profit

State budget enabling education industrial complex

Following up on an earlier piece by William Phillis, Ohio E & A

Remember the news articles about military contractors charging the military $100 for a $2.98 hammer and $600 for toilet seats and $3,000 for a coffeemaker? The military is a government function but the size of the defense budget attracted lots of private operators to the table. Contractors developed cozy relationships and deals with government officials which cost the taxpayers heavily.

The size of America's collective education budget has gotten the attention of private operators in recent years. Much of the charter school money in Ohio goes to for-profit operators. State officials have allowed the "nonprofit" charters to be managed by companies whose bottom line seems to be profit-at any cost.

Campaign contributions from for-profit charter operators may be the reason that Ohio's charter school laws are, for the most part, not rational.

The corporate operation of charter schools may be just the tip of the iceberg. Pearson, the world's largest education company has operations throughout the world. This company continues to commercialize education by suggesting that every teacher and student in the USA is a potential customer. Pearson has been buying up the competition. This company is engaged in all facets of education-testing of students and teachers, virtual schools, textbooks, digital texts, online learning tools, etc.

The privatization movement, (i.e.) the Education Industrial Complex, seeks to eliminate the current practice that communities, through their boards of education, operate their schools for the benefit of all their students. The greatest discovery of mankind-the public common school-is being replaced. Unfortunately, state officials throughout the nation, particularly in Ohio, are enabling the demise of the public common school system through enactment of policies that open the door to the complete privatization of education.

As the privatization movement blossoms, there will be fierce competition among the private schools, nonprofit charters, corporate charters and huge education groups like Pearson. In this environment, the losers will be taxpayers, students and all who cherish democracy.

Power, Ideology, and the Use of Evidence

Consider the three-decade long, unrelenting promotion of classroom computers and online instruction. A recently mobilized corporate and civic-driven coalition chaired by two ex-state governors issued a report that touted online instruction as a way to transform teaching and learning in U.S. schools. (p. 19 of Digital Learning Now Report FINAL lists corporate, foundation, and top policymakers who participated).

Evidence that regular instructional use of these machines will transform teaching and learning is barely visible. Furthermore, evidence of students' academic achievement gains attributed to online instruction, laptops, and other hardware and software in schools is missing-in-action. And the dream that school use of these machines and applications will lead to better jobs (except in programs where technical certificates can lead to work - e.g., Cisco), well, I won't even mention the scarcity of evidence to support that dream.

So what do these two-governors champion in their Digital Learning Commission report?

"Providing a customized, personalized education for students was a dream just a decade ago. Technology can turn that dream into reality today. The Digital Learning Council will develop the roadmap to achieve that ultimate goal."

Sure, this is an advertisement pushing for-profit online outfits such as for-profit K12 and non-profit projects such as the Florida Virtual School and "hybrid" schools. See here and here. These ex-governors want states to alter their policies to accommodate this "Brave New World" where students get individual lessons tailored to what they need to learn.

Question: After decades of blue-ribbon commissions issuing utopian reports promising "revolutionary" and "transformed" schools, where is the evidence that such futures are either possible or worthwhile?

Answer: When it comes to technology policy, evidence doesn't matter.

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The Big e-school rip off

The evidence is becoming clearer and clearer. E-School charters are a tax payer rip-off that delivers awful results.

At Join the Future we have focused most of our attention on the poor quality Ohio's e-schools have delivered. Providing the highest quality education is, after all, the most important aspect to schools. In article after article, we have highlighted the packed virtual classrooms, and the poor graduation rates they produce.

But now comes news that not only do they produce awful results in terms of educational quality, they are also a huge pay payer rip off. First for some context as to the scope of e-schools in Ohio

Enrollment in online schools in Ohio has passed 30,000, more than 12 times the number in 2000 when the first "virtual" school opened in the state.

Only Arizona had more students enrolled full time in online schools in 2010-11, according to an annual report by the Evergreen Education Group.
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Although scattered around the state, the online students combined would make up the third-largest district in Ohio — about the size of the Cincinnati schools. The online schools are charters, independently operated but publicly funded.
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Ohio's online schools have become a big business. The state paid online charter schools $209 million in 2010-11 to educate students, or an average of $6,337 per student.

Results are mixed at both for-profit and district-run schools. Online students have lower graduation rates than those at traditional schools. They attend college at a lower rate. At the same time, other measures have shown online students learning as much as, or more than, students in many districts.

It's a growth business. And reporting from StateImpact Ohio and the Plain Dealer indicate why

Robert Mengerink didn’t know how much an online school really costs to operate — until he started one.

When he learned this summer that the agency he heads, the Educational Service Center of Cuyahoga County, could offer a basic online program for less than half of what the state pays online schools per student, he was taken aback.
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The cost? About $2,980 per student for a full course load all year.

That's more than 50% cheaper than the for-profit charter operations such as ECOT, and it's not an isolated example.

TRECA Digital Academy, another publicly operated provider of online K-12 education, says it can do it for about $3,600 per student.

That potential savings highlights questions that critics of online schools have been asking for years: What really happens to that taxpayer-provided money? Is most of it going to educate students? Or are schools pocketing a large profit while cutting corners for students?

That's a really good question. For a Governor and legislature that talks about reducing government spending so much, we are left wondering why they continue to allow such a laissez faire attitude to these terrible schools.

We recommend you read the full State Impact report, it really should open some eyes.

Romney education policy aligns with ALEC agenda

As its inner workings have been revealed over the past few months, one thing is clear about the American Legislative Exchange Council, the radical conservative “bill mill” that gives powerful corporations access to lawmakers: The group makes no apologies for putting the needs of Corporate America, and the wealthy citizens it comprises, before those of middle class America.

The same could be said of presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Earlier this week, Romney finally got around to introducing some details of his education policy —and much of what he said might as well have been churned out at a meeting of ALEC’s education task force.

Here are top priorities they share:

  • Promote a nationwide voucher program. Funneling public funds to private schools and for-profit charters through voucher schemes has been an ALEC priority for decades—and they’ve been successful in states like Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia to name only a few. In his education policy speech, Romney said that if he were president, federal education funds would be linked to students, with parents deciding where their child goes to school, be it a public, charter or private school.
  • Eliminate teacher certification requirements. ALEC’s Alternative Certification Act asserts that any professional can teach K-12 classes with virtually no preparation, and it’s a theme woven into its other education bills. Romney similarly believes there is too much “unnecessary certification” getting in the way of professionals from other fields might want to give the teaching thing a go.
  • Make it more difficult for middle class families to afford higher education. Their tactics may differ, but the result would be the same: More and more, college would become a luxury of the upper class. Romney would repeal the law signed by President Obama that eliminates banks as middle men on federally guaranteed student loans and uses those savings to increase Pell Grants, strengthen community colleges and make it easier for students to repay their federal student loans. (Romney revealed his lack of perspective on college affordability earlier on the campaign trail, suggesting that borrowing money from parents or attending outrageously priced for-profit colleges might be solutions for those who cannot easily afford higher education.)

ALEC has generated model legislation that would give tax breaks to families wealthy enough to have college savings accounts—which many middle class families cannot afford. Other model bills would direct public funds to private universities through higher education vouchers.

  • Upend educator unions. Union busting is high on ALEC’s overall agenda (a favorite topic of conversation at its economic task force meetings), and language attempting to limit educator unions’ ability to negotiate crops up in several K-12 education bills. Romney, meanwhile, says standing up to organized labor and taking so-called “right to work law” national is a day-one priority.

So what’s it like for educators when top decision makers sign off on anti-public education legislation? Just ask a teacher from a state where ALEC-friendly lawmakers and governors have already had their way.

“Wisconsin has been slowly going private for years,” says Milwaukee kindergarten teacher Tiffanie Lawson. “And these for-profit charters are not held to the same standards that we are–we’re talking about teachers who don’t have teaching degrees. We’ve seen so much corruption with money going to the choice and charter schools that should be going to the public schools.” (Read more about ALEC’s shocking degree of influence in Wisconsin in the Center for Media and Democracy’s recently released “Wisconsin: The Hijacking of a State.”)

“We see students who leave our schools to go to these charters come back to us,” said Lawson, “because they realize they’re not getting the education they deserve and that the public schools offer what they need: the support, the services. And we need the resources to keep all of that going for our kids.”

Find out more, and get involved, here.

Can Education Be ‘Moneyball’-ed?

Data analysis is so trendy these days that Brad Pitt is getting millions of people to sit through a movie about quantitative methodology. Moneyball, based on the 2003 bestseller by Michael Lewis, traces the rise of new methods that the Oakland A’s used to identify undervalued baseball players so the team could win more games with a smaller payroll. A lot of education reformers are calling for a similar approach to evaluate teachers and improve student performance. Given that I’m a longtime reformer and love baseball, you’d think I’d be all over this idea. But there are some significant strikes against a Moneyball approach to education.

Poor data quality. In baseball, you can rely on the accuracy of a statistic such as a batting average or percent of at-bats a player gets on base. In education, we’ve seen an explosion of data and statistics during the past decade — it’s one of the quiet successes of No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, while states are trying to do better, all the data being produced are not yet high-quality. In some states, for instance, standards for accuracy are lax or the data isn’t audited to check for errors. And just 14 states have standards about what a district should do to try to locate or figure out what happened to a departing student, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national non-profit organization that has led the charge to improve state education data systems.

In addition, too many states have data systems that are inadequate or underutilized. According to the Data Quality Campaign, only 35 states are able to link student data to teacher data — and fewer states actually do this in practice, in no small part because it’s so politically contentious. And a lack of transparency plagues some states, where parents and other stakeholders cannot easily go online and find the data or use it to answer questions or learn about schools. What good is a lot of data if it’s difficult or impossible to use?

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Cashing In on Education

StateImpactOhio has a great piece today, Charters Schools Part III: Cashing In on Education. It discusses at length to for-profit nature of Ohio's "non profit charters". It starts with the tale of one charter teacher experiencing her own kind of "Corporate innovation" - not getting paid.

Nagorsky says the it took her by surprise, but in hindsight, she says there were definitely some tell-tale signs: “I remember obviously the pay checks bouncing, which was huge. I remember the phone call telling me I was $900 in the hole in my account because everything I had sent out had bounced.”

Of course an article on profiteering charters would be incomplete without mention of White Hat Management and David Brennan

White Hat has been sued by some of its own schools, and critics keep pointing to the poor grades most of the schools get on annual report cards.
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Minson says that would not have bothered him, if he felt like students in his schools were getting a good education.

He did not.

“We saw a lot of strategies put in play that tried to lessen the cost of educational delivery on a couple of different points, and that really gave us the vision that the number one priority of prosit was in direct competition at times with educational delivery.”

That's from the board chair of two of White Hat's own schools!

But lawyer April Hart says White Hat’s problem isn’t tough students. She argues it’s a teaching method that relies on computer instruction – a model she says is good for profits but not students.

“If you don’t care at the end of the day what’s going on in the school as long as your enrollment numbers are up, you’re going to have a problem in a for-profit situation,” says Hart.

So charters prefer not to hire too many teachers, and when they do, some even prefer not to pay them. Left holding the bag are thousands of students getting low quality, high profit educations from Ohio's accountability free charter school system.