on huge debt and ended up with a degree that meant little to employers, or no degree at all. . .

 

The Starbucks, ASU, and Pearson Scam

If you thought wow! yesterday when Starbucks announced that CoffeeCorp will fund its employees' college educations from here on out, look a little closer before you fill up your mug.  

First off, Arizona State has joined the state-run exploitation college model perfected by the University of Maryland, whereby overseas military personnel and the stateside poor pay for junk degrees while funding lavish campus health clubs and libraries that only the on-campus college crowd can take advantage of.  UMaryland's profits were $350 million annually in 2012.  

ASU hopes to be raking in $200 million a year by 2020 to make party central even more fun the youngsters who can afford to go there.  And who is managing ASU's online biz?  Who else--Pearson.  Alway Earning!

With the help of Starbucks public relations gimmick, ASU may reach its goal sooner than 2020. From MSNBC on Starbucks "free college education":

. . . Sounds great, right? Not according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who said she found it “incredibly problematic” that Starbucks has decided to limit its tuition assistance to a single online university.

“ASU Online is a profit venture,” said Goldrick-Rab. “And basically, these two businesses have gotten together and created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.”

Although ASU is a public university, its online wing is definitely a revenue-generating enterprise, helping the university manage its finances in an era of declining state aid. Online courses are taught by ASU professors, but much of the technical and administrative work that goes into managing ASU Online has been handed over to a private company, Pearson.

In addition to limiting student choices, Goldrick-Rab said she believes it will leave them with a shoddier education. Recent research [follow the link] has suggested that online-only classes may leave low-income students at a disadvantage. Those are precisely the people, said Goldrick-Rab, who are mostly likely to enroll in ASU Online through the Starbucks program.

“These studies indicate that online education not only doesn’t work well for them, but can also propel them backwards,” she said. Students would also expected to become full-time students, while still working an average 20 hours per week at Starbucks. . . .

The College Caste System and Crushing Student Debt

It is not at all surprising that many well-intentioned folks concerned with the costs of higher education today have turned to technology in hopes of reducing costs and limiting tuition increases.  After all, when students are at home in their pajamas and the professor (maybe in his pajamas, too) is connected via the web (in real time or asynchronously) from anywhere in the world, and no one is using physical classroom space with maintenance costs, utility costs, and parking problems, how great could that be?  Pretty great, particularly if you are a large public university dealing with shrinking shares of public funds while trying to compete for top students, pay the football coach, stock libraries, run research facilities, and hire quality faculty.

After all, if you can put a good chunk of classes online for students who can't afford to drive in or live on campus, and hire some of those ultra-cheap academic sharecroppers to teach them at about $3K per class, maybe you can build that new health club just across from Fraternity Row or that new living/seminar center for the gifted students.  One adjunct for the poor, then, can teach ten sections a year for $30,000, with no benefits/retirement costs for the university.  That's what I call efficiency.

The University of Maryland, University College is a great example of this kind of lucrative college caste system, whereby those who are in most need of a nurturing learning experience are plugged in from afar.  UMUC has 90,000 students worldwide hooked up to its virtual campus, and UMUC has people waiting to help you fill out those federal loan forms.  Want to guess the graduation rate in Maryland?  6 percent. From WaPo in 2011:

Can it be that a university in the vaunted Maryland state university system has a 6 percent graduation rate? Well, yes and no. UMUC is a contemporary model of the traditional night school, an institution designed for adults returning to higher education. Much like the for-profits, University College tends to take students who have been in and out of the collegiate revolving door. Thus, its federal graduation rate is based on a comparatively low number of full-time, first-time students. But no one at UMUC is claiming the school’s true completion rate is vastly higher than 6 percent. Their point is more that a traditional graduation-rate analysis simply does not work at the Adelphi campus.

Now if you are a for-profit "university" with the price points studied and worked out by the best bean counters that millions of Pell Grants can buy, the deal gets even sweeter.  Take the University of Phoenix, for instance, with its 328,000 students and about 17,000 professor, 95% of whom are adjunct or part-time.  That's right--fewer than a thousand full-time faculty for 328,000 students, and that includes "doctoral" programs.

How sweet does make the bottom line for the UofP?  Last year net profits were $572,000,000 on revenue of $4. 71 billion!!

But wait, something is happening, for this fiscal year profits are down by 21 percent to a mere $422,000,000 on revenue of $4.25 billion.  And analysts predict 2013 to be lower still.  What has happened?  Has the public finally caught on to the scam, after numerous accounts of shady recruiting practices?  My favorite was the one involving recruiters down at the homeless missions with federal loan forms and Pell Grant paperwork, looking for future Phoenixes to sign up.

And how about their completion rates?  9 percent nationally. From the NYTimes in 2010:

A new report on graduation rates at for-profit colleges by a nonprofit research and advocacy group charges that such colleges deliver “little more than crippling debt,” citing federal data that suggests only 9 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, graduate within six years.

The report, “Subprime Opportunity,” by the Education Trust, found that in 2008, only 22 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at for-profit colleges over all graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at private nonprofit colleges.

Among Phoenix’s online students, only 5 percent graduated within six years, and at the campuses in Cleveland and Wichita, Kan., only 4 percent graduated within six years.

“For-profits proudly claim to be models of access in higher education because they willingly open their doors to disadvantaged, underprepared students.” said José L. Cruz, a vice president for the trust. “But we must ask the question, ‘Access to what?’ ”

Meanwhile, the debt for the 90+ percent of poor students who never finish continues to pile up, along with the federal debt from Pell Grants to fund these rapacious diploma mills.  And what is U of Phoenix doing about it?  They are moving all in on online, choosing to concentrate their resources where there is the most profit and the least likelihood that students will graduate.  Story from the NYTimes:

The University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit university, is closing 115 of its brick-and-mortar locations, including 25 main campuses and 90 smaller satellite learning centers. The closings will affect some 13,000 students, about 4 percent of its student body of 328,000. 

It is also laying off about 800 employees out of a staff of 17,000, according to Mark Brenner, senior vice president for communications at the Apollo Group, which owns the university. 

After the closings, which are to be completed next year, the University of Phoenix will be left with a nationwide network of 112 locations and a physical presence in 36 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

Apollo stock closed Wednesday at $21.40, down $6.09, a 22 percent decline.

Enrollments at the University of Phoenix and in the for-profit sector over all have been declining in the last two years, partly because of growing competition from other online providers, including nonprofit and public universities, and a steady drumroll of negative publicity about the sector’s recruiting abuses, low graduation rates and high default rates. 

Late last month, Kaplan Higher Education, a division of the Washington Post Company, announced that it was closing nine of its campuses and consolidating four others into nearby locations. The company did not give a reason, but in an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission it disclosed that an accrediting commission had warned that its campuses in Baltimore, Indianapolis and Dayton could lose their accreditation — and with it, eligibility for the federal student aid that makes up more than 80 percent of Kaplan’s revenues — for failure to meet student achievement requirements.

As the negative publicity about for-profits mounted — including many charges that the schools enrolled students who had almost no chance of succeeding, to get their federal student aid — both Kaplan and the University of Phoenix announced new programs, offering some form of free trial, to ensure that they enrolled only students who had a reasonable likelihood of success. Those programs cut substantially into their enrollment numbers. 

“We’ve said publicly that about 20 percent of the students in our free three-week online orientation program either don’t complete the program or don’t enroll,” said Mr. Brenner. . . .

To help boost enrollment, the University of Phoenix last week announced a tuition freeze for students who remain consistently enrolled.. . .

Bloggers Beware: The Online Bedbugs Want to Hitch a Ride

The fat bedbugs that run the online diploma mill business are unrelenting.  They write lengthy friendly comments to blog posts, and just underneath some of the verbiage, they attach their swollen transparent red blood-filled carcasses in hopes that some unsuspecting reader will take their links home.  That is how their blood-sucking infestations spread, and once victims have given them an opening, it is too late.

Another trick they use on bloggers is to write emails inviting themselves to write articles for your blog on, who knows, how to be happy when covered with bedbugs, or how to use bedbugs to get ahead in life.

Victims of these virulent predatory pests end up with huge infestations that they cannot rid themselves of, and their lives are preoccupied with the unending debt and an inability to get work, once employers know they are carrying bedbugs.

So beware of these websites, for even though they offer what appears to be attractive incentives, they are filled with biting bloodsuckers that you will never be free from:

http://www.onlinecollegeclasses.com/

http://www.top10onlineuniversities.org/)

http://theelearningsite.com/2012/08/7-ways-students-can-speak-up-in-an-online-class/

http://www.top10onlineuniversities.org/

So beware of these unrelenting parasites, using names like Nancy Wood and Stephanie Brooks or Donna Jones.  Underneath the sweet female WASPY names are rapacious and unceasing mandibles aimed at your warm blood.

News Flash: K-12, Inc. Cyberschools Are a Waste of Taxpayer Money and Miseducative Isolation Chambers

 From NEPC:

Reference Publication: 

Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools

Contact:
William J. Mathis, (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
Gary Miron, (269) 599-7965; garmiron@gmail.com
URL for this press release: http://tinyurl.com/7s4lsds

BOULDER, CO (July 18, 2012) -- A new report released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation’s largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and-mortar schools.

These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates. “Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags,” said NEPC Director Kevin Welner.

The report’s findings will be presented in Washington today to a national meeting of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), where the report’s lead author, Dr. Gary Miron, is scheduled to debate Dr. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning. The report is titled, Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools.

“Our findings are clear,” said Miron, an NEPC fellow, “Children who enroll in a K12 Inc. cyberschool, who receive full-time instruction in front of a computer instead of in a classroom with a live teacher and other students, are more likely to fall behind in reading and math. These children are also more likely to move between schools or leave school altogether – and the cyberschool is less likely to meet federal education standards.”

K12 Inc. schools generally operate on less public revenue, but they have considerable cost savings, says Miron. They devote minimal or no resources to facilities, operations, and transportation. These schools also have more students per teacher and pay less for teacher salaries and benefits than brick-and-mortar schools.

“Computer-assisted learning has tremendous potential,” said Miron. “But at present, our research shows that virtual schools such as those operated by K12 Inc. are not working effectively. States should not grow full-time virtual schools until they have evidence of success. Most immediately, we need to better understand why the performance of these schools suffers and how it can be improved.”
Student performance results from the current study are clearly in line with the existing body of evidence, which includes state evaluations and audits of virtual schools in five states as well as a more rigorous study of student learning in Pennsylvania virtual charter schools conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. CREDO’s study found virtual-school students ended up with learning gains that were “significantly worse” than students in traditional charters and public schools.

Miron and co-author Jessica L. Urschel, a doctoral student at Western Michigan University, analyzed federal and state data sets for revenue, expenditures, and student performance. In terms of student demographics and school performance data, the researchers studied all of K12’s 48 full-time virtual schools. In terms of revenues and expenditures, they used a federal data set that includes seven K12 Inc. schools from five different states (Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Ohio and Pennsylvania), although these seven schools accounted for almost 60 percent of all of K12 Inc.’s enrollment from 2008-09, which is the most recent year of available finance data.

Key findings include:
• 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.

“Part of K12’s problem seems to be that it skimps on special education spending and employs few instructors, despite having lower overhead than brick-and-mortar schools,” said the NEPC’s Welner, who is a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado.

Also, students enrolled at K12 Inc. cyberschools are much less likely to remain – raising inter-connected issues of mobility, attrition and graduation rates.

“Our research highlights a number of significant issues at K12, Inc. schools, and we recognize that these issues are also of concern at other full-time virtual schools,” said Miron. “We need a better understanding of how this new teaching and learning model can be most effective, so that full-time virtual schools can better serve students and the public school system as a whole.”

The NEPC report on K12 Inc., Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools, can be found on the web at
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/understanding-improving-virtual.

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.

How Are Online Learning and Online Dating Different?

Online dating can be fun, and it might lead to something. 

Teachers and professors are the last obstacles standing in the way of a virulent corporate educational caste system based on shrinking public investment in education and a larger and more lucrative role by online diploma mills in the exploitation, containment, and marginalization of the non-privileged, whose shrinking hope for moving into the middle class depends upon acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills to compete for an evaporating pool of good jobs.

When Phillips Exeter and Harvard go online, that's when I'll become interested in distant learning.
From the NYTimes:

By MATT RICHTEL

POST FALLS, Idaho — Ann Rosenbaum, a former military police officer in the Marines, does not shrink from a fight, having even survived a close encounter with a car bomb in Iraq. Her latest conflict is quite different: she is now a high school teacher, and she and many of her peers in Idaho are resisting a statewide plan that dictates how computers should be used in classrooms.

Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho’s schools as a high-tech vanguard.

To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.

This change is part of a broader shift that is creating tension — a tension that is especially visible in Idaho but is playing out across the country. Some teachers, even though they may embrace classroom technology, feel policy makers are thrusting computers into classrooms without their input or proper training. And some say they are opposed to shifting money to online classes and other teaching methods whose benefits remain unproved.

“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation’s teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. “They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning.”

In Idaho, teachers have been in open revolt. They marched on the capital last spring, when the legislation was under consideration. They complain that lawmakers listened less to them than to heavy lobbying by technology companies, including Intel and Apple. Teacher and parent groups gathered 75,000 verified signatures, more than was needed, to put a referendum on the ballot next November that could overturn the law.

“This technology is being thrown on us. It’s being thrown on parents and thrown on kids,” said Ms. Rosenbaum, 32, who has written letters to the governor and schools superintendent. In her letters she tells them she is a Republican and a Marine, because, she says, it has become fashionable around the country to dismiss complaining teachers as union-happy liberals.
“I fought for my country,” she said. “Now I’m fighting for my kids.”

Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, and Tom Luna, the schools superintendent, who have championed the plan, said teachers had been misled by their union into believing the changes were a step toward replacing them with computers. Mr. Luna said the teachers’ anger was intensified by other legislation, also passed last spring, that eliminated protections for teachers with seniority and replaced it with a pay-for-performance system.

Some teachers have also expressed concern that teaching positions could be eliminated and their raises reduced to help offset the cost of the technology.

Mr. Luna acknowledged that many teachers in the state were conservative Republicans like him — making Idaho’s politics less black and white than in states like Wisconsin and New Jersey, where union-backed teachers have been at odds with politicians.

Mr. Luna said he understood that technological change could be scary, particularly because teachers would need to adapt to new ways of working.

“The role of the teacher definitely does change in the 21st century. There’s no doubt,” Mr. Luna said. “The teacher does become the guide and the coach and the educator in the room helping students to move at their own pace.”

Many details about how students would use their laptop or tablet are still being debated. But under the state’s plan, that teacher will not always be in the room. The plan requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits.

Mr. Luna said this would allow students to take subjects that were not otherwise available at their schools and familiarize them with learning online, something he said was increasingly common in college.

The computer, he added, “becomes the textbook for every class, the research device, the advanced math calculator, the word processor and the portal to a world of information.”

Idaho is going beyond what other states have done in decreeing what hardware students and teachers should use and how they should use it. But such requirements are increasingly common at the district level, where most decisions about buying technology for schools are made.

Teachers are resisting, saying that they prefer to employ technology as it suits their own teaching methods and styles. Some feel they are judged on how much they make use of technology, regardless of whether it improves learning. Some teachers in the Los Angeles public schools, for example, complain that the form that supervisors use to evaluate teachers has a check box on whether they use technology, suggesting that they must use it for its own sake.

That is a concern shared by Ms. Rosenbaum, who teaches at Post Falls High School in this town in northern Idaho, near Coeur d’Alene. Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a family in Germany that hides a Jewish girl during World War II.

Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?

Her room mostly lacks high-tech amenities. Homework assignments are handwritten on whiteboards. Students write journal entries in spiral notebooks. On the walls are two American flags and posters paying tribute to the Marines, and on the ceiling a panel painted by a student thanks Ms. Rosenbaum for her service. Ms. Rosenbaum did use a computer and projector to show a YouTube video of the devastation caused by bombing in World War II. She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”

She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.

Some of her views are echoed by other teachers, like Doug StanWiens, 44, a popular teacher of advanced history and economics at Boise High School. He is a heavy technology user, relying on an interactive whiteboard and working with his students to build a Web site that documents local architecture, a project he says will create a resource for the community.

“I firmly believe that technology is a tool for teachers to use,” he said. “It’s time for teachers to get moving on it.” But he also spoke last year on the capital steps in opposition to the state’s program, which he said he saw as a poorly thought-out, one-size-fits-all approach.
Half of teachers, he suspects, will not use the new computers. And the online learning requirement seems to him to be a step toward cutting back on in-person teaching and, perhaps eventually, on not having students congregate in schools at all.

“We can just get rid of sports and band and just give everyone a laptop and call it good,” he said.

Stefani Cook, who teaches accounting and business at Rigby High School in southeast Idaho and was the state’s 2011 Teacher of the Year, also teaches a modernized typing course to 32 online students after-hours. A contractor for the state pays her to teach the course and also to help other teachers shape and present their online lessons.

Ms. Cook is a believer in classroom technology and generally supports the state’s plan. She is on a 38-member task force that is working out the logistics of deploying computers to teachers next fall and, eventually, to 80,000 high schoolers. The group will also organize training for teachers. Ms. Cook said she did worry about how teachers would be trained when some already work long hours and take second jobs to make ends meet.

“I’m excited about it,” she said. But some teachers, she said, “think it’s just another thing that they’ve got to do.”

Mr. Luna, the superintendent, said training was the most essential part of the plan. He said millions of dollars would be set aside for this but that the details were still being worked out. Teachers will need to learn how to use the new devices and how to incorporate them into their lesson plans, which could involve rethinking longstanding routines.

For his part, Governor Otter said that putting technology into students’ hands was the only way to prepare them for the work force. Giving them easy access to a wealth of facts and resources online allows them to develop critical thinking skills, he said, which is what employers want the most.

When asked about the quantity of unreliable information on the Internet, he said this also worked in favor of better learning. “There may be a lot of misinformation,” he said, “but that information, whether right or wrong, will generate critical thinking for them as they find the truth.”

Mr. Otter said of a teacher like Ms. Rosenbaum, “If she only has an abacus in her classroom, she’s missing the boat.”

Some of the state’s politicians disagree with that message. State Senator Dean L. Cameron, a Republican who is a co-chairman of the senate budget committee, said there was no proof that the technology improved learning. He said he felt the legislature was “dazzled” by presentations given by lobbyists for high-tech companies — who also gave generously to Mr. Luna’s re-election campaign.


(Mr. Luna said that $44,000 of his $300,000 in donations to his last campaign came directly or indirectly from technology companies, but he said that was because they supported his agenda, not because they shaped it.)

Mr. Cameron said of the law: “It’s almost as if it was written by the top technology providers in the nation.” He added: “And you’d think students would be excited about getting a mobile device, but they’re saying: not at the expense of teachers.”

Last year at Post Falls High School, 600 students — about half of the school — staged a lunchtime walkout to protest the new rules. Some carried signs that read: “We need teachers, not computers.”

Having a new laptop “is not my favorite idea,” said Sam Hunts, a sophomore in Ms. Rosenbaum’s English class who has a blond mohawk. “I’d rather learn from a teacher.”

Great Reporting in The Nation on the Big Online Biz in K-12

Great reporting.  An introductory clip:

Lee Fang | November 16, 2011

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
 
If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement’s cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one point, the GOP’s budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going to virtual school programs.

Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. 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.”

If Levesque’s blunt advice sounds like that of a veteran lobbyist, that’s because she is one. Levesque runs a Tallahassee-based firm called Meridian Strategies LLC, which lobbies on behalf of a number of education-technology companies. She is a leader of a coalition of government officials, academics and virtual school sector companies pushing new education laws that could benefit them.

But Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. A press release from her national group says that it fights to “advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment.”

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success [1] by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school students take at least one online course before graduation.

“I’ve never seen it like this in ten years,” remarked Ron Packard, CEO of virtual education powerhouse K12 Inc., on a conference call in February. “It’s almost like someone flipped a switch overnight and so many states now are considering either allowing us to open private virtual schools” or lifting the cap on the number of students who can use vouchers to attend K12 Inc.’s schools. Listening to a K12 Inc. investor call, one could mistake it for a presidential campaign strategy session, as excited analysts read down a list of states and predict future victories. . . .

Vander Ark getting cranky regarding negative NEPC report

The true path to higher test scores is reading. — Dr. Stephen Krashen

Look up the word charlatan in any lexicon and it would be of no surprise if it features a photograph of Tom Vander Ark as the accompanying illustration. The former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation executive has been a major player in the corporate education reform onslaught against the public commons. He has been gorging himself at the tax trough for some time now. His antics and blather have garnered quite a bit of ink here at Schools Matter, partly since few people are as adept at technobabble and doublespeak as Vander Ark.

Earlier this evening Class Size Matters and Parents Across America's Leonie Haimson posted an intriguing tweet from which I shamelessly lifted for the title of this post:

@leoniehaimson Vander Ark getting cranky re negative NEPC report on online learning; no research to support K12 virtual instruction http://goo.gl/19nN1

Cranky is an understatement, Vander Ark's childish rant against the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) had all the class and irrational ignorance of a petulant charter school student ignominiously dumped back to public school right before the CAHSEE. He's incredulous that anyone would question the unmitigated greed of these online swindlers (himself included). I left the following comments:

You're embarrassing yourself Mr. Vander Ark. National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education is one of the most respected sources on education around. Its staff, including the celebrated Dr. Welner, are some of the most knowledgeable experts on education policy in the nation. What are your qualifications again? A businessman and former Gates Foundation executive?

If we want information on education, we'll turn to the experts at NEPC. If we want advice on get rich quick schemes, we'll turn to you and one of your profitable enterprises — oh wait, online learning is another get rich quick scheme, so perhaps your above comments make sense in that context.

The report that flimflamer Vander Ark is whining about? Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Ventures in Need of Pubic Regulation by the NEPC's Gene V. Glass and Kevin G. Welner. God forbid that respected academics suggest that an entirely unregulated industry sucking up public tax money faster than a shop vacuum be subject to a modicum of oversight. We're talking about one of Vander Ark's biggest cash cows after all!

UPDATE: It appears Mr. Vander Ark deleted my original comments. Seems he can't stand for anyone speaking truth to his power and privilege.

Online Predator Colleges Go After the Easy Billions in GI Bill

Interview with Senator Harkin from Frontline:

Back in June 2010, you announced plans to hold hearings on for-profit higher education schools. What's behind that decision?

We looked at the increasing amount of money going from the government loan program and the Pell Grant program to these for-profit schools. It just seemed to be a huge spike-up, and we were kind of wondering what was going on there.

“Private equity firms, hedge funds own these schools and are making a lot of profit and not really giving that much of a benefit to these students.”

 

Then we got reports from some students who had been at these for-profit schools and had contacted us about how they felt they'd been ripped off and they hadn't received what they thought they were receiving.

So one thing led to another, and that's why we started to investigate.

When did the issue of vets and for-profits come to your attention?

We started our investigation last year and started getting data. We found that there was a huge spike-up in the amount of military money going to these schools -- 600 percent increase in just a couple of years -- a huge increase. So we started looking at that, and what we found is just really disturbing.

You described it as a slap in the face. What did you mean?

Well, in Congress, we passed a bill to say that look, the GIs of today -- that's the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- should get the same educational benefits as the GIs of World War II and the Korean War and Vietnam War. And we did that in good faith.

What we didn't count on was the for-profit schools then seeing this as a way of increasing their profits and maybe not providing the best educational benefits. There's private equity firms, there's hedge funds that own these schools, and they are making a lot of profit, and they're not really giving that much of a benefit to these students, and that's why I call it a slap in the face to our veterans.

Look, these veterans get this benefit one time; it's a one-time shot. And if they don't get a quality education that can really help them with their lives, they'll never get it again. But the hedge funds and the private equity firms that own these for-profit schools, they get the profits.

Why would a veteran or an active-duty serviceman or -woman sign up with a for-profit?

There are some benefits to being in the service and accessing distance learning. Even when I was in the military some 40 years ago, the University of Maryland had a great program -- still has a program -- providing distance learning to our troops.

At that time, it was all paper, and now they've moved into the electronic age. So this distance learning can be very helpful to a young person in the service who's stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere.

You say that the for-profits, though, are taking advantage of this new money that's come free. Why have they been more successful in growing faster than their competitors in the nonprofits here?

They put more money into recruiting. For example, the for-profits spend upward of maybe 30 percent in just recruiting, in advertising. The nonprofits don't do that. They don't have that kind of access.

And the few for-profits that are in there are going after our GIs -- when I say GIs, I mean those on active duty and those who are now veterans and getting the VA [Veterans Administration] benefits -- both groups are being targeted by the for-profits with very aggressive advertising and targeting.

But there's a couple of reasons why these for-profit schools have targeted the military. Number one, a lot of the times [these students] don't have to go out and borrow additional money. So that helps. Secondly, a little known fact is that we have a 90/10 rule that these for-profit schools can only get up to 90 percent of their money from the government student-aid programs. The other 10 percent they have to get from the students or other sources.

So the student has to go out and take out a loan.

Or something. Well, there's a little quirk in the law that military benefits don't count on the 90 percent side.

So 100 percent can be paid for by the military benefits programs.

Absolutely. So a for-profit school, they want to go out and recruit military people because they can get the military people in, and it doesn't count on the 90 percent. So they could be getting 95, 96, 97 percent of their money from the government, yet still fall under the 90 percent rule.

The for-profits are more expensive. Their tuition is higher than the University of Maryland, for instance, or some of the other schools that have for a long time served veterans. So why would a veteran sign up with a for-profit if he can get a better deal with a nonprofit?

I don't know the answer to that question other than that the for-profits do a much better job of recruiting and advertising than the nonprofits do. Let's face it: The nonprofits don't make a profit, so they're not heavily into advertising and promoting.

Because they don't have the budget.

The nonprofits just simply don't have the budget for it. And the other thing that's happening now is that these for-profits are going after the spouses and children of our GIs. That's who they're targeting now.

But that is legal. That's part of the legislation that you passed.

As I say, it's legal. But are they really providing a good educational benefit to the spouses and the children? That's the real question. And our data shows that that's not happening; that, quite to the contrary, a lot of the spouses and children that are signing up are being taken advantage of. And they're spending their government money, taxpayer money. The hedge funds and the private equity firms are making a big profit, and yet the spouses and the children are not getting a good education.

The schools say that they're doing as good a job as anybody else and that they are serving the underserved.

Are they serving them in a manner where the underserved maybe gets a little few things, but they don't really get a good education?

What's the evidence that they are not giving vets a good education?

We know about the dropout rate. We looked at the number of students they recruit and what their growth is in the student population. But how many did they recruit to get that increase? For example, [one school], in one year they increased their enrollment by 27,000, but they enrolled 371,000 students to get that 27,000 growth.

What happened to the other 300-and-some-thousand students? Where did they go? They just sort of paid their money and disappeared.

So it's what you call "churn"?

It's what we call churning. They're churning students. It's a bad business model.

Here's what's wrong with this picture: A for-profit school makes the most profit by enrolling the poorest students. That's why they target the poorest students. Why? Because the poorest students get the most Pell Grants and the biggest student loans, and therefore that money goes to the for-profit schools; they keep that money as a profit. And quite frankly, they don't really have a stake in what happens to that student. That student drops out after a year, they keep the money, and the student's gone.

They would say the longer they keep a student enrolled, the more money they're going to make, so therefore it's in their interest to keep them there.

Well, either that or they churn the students and they make their money on new students coming in.

But to do that, they'd have to spend a lot of money on recruitment.

And they do spend a lot of money on recruitment and advertising.

They say, look, we're serving the underserved; we're serving a part of the population that traditional universities have turned their back on and that it's to be expected that among this cohort there's going to be a high level of dropouts, because you're dealing with people whose circumstances are such that they live more on the edge. What do you say to that?

I would say that if they really want to serve that population, maybe they should make a little less profit and put more of that money into supporting services for these poor students. We do that at other colleges. We do it at community colleges; we do it at our public universities.

There are many programs to help support students who come from those kind of poor backgrounds that don't have the kind of support mechanism to enable them to really get a good education. The for-profits provide very little if any support. They bring in these students; they promise them the sky. They promise them they're going to get great jobs and a good education, and then they're on their own.

You say support services. What should the VA do? What should the Department of Defense do?

First of all, the Department of Defense and the VA has got to start tracking that money and what happens to these students. And through our investigations, we're now asking the for-profit schools to give us a breakdown: How many of these new recruits that they're bringing in are military, and what's happening to them?

Are they cooperating?

We've started asking them for that data, and we'll see if they're going to cooperate. If not, we may have to take more stringent steps.

The VA says they've been overwhelmed with just getting this program up and running and getting the money out the door, and they say that down the line, they need to do a better job of informing students about what their choices might be. Is that acceptable?

That is not an acceptable answer. They need to do a better job of tracking this money and what's happening.
Look, in 20 for-profit schools that we tracked, the amount of military money in four years went from $66 million to $521 million. In four years! That's a 683 percent increase in four years.

Sounds like a good business to invest in.

That's why AMU -- the American Military University -- had been bought by these private equity firms. That's why hedge funds are getting into this business. Anytime you see hedge funds getting into education, you've got to ask, wait a minute, hedge funds are in there to make the biggest profit they can and in the shortest amount of time that they can. And so you've got to really start asking some questions: What is going on here?

As it was explained to us, the mechanism was that the VA relies on State Approving Agencies [SAAs] to certify whether these schools should be eligible for GI benefit money. How good a job are the State Approving Agencies doing, in your view?

We had some of these approving agencies before our committee, and quite frankly, they're not doing a very good job. In many cases, some of these agencies are being paid by the very schools that they're accrediting. So do they want to not accredit a school that's going to pay them?

We found a lot of abnormal behavior out there from these accrediting agencies that went out and gave accreditation to some of these for-profit schools. Through our investigation by the GAO [Government Accountability Office], they found a completely different picture than what the accrediting agency found.

So I think there's some real problems with the way accrediting agencies are established, who pays them. And if the schools they're accrediting are the ones that are paying them, are they really doing a good job of accrediting?

What we found is that in the military program, they just basically give the money to the student and say goodbye. They don't care where they go or what school they attend to. They do no accounting on that; they do no supervision of that; and they don't track it.

So you're a legislator. What are you guys going to do about it?

The reason we've had this investigation going on for about a year is to make sure we've got a clear picture of what was happening. There are other hearings that we'll be doing.

I hope sometime this year we will have a package of legislation that we'll be proposing that will hopefully start to change the picture on these for-profit schools.

We just can't continue to go down this path. Look at it this way: These for-profit schools right now are taking 25 percent of all of the federal student aid money -- 25 percent -- yet they're only covering 10 percent of the students.

And when it comes to vets, they're taking 36.5 percent.

They're taking 36 percent of all the money that comes to the military. That's exactly right. But what's happening to these people? Are they getting a good value for the money that they're spending at these for-profit schools? That's sort of the bottom line.

You've been here for a while in Congress, in the Senate, and you've seen a lot of lobbyists come and go. How do they match up, the for-profit school lobby, in terms of their power and capability?

The for-profit school lobby here in Washington is very powerful. And they're powerful on both sides of the aisle, I will add.

A lot of my friends who have been members of Congress in the past are lobbyists for the for-profit schools. The for-profit schools hire a lot of powerful lobbyists. …

But again, that's indicative as to how much profit there is in these schools. I'm not opposed to the profit motive, but how can you call yourself a for-profit school when 95 percent of your money comes from the taxpayers? Is that for-profit? They're just taking advantage of the legislation that we had passed to make these huge profits in these schools.

You have to look at a little bit of the history here. Most of these for-profit schools had their genesis back around World War II. They started out as technical schools [for] a young person who didn't want to go to a four-year college, wanted to be an auto mechanic or a diesel mechanic or an airplane mechanic, or some technical work. Or [for] young women who wanted to be stenographers or court reporters, they went to these schools. And these schools were basically for-profit schools, but they did a good job, because they were training a segment of the population for jobs that the four-year colleges were not doing.

But what happened is they then morphed. As legislation changed and as we got more money into student loans and student grants, people always know how to make a buck. So they morphed into these institutions like the University of Phoenix, in which you can take just about any course you want. And you wonder, does that really lead to a good job or not?

And as they morphed into these huge entities, hedge funds, private equity firms, the geniuses on Wall Street figured out how to make more money out of them. And I'd say probably in the last 20 years they have grown, and in the last several years they've grown exponentially.

Given the power of the lobby, given the amount of money that Wall Street has at stake here, are you going to be able to pass legislation in the current environment that really makes a difference?

Well, I'm hopeful that reason will prevail here and that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle will say this is not sustainable; this is not good. This is taxpayer money. Are these students getting a good value for that? And what about the recruiting techniques, where they go after the poorest students and yet these students don't get any support, and they churn these students every year?

And there's one other thing that we've got to come to grips with here. These poor students are borrowing money. These for-profit schools will go out and recruit them, and they'll say you don't have to do anything; we'll fill out all the paperwork; we'll submit all this, and we'll get you the loan; you won't have to do a thing. And so the student signs their name on the dotted line. They get the loans, and then the student drops out.

The for-profit school keeps the money; the student keeps the debt. And what a lot of these young people don't know is that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy; that debt is around their neck for the rest of their lives. They can't get another student loan. They won't be able to get a house or a car or anything else because they've got that debt hanging around their neck, but they have no way to pay for it. And that to me is one of the worst aspects of this.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/educating-sergeant-pantzke/tom-harkin/#ixzz1R5T1yCJO