Exit Counseling, Revenue Sharing, and Other Forms of Prostitution

It is clear now that many, many colleges and universities have been in bed with the corporate loan sharks that privatizers like John Boehner and Mike Enzi helped to put in the position to prey on college students saddled with big school loans. Here is one of the latest example, now coming fast and furious as Cuomo's lifting of the rock has the dark inhabitants scurrying for cover. One thing is for sure: as the American university is turned in just another commercial consumer service, the naive student customers are just as sure to get screwed as the knowledge workers once known as professors and scholars:

Rachel Jones, a senior at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, recently was sitting through a student-loan workshop that university officials had told her was mandatory when an uneasy feeling kicked in.

The woman in the front of the classroom asked students to fill out forms with personal information — including names, addresses and phone numbers of relatives, an employer and a friend. Ms. Jones recalled that she also talked about “other loan companies” that would saddle students with unfavorable rates if they decided to consolidate loans on graduation.

Unable to keep quiet, Ms. Jones raised her hand: “I just said, excuse me, who are you and what is your affiliation?” The woman identified herself as an employee of All Student Loan, a California-based lender.

Ms. Jones, a 22-year-old who has $17,000 in student loans, had unwittingly stumbled upon another undisclosed relationship between universities and loan companies.

Recent investigations have largely focused on incentives lenders give universities to get coveted placement on the preferred lending lists students use to take out loans when they enter college. But colleges also give lenders crucial access to students when they are graduating, using lenders to conduct exit counseling required under federal law for students who have taken out federally guaranteed student loans.

In some cases, loan company representatives come on campus and run sessions for seniors on loan repayment. In others, colleges direct students to loan company Web sites, including Wells Fargo, Citibank and Sallie Mae. And in many cases, the loan companies are pushing a product: their consolidation loans.

Anne Prisco, the vice president for enrollment management at Loyola, defended the practice, saying the lenders allowed on campus were carefully selected. “Every year when we have exit interviews we ask if they want to assist,” Ms. Prisco said. “They are just there to provide additional information.”

Others say the access to students is improper. Heather McDonnell, the director of financial aid at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., said she thought using loan companies for exit counseling was “absolutely” inappropriate.

“Behind every lender is a consolidation loan,” Ms. McDonnell said. “I don’t allow anybody to come on my campus to come and do that. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that information should be coming directly from the financial aid office.” . . . .

David Berliner Saturday Morning

Tomorrow morning at 8:00 Eastern time on C-Span 2:

David Berliner talked about the book he wrote with Sharon Nichols, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools. He argued that the testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act compromises education. He said that the pressures of high-stakes testing leads to corruption in the form of increased cheating among both teachers and students, and noted that this deprives students of a well-rounded education.

Reading First Lawbreakers Referred to U. S. Department of Justice

Today the House Committee on Education and Labor grilled some of the hacks and lead thug, Chris Doherty, who were on the front lines of the well-financed war on reading instruction since Reading First dumped its annual billion-dollar installment into the laps of Bush cronies in the ed industry.

. . . . All three of those former committee members - Roland Good, Ed Kame'enui, and Deborah Simmons - benefited financially either directly or indirectly from the sale of a specific assessment product called the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning Skills (DIBELS). Goode was a co-author of DIBELS; so far, a company in which he owns a 50 percent share has received more than $1.3 million in royalty and other payments from the sale of DIBELS.

Kame'enui and Simmons were co-authors of a reading intervention product used in Reading First, which was packaged and sold together with DIBELS. They both confirmed at today's hearing that they each have received approximately $150,000 in royalty payments in the last year for the sale of that intervention product.

The question remains as to when Congressman Miller will bring into the spotlight Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine, the kingpins in the conspiracy. Or will he interview Margaret Spellings, who was running the operation from her office in the White House before she became Secretary of Education:

. . . . At today's hearing, the U.S. Department of Education's Inspector General, John Higgins, also confirmed that his office has made a referral to the U.S. Justice Department in the wake of the scandal.

"Too many times in the Bush administration we have seen examples of officials abusing the public trust and misusing tax dollars. And we have seen way too many examples of cronyism and conflicts of interest that have undermined government's effectiveness," said Miller. "Now it appears that we can add Reading First - on which we have spent roughly $6 billion since 2002 - to that long and growing list of instances of the administration operating outside the law, unaccountable to Congress and the American people."

A Common Dream for Education and Democracy

"If we want democracy, we must educate for democracy."
--- Dr. Philip Kovacs, Chair of the Educator Roundtable

The following article was published on Common Dreams:

Over the past six years this country has seen the Constitution discarded, the military privatized, the church married to the state, women’s reproductive rights repealed, gangster-style cronyism, disgusting incompetence, and propaganda campaigns of Orwellian proportions.
None of these abuses would have been possible if our country had educated children towards becoming the types of adults capable of recognizing and acting against threats to life, liberty, and happiness.

If we continue to force children to memorize the dates of wars without asking why we have perpetual war; if we continue to force children to memorize mathematical precepts without understanding how and why we use math; if we continue to force children to learn to read while ignoring literacy, we should not expect anything different than what we have had for many years: a bewildered herd.

If, however, we want something much different for our children, for our communities, and indeed for the world, then we must take a radically different approach to how we educate future citizens.

If we want democracy, we must educate for democracy.

Democracy is a form of associated living that fosters the growth of the individual through her participation in social affairs. Free, reflective, critical inquiry and the welfare of others undergird interaction, communion, and community building. Unlike authoritarian modes of government, democracy requires its members to participate in the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions affecting their development and, unlike authoritarian countries, democracies believe in the capacity of ordinary individuals to direct the affairs of their communities, especially their schools.

The trajectory our schools now follow does not bode well for democracy. The No Child Left Behind Act produces a hyper-productive, blindly obedient, worksheet completing citizenry, one capable of voting for American Idols, but one unable to recognize larger threats to humanity. In place of NCLB, Americans must develop education for democratic participation, a type of education that helps children mature into intelligent, critical, engaged, reflective, and compassionate members of their schools and communities.

Active participation in institutions prevents authoritarianism and allows for individual and community re-creation and growth. Privatizing or standardizing institutions does quite the opposite.

NCLB removes teachers, students, parents, and local communities from active involvement in what will be learned, how it will be learned, and how to measure growth and development. Therefore the legislation is not only undemocratic, it prevents democratic reinvention and growth, as NCLB forces all communities to conform to a pre-determined and static version of what is true, beautiful, and good.

Democracy cannot be static.

As individuals engage with, reflect on, and critique the communities they inhabit, democracy itself evolves. A political system that ossifies cannot take into account new realities or exigencies. Therefore, democracy requires complaint and challenge, as it is through complaint and challenge that democracies evolve with social, political, and environmental realities.

Arguably, had we educated towards complaint and challenge, Iraqis would not still be enduring our freedom, the Supreme Court would not be slowly stripping women of their reproductive rights, the Constitution would still mean something.

Believing that democracy (or what it means to be “educated”) has for all times been defined violates democratic principals. If our country does not invite and allow individuals to participate in its remaking, and if our country does not create and protect spaces for developing a citizenry capable of such participation, then our country is authoritarian, plutocratic, oligarchic, theocratic, totalitarian, or fascist.

Where and how should children develop a consciousness that favors democracy over any of the above?

In schools governed by corporate America?

Over the past six months we have extensively documented NCLB’s attack on life, liberty, and happiness. After reading our research and listening to our arguments, nearly 30,000 people have signed our petition calling on Congress to replace NCLB with a democratic education, an education more responsive to the needs of local communities. In determining those diverse needs, we call on Congress to do the unthinkable: listen to the teachers in each of those communities, as democracy requires us to do.

Dr. Philip Kovacs is Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Chair of the Educator Roundtable, a project dedicated to freeing public schools from corporate encroachment.

Florida's Latest Corporate Welfare Voucher Scam

What could be better than using tax dollars to fund fundamentalist church schools for the urban poor? How about dollar-for-dollar tax breaks for corporations to fund fundamentalist church schools for the urban poor? From the Palm Beach Post on Florida's latest corporate welfare voucher scam:

James K. Isenhour took more than $268,000 from a Florida school voucher program without providing a single voucher for the low-income students who were supposed to benefit. How could he do that without being sent to prison? He had a lot of help from Jeb Bush.

A jury found Mr. Isenhour guilty in 2005, but last week a three-judge panel of the 5th District Court of Appeal in Daytona Beach threw out the conviction. Why? Because the Legislature, at former Gov. Bush's insistence, imposed so few rules on voucher schools that taking the money and failing to educate kids with it wasn't against the law.

The state should appeal the decision to throw out Mr. Isenhour's conviction. Even if that doesn't happen, the state should learn the most obvious lesson from the ruling: Don't expand voucher programs that are subject to this sort of abuse.

The programs at issue are so-called "corporate vouchers" because they are financed by donations from corporations that then get a dollar-for-dollar tax break on their state corporate income tax. Mr. Isenhour, who ran a failed correspondence school in Ocala, shows how the scheme puts Florida in an impossible Catch-22.

Last year, the Florida Supreme Court struck down vouchers paid for from the state treasury. But voucher advocates insist that the corporate vouchers are constitutional because the money doesn't come directly out of the state treasury. They want to pay for even more vouchers that way.

If corporate vouchers are to continue, the state obviously would need to be sure that there are enough safeguards to prevent theft. But the more safeguards the state puts on the money, the more the money looks as if it belongs to the state and spending it on vouchers would be unconstitutional.

The Legislature in 2006 enacted a few weak accountability measures for corporate vouchers. It's not at all clear that they would be enough to secure a conviction in another case like Mr. Isenhour's.

Voucher opponents had held off on filing lawsuits to challenge corporate vouchers in deference to more important education issues, such as teacher pay, academic standards and the class-size amendment. But the Isenhour case could turn the corporate voucher program, which could cost the state more than $88 million this year, into a piggy bank for unscrupulous private school operators. Either the courts or the Legislature needs to shut down this school for scammers.

Bush and Spellings on Testing and NCLB

Last Thursday Ben Feller, the White House's education PR man at the Associated Press, was one of two "reporters" let in to hear the President waxing philosophical about his domestic policy centerpiece, NCLB. Here are some of the comments, most of which did not get into Feller's piece. They come from the right-wing would-be journalist, Nicholas Plagman, and how he got them remains a mystery. However they were obtained, they are so thoroughly Bush that no one could have made them up:

"It is important for all of us to make it clear that accountability is not a way to punish anybody," said Bush in a meeting at the White House, "It's an essential component to making sure that our system, our education system, frankly, is not discriminatory. Education isn't about learning, or getting an education, it's about ensuring that people of all races and all backgrounds have identical test scores."

. . . .

"There cannot be one nationwide federal test that compares all students equally," said Bush, "that'll just never work. Some parts of the country have more minorities than others, some are overflowing with illegals, and some are in the south; we cannot expect these states to perform at the same level as other, less unfortunate states."

And then there is this from Spellings, who stopped in at UTPB in Midland, Texas on Tuesday to share some of her wisdom:

When asked about her opinion on "teaching to standardized tests," she said, "There is not a thing wrong in teaching to the test."

She also said fears about the testing might be in part due with "grown-up anxiety," as educators adapt to the change in standards. "I think we are seeing anxiety on the part of grown-ups..."

NCLB: A Tragedy in the Making

From Common Dreams:

Federal Education Reform Policy:
World-Class Potential or Tragedy in the Making?

by William Spady

America is at the most significant educational crossroads it has faced since its system of public education took form in the 19th Century. Today’s pace and depth of technological change, instantaneous global communication, and social, cultural, and climate change have brought our country to an impending educational crisis. How do we prepare our children for a future that will inevitably be profoundly different than our very familiar past?

That impending crisis is being starkly enacted on Capitol Hill as President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) act is being considered for reauthorization. Senator Edward Kennedy, one of NCLB’s initial architects and champions, must be facing one of the toughest decisions of his long career as NCLB’s advocates and critics line up to press their respective cases for its continuation, or its strengthening, or its major revision, or its outright abandonment.

The Illusion of a World Class Education

According to Kennedy’s March 26 editorial in The Washington Post, NCLB’s original fundamental purpose was “. . . to guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class education.” The term “world-class education” implies that our young people will be fully prepared for the complex social and intellectual challenges of democratic citizenship and career contribution emerging in our ever-evolving global economy and complex multi-cultural world.

But that’s not what NCLB delivers. When translated into NCLB-style “reality,” this noble goal gets reduced to meaning: scores on two widely criticized paper-pencil basic skills tests per year - one in reading, and one in math - just enough to supposedly measure if students are “proficient” in those fundamental abilities, and just enough to qualify them for low-end, low-paying jobs. In other words, Americans are being asked to believe that basic skills test scores are the equivalent of a world-class education!

Never mind this profound inconsistency and insult to our collective intelligence, NCLB’s key advocates are so enamored with its “accountability” provisions, that little else seems to matter. But it should. Ask any competent educator, and they will tell you that NCLB does nothing to promote a host of things that should comprise the basics of a world-class education: no creative and critical thinking; no future-focused curriculum, student inventiveness and entrepreneurship; no global understanding and cooperation; no personal health and well-being; no greater connection to the complex world of work; no learner-responsive opportunities and experiences; no incentives for attracting talented teachers into the system; no environmental and ecological awareness; and no strengthening leadership and community engagement at the local level.

NCLB’s Accountability Juggernaut

No, the engine that drives NCLB, embodies its essence, and inspires its advocates is “Accountability” writ large and imposed from on high (i.e., the U.S. Department of Education). NCLB makes individual schools and educators pay a dear price if their students do not reach specific “high stakes” test-score benchmarks within specified amounts of time. Those stakes: lose your job, lose your school, and/or lose your federal funding - no excuses, and no questions asked - even if your students can’t speak English at the beginning of the school year or have serious learning disabilities.

Certainly, many of America’s lowest performing schools need drastic improvement, and some kind of enlightened accountability process to assist them. But NCLB’s heavy-handed and mechanistic approach to accountability is actually making it more difficult than ever for our schools to be world-class by any reasonable measure of that term.

How do you become world-class when your federal “reform” strategy actually is: 1) driving experienced and talented educators out of the system; 2) creating enormous discontinuity in some schools’ staffing and disconnection with their students and parents; 3) ignoring the inherent humanity, talents, and uniqueness of the individual learner; 4) reducing “the learning that matters” in the 21st Century to annual scores on highly limited and limiting paper-pencil tests; 5) ignoring mountains of research on brain functioning, learning processes, and child development; 6) forcing reductions in the richness and depth of curriculum and learning experiences students are receiving; 7) imposing a narrow, single-method approach to instruction on the diversity of learners and schools; 8 ) preventing those experts with a richer approach to learning and instruction from working in or assisting schools in their improvement efforts; 9) overriding community input regarding school goals, priorities, and operations; and 10) eliminating incentives for schools to innovate in ways that serve their particular clientele?

Despite the Administration’s rhetoric to the contrary, these glaring shortcomings are so extensive, damaging, and future-threatening that America’s parents, students, educators, and business leaders should all be clamoring for Senator Kennedy and Congressman George Miller to drastically overhaul both NCLB and the rigid, archaic thinking that underlies its current implementation. There are countless citizens, educators, and researchers in the country eager to make enlightened contributions to this policy dialogue and to the fulfillment of Senator Kennedy’s dream for a world-class public system that guarantees 21st Century outcomes for all its students and schools. Their active engagement should be encouraged to help avoid the serious tragedy that NCLB has already become.

Dr. William Spady writes, lectures, and consults across the world on issues of educational change, leadership development, and personal empowerment. His 2001 book Beyond Counterfeit Reforms offers a concrete, transformational alternative to Industrial Age educational practices. He can be reached at: billspady@earthlink.net

Working to Raise Test Scores While America is Exported

While the Congress deliberates over the Business Roundtable's and the Aspen Institute's Great Domestic Diversion, NCLB, American corporations continue their off-shoring of American jobs, both service jobs and highly-skilled professional jobs. And while the U. S. Chamber of Commerce polishes its plans to transform American high schools into science and math camps, Boeing and Cisco continue to funnel science and engineering jobs to cheap labor markets overseas:

Boeing now employs hundreds of Indians for aircraft engineering, writing software for next-generation cockpits and systems to prevent aircraft collisions. Investment banks like Morgan Stanley are hiring Indians to analyze American stocks and to write reports for institutional investors, jobs formerly done by Americans earning six-figure salaries on Wall Street.

Eli Lilly is doing major pharmaceutical research in India. Cisco Systems, the leading maker of communications equipment, will have 20 percent of its top talent in India within five years, and global-consulting giant Accenture will have more employees in India than in the United States by the end of this year.

IBM reduced its American work force by 31,000 while increasing its Indian staff to 52,000. Citigroup, which already has 22,000 employees in India, plans to eliminate 26,000 jobs in the U.S. and increase its Asian work force by another 10,000 where the pay is lower.

Follow the money, of course, explains this massive shift in jobs. It's cheaper to hire and produce in India than in the United States.

The unhappy results of these policies are now apparent; they richly benefit the corporations but are devastating to the American middle class. Outsourcing reduces good American jobs, our standard of living, our national security, and our world leadership.

At the same time, Bill Gates argues for throwing open the door to import skilled workers in order to train foreign nationals who will return to their home countries to run the operations that he plans to export:

Corporations whine that H-1Bs are needed because of a shortage of Americans with skills, but major studies at the University of California Davis and Duke University conclusively prove we have thousands of unemployed or underemployed Americans with all the needed technical skills. Nobel economist Milton Friedman accurately labeled H-1Bs a government "subsidy" to enable employers to get workers at a lower wage.

The best way to deal with the demand for a limited number of H-1Bs would be to auction them off, so then we would find out if they are really needed and how much they are worth. An auction would enable taxpayers to get some return on the H-1B subsidy instead of the current system that allows corporations to influence congressmen with campaign contributions and pay high-priced lobbyists to get legislation to increase the number.

Contrary to corporate propaganda, H-1Bs are not an alternative to outsourcing skilled jobs but a vehicle to promote outsourcing. H-1Bs enable corporations to bring in foreigners, train them in American ways, and then send them back to guide outsourced plants in Asia.

Who can we blame for all this? Well, of course, it is the fault of the teachers and children in our public schools. And who has the solution? Well, of course it is a corporate solution, which, if unchecked, will eventually lead us to online corporate schools manned and womaned by disembodied voices located somewhere in a foreign country lecturing on the virtues of American democracy.

Here is a clip from a most interesting piece on Princeton economist, Alan Blinder, with links to his important article that appeared in Foreign Affairs last year. Which jobs are likely to be safe from export? The ones that physically cannot be exported by corporate bosses who don't give a damn about the consequences, a fact that places a new educational premium on auto mechanics as compared to, say, computer graphics. It also gives added added credence to Lester Thurow's mostly forgotten dictum that for America to survive, we have to make things.

From Finance Mentor:

At Princeton, he began to reassess some of his views on trade. Visiting the yearly business gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2004, he heard executives talk excitedly about moving jobs overseas that not long ago seemed anchored in the U.S. ...

. . . .

[H]e'd begun to wonder if the technology that allowed English-speaking workers in India to do the jobs of American workers at lower wages was "a good thing" for many Americans. At a Princeton dinner, a Wall Street executive told Mr. Blinder how pleased her company was with the securities analysts it had hired in India. From New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman's 2005 book, "The World is Flat," he found anecdotes about competition to U.S. workers "in walks of life I didn't know about." ...

At the urging of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Mr. Blinder wrote an essay, "Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?" published last year in Foreign Affairs. "The old assumption that if you cannot put it in a box, you cannot trade it is hopelessly obsolete," he wrote. "The cheap and easy flow of information around the globe...will require vast and unsettling adjustments in the way Americans and residents of other developed countries work, live and educate their children." (Read that full article.)

In that paper, he made a "guesstimate" that between 42 million and 56 million jobs were "potentially offshorable." Since then he has been refining those estimates, by painstakingly ranking 817 occupations, as described by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to identify how likely each is to go overseas. From that, he derives his latest estimate that between 30 million and 40 million jobs are vulnerable.

He says the most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don't. It's not simply that skilled jobs stay in the US and lesser-skilled jobs go to India or China. The important distinction is between services that must be done in the U.S. and those that can -- or will someday -- be delivered electronically with little degradation in quality. The more personal work of divorce lawyers isn't likely to go overseas, for instance, while some of the work of tax lawyers could be. Civil engineers, who have to be on site, could be in great demand in the U.S.; computer engineers might not be. ...

Diana Farrell, head of the McKinsey Global Institute, a pro-globalization think-tank arm of the consulting firm that has done its own analysis of vulnerable jobs, calls Mr. Blinder "an alarmist" and frets about the impact he is having on politicians, particularly the Democrats who see resistance to free trade as a political winner. She insists many jobs that could go overseas won't actually go.

Ms. Farrell says Mr. Blinder's work doesn't take into account the realities of business which make exporting of some jobs impractical or which create offsetting gains elsewhere in the U.S. economy. ...

Mr. Blinder says there's an urgent need to retool America's education system so it trains young people for jobs likely to remain in the U.S. Just telling them to go to college to compete in the global economy is insufficient. A college diploma, he warns, "may lose its exalted 'silver bullet' status." It isn't how many years one spends in school that will matter, he says, it's choosing to learn the skills for jobs that cannot easily be delivered electronically from afar.

Similarly, he says any changes to the tax code should encourage employers to create jobs that are harder to perform overseas. While Mr. Gomory, the former IBM chief scientist, suggests tax breaks for companies that create "high value-added jobs," Mr. Blinder says the focus should be on jobs with person-to-person contact, regardless of pay and skill levels -- from child day-care providers to physicians.

Mostly he wants to shock politicians, policy makers and other economists into realizing how big a change is coming and what new sectors it will reach. "This is something factory workers have understood for a generation," he says. "It's now coming down on the heads of highly education, politically vocal people, and they're not going to take it."

Cheney is to Halliburton as Spellings is to _____________

All it took was the threat of a Congressional investigation to convince Spellings that there was something wrong with allowing corporate lenders to raid Federal databases. Complicity or incompetence or both--Spellings should be fired. From Raw Story:

While calling for the Department of Education to undertake a set of emergency reforms in collegiate student lending around the country today, a top House Democrat warned that the private student loan industry was as bad as Halliburton and assailed the Bush administration for ignoring its activities.

"This is the [modus operandi] of the Bush administration – they never took a look at their friends, whether it's Halliburton in Iraq, contractors in Hurricane Katrina, or Vice President Cheney and the oil companies," said Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. "Now it's the lenders."

Miller was speaking during a conference call in which he called on Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to enact a set of emergency reforms as a response to what is seen by many as a growing scandal in the federal higher education student loan program. He warned that under the Department's watch, the program was "spinning out of control."

"It's time for the Secretary of Education to step up, and take responsibility for the entire program," Miller added. "If Secretary Spellings fails to do this, what is happening is that she is allowing a corruption surcharge to fall on every student borrower and their families."

The nation's student loan industry has come under intense scrutiny recently, after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo "uncovered numerous arrangements that benefited schools and lenders at the expense of students," according to the Associated Press. "For example, investigators say lenders have provided all-expense-paid trips for college financial aid officers who then steered students to the lenders."

Additionally, a Department of Education student loan official, Matteo Fontana, was shown to have $100,000 in stock with the former parent company of one major lender, Student Loan Xpress.

Miller is calling on the Education Department to enact an emergency plan to ensure "that the federal student loan programs are operated to the maximum possible benefit of students, families, and taxpayers," according to a fact sheet released to RAW STORY:

1. Imposition of a moratorium on use by university and college financial aid office's of 'preferred lender' lists.

2. Clearly define and end all bribes paid by lenders.

3. Require full disclosure and end to all institution-lender conflicts of interests.

4. Launch Inspector General oversight of all Department of Education employees.

Miller is also seeking all public records of meetings between student loan industry representatives and Education Department political appointees.

The Education and Labor Committee chairman praised Spellings for suspending access by lenders to a database of all students using the federal Direct Loan program, but said a full investigation had to be launched into how the database had been used.

"Under the law, there is legitimate access to the database on the basis of identifying specific students to determine their eligibility for various student loan programs," Rep. Miller said. "But people were trolling through this database to get names of students and their backgrounds so they could promote private lending [and remove students from the federal Direct Loan program], or for some other purpose, to sell it to someone."

Miller suggested that the misuse of the database might have been an invasion of privacy.

"The student loan database is there for the benefit of the student loan program, and while it's a rich environment for other uses, neither students nor families signed up for those other purposes," he said. "It may be a flat out violation of their privacy rights."

Sallie Mae, the Unbowed Ho

A clip from TomPaine.com:

Isaiah J. Poole is the executive editor of TomPaine.com. This was written with the research assistance of Eric Lotke.

The sale of Sallie Mae to a group of investors that includes JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America should confirm to members of Congress that it is time to pull the plug on what has been a huge ripoff of taxpayers and college students.

Sallie ŸMae became a valuable enough business to warrant a $25 billion purchase price in part because its lucrative loan portfolio, estimated as high as $142 billion, is guaranteed by the federal government. That guarantee, in turn, ensures what has turned out to be in the past two decades a relatively low-risk investment, as graduating college students get jobs that enable them to repay the loans with few defaults.

But the icing on the cake was the success Sallie Mae had, after directing more than $877,000 to the election campaigns of President Bush and congressional candidates in 2004 and 2006, in getting the Republican-dominated Congress to allow it to charge interest rates on loans that ensured it a fat profit. That profit was fat enough, in fact, for its former board chairman, Albert L. Lord, to collect $228 million worth of salary and stock options in 2005 and for its current chairman, Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, to have received $180 million in total compensation, according to The New York Times .

This is, in other words, Reaganesque obsequiousness to private interests writ large: A public-interest goal—low-cost and widespread access to college tuition financing—turned into a license to print money for high-priced executives and investors, leaving students and taxpayers stuck with the bill. . . .