In Parts 1 through 6 we’ve found evidence that former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress’s "No Child Left Behind," the Bush administration’s re-write of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act has effectively diverted public funds to private enterprise, allowed big business to circumvent federal anti-discrimination laws, blurred the legal boundaries separating public schools and private or parochial schools – churches themselves, for that matter – and generally profit corporations and individuals close to Bush and his family. Since its enactment in 2002, Kress himself has turned from public servant to corporate lobbyist, now guiding his employers to the many spigots flowing with federal funds from his crowning achievement in lawmaking. Corporations specializing in standardized testing and in "supplemental education services" have been the biggest winners and now line up to expand their profit margins during the next six years, as NCLB is being re-authorized by this Congress. In this edition, we’ll see how part of the racket works.
Those readers who are fans of the late Johnny Cash may recall "American IV: The Man Comes Around," an album released in late 2002, and its compelling title track, "The Man Comes Around." "There's a man goin' 'round takin' names," the lyrics begin. "And he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won't be treated all the same. There'll be a golden ladder reaching down when the man comes around."
As renowned education researcher Gerald Bracey explained only a few months after that album was released, everybody wasn’t treated all the same under Kress’s NCLB when Kress negotiated away the school voucher component of the package. As a result of that bargain to win favor from some Democratic leaders, the skids were greased for some corporate interests but other formerly-favored interests found themselves left out in the cold. One such fellow is Chris Whittle, founder of Channel One News in 1989 and the celebrated Edison Schools, the school-management company that promised to revolutionize public schools by applying business-world models to public education. Back in 2000, things were looking way, way up for his company, as the potential of a Bush presidency meant that long-laid plans would come quickly to fruition.
Writing in one of his annual reports in 2003, currently found here http://www.america-tomorrow.com/... , Bracey tells the story better than I:
Recall that Whittle announced his plan for a national system of private schools in 1991 when President George Herbert Walker Bush was riding high after the Gulf War.
Recall, too, that Whittle had paid Bush’s secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, $125,000 as a consultant while Alexander was Governor of Tennessee (Whittle Communications was headquartered in Knoxville). Alexander also bought $10,000 worth of Whittle Communications stock. He transferred the stock to his wife when he became president of the University of Tennessee (for some reason, his wife also wrote a check to Whittle for the shares. Apparently, Whittle never cashed either one of them, but he later bought the stock back for $330,000.
Whittle's original grandiose plan prophesied 200 private schools by 1996 and 1000 by 2000 (he currently manages, not owns, about 130 public schools). He said it would require about $1 billion to create a prototype of his scheme and another $2 to ramp it up to a national scale. Where on earth would he get that kind of money? Whittle said from bankers and investors. Three billion from investors who had already lost about $400 million on his earlier adventure, Channel One?
Whittle actually needed Bush and Alexander to push their school voucher plan through Congress. Then children could use those vouchers to attend Edison schools.
When the unthinkable happened [and vouchers were deleted from the NCLB bill], Whittle had to fall back on managing a few public schools. Whittle no doubt already has an advertising campaign ready for when the failing grades start arriving. He will then portray the Edison "model" as the only means of consistently achieving AYP, even though evaluations have found Edison achievement results mixed at best and a dozen schools that Edison lists as showing "positive" trends have terminated their contracts.
But Edison has friends in high places. Lamar Alexander is now a Senator who managed, despite his freshman status, to wrangle a seat on the education committee. Another fan, Eugene Hickok, is Deputy Secretary of Education (Hickok was responsible for persuading then-Pennsylvania governor, Tom Ridge, to impose Edison on Philadelphia schools). And a third Whittle pal and voucher advocate, Lisa Keegan, heads the Education Leaders Council (in which Hickok was very active before taking his current appointment), which has received millions in no-bid contracts from Secretary of Education Rod Paige. Whittle will be ready to roll if the moment comes.
As will be former secretary of education, William J. Bennett. Bennett now heads K12, Inc. After decades of warning people that computers offer no educational advantages, Bennett converted and is now CEO of this company that produces on-line curriculum materials. The "supplementary services" provisions of NCLB offer Whittle, Bennett and other private companies opportunities after the public schools "fail."
In that 2003 report, Bracey, who has analyzed and reported on the state of American public schools his entire career, draws a pointed conclusion: "The No Child Left Behind Act is a trap. It is the grand scheme of the school privatizers. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) sets up public schools for the final knock down."
"Would an administration with such an anti-regulatory, pro-private sector policy perspective turn around and impose harsh, straitjacket requirements on schools, demands that would bankrupt any business?" Bracey asks before offering the obvious answer, "Of course not. Unless it had an ulterior purpose."
So how would the final knock down play out? Bracey predicts the mantra, and four years later he’s been proven correct time after time. "The privatizers will shout ‘The school system has proven it is an ossified government monopoly that can't reform itself (Chester Finn shouted precisely this in 1998 in the Wall Street Journal). You've had your chance. We warned you. We gave you 'Nation At Risk' over twenty years ago. Nothing has changed. It's time to apply American business expertise to education."
Business expertise. The bottom line. Inputs and outcomes. Trimming overhead, maximizing the profit margin. Expanding current markets, finding and exploiting niche markets with boutique services.
Ponder the names of these corporations, courtesy of Bracey’s text, who benefited from such business expertise: Enron. Tyco. Global Crossing. ImClone. WorldCom.
But never mind those colossal failures. In nature, water runs downhill. Thanks to Sandy Kress, several brand-new spigots had begun to pump billions in federal dollars out of public schools and into the private sector, where corporate interests had only to hold out their buckets and fill ‘em up. Here’s where the "supplemental educational services" part of the racket gets explained.
So wrote New York Times reporter Sam Dillon here http://oldweb.uwp.edu/... on April 16, 2004:
The competition between public schools and private enterprise that the Bush administration is encouraging heated up the other day, just outside Classroom 207 at Wentworth Elementary School here.
Over several months, a string of novice tutors from a private company offering federally financed after-school classes had tried and failed to control Room 207's dozen rambunctious students. A supervisor from the company was dispatched to troubleshoot. Effie McHenry, Wentworth's principal, was clucking her tongue in disapproval.
"I just don't think they're prepared to deal with challenging inner city children," Mrs. McHenry said of the company, talking past the supervisor to a visitor. "I think they expected to find children who'd just sit down and wait for them to expound. These kids aren't like that. They need challenging instruction."
The No Child Left Behind law has kicked off one of the nation's largest experiments in educational capitalism by inviting private companies and other groups to offer tutoring in failing public schools and financing the effort with federal money previously spent on the schools themselves. The aim is to help struggling children perform in their regular classrooms, while invigorating public education with private competition. The initiative has set off a stampede, with 1,000 companies rushing to recruit armies of tutors and grab chunks of what experts say could be a $2 billion-plus tutoring market.
Dillon wrote that implementation of these new private-sector solutions in public-school environments were "chaotic," as gurus of the solution-oriented business world came face-to-face with the realities of life in public education, leaving them "struggling with the same discipline, attendance and other problems that have kept failing schools from raising proficiency levels on their own."
Gurus at Nashville-based EdSolutions stumbled onto the problem of absenteeism in Chicago when 6,000 children enrolled for its "supplemental educational services," "but only 2,300 showed up," Dillon reports.
In the business world, a constantly absent or truant employee can be fired and replaced with one more dedicated, an unruly employee can be fired and replaced with one better-behaved, the employee who lacks basic skills can be fired and replaced with an employee who brings the necessary skill levels. Before an employee is ever hired, a personnel officer will make a judgment about the candidate’s ability to speak English. In public schools, however, the constantly absent or truant student, the unruly student and the student who lacks basic skills – as well as the student who speaks no English at all – must all be taught and tested under No Child Left Behind, and a single student’s test scores can determine whether a school is successful or "low-performing."
No wonder the turnover in all those private-sector start-ups was high, as Dillon reports.
Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, told Dillon, "The schools aren't used to dealing with private tutoring companies, and the companies aren't used to dealing with the challenges that people in public schools face every day."
But there’s a "whole new marketplace," Dillon heard from Jeffrey Cohen, president of Sylvan Education Solutions, one of the companies collecting massive federal funding for its "supplemental education services." Seeing the glass as half-full and his company’s bottom line getting fatter and fatter, Cohen told Dillon, "It's like when Medicaid started, the creation of a new right for low-income parents. It will breed investment and innovation."
It sure would. The market would only grow; Kress’s NCLB made low-income students at schools that "fail" for a third year eligible for tutoring, meaning that private companies offering "supplemental education services" had a captive market and a steady revenue stream. Kress’s NCLB allowed "companies, nonprofit and religious groups and educational agencies" to enroll students, so private schools – with their infrastructure already in place – could get in on the revenue streaming too.
And where would the money come from? Dillon describes how the federal spigots work: "Districts must set aside 20 percent of the federal money they get to educate low-income students, known as Title I money, to finance the transfer and tutoring programs."
Twenty percent of all federal funds given to a school district to provide services to low-income students HAVE TO BE set aside BY LAW in anticipation of a district’s failing to meet those students’ needs, THEN TRANSFERRED to private companies who enroll the district’s students in "supplemental education services." In short, it’s a racket – but the sort of racket that is exempt from federal racketeering laws, because it’s a federal program itself. That’s half of the beauty of Kress’s NCLB.
"We have a good relationship with Chicago, but many districts have an antagonistic relationship with tutoring providers, because we're paid with their dollars," Dillon heard from Steve Quattrociocchi, an executive vice president at The Princeton Review. Dillon writes that Princeton Review "organized tutoring in Chicago and about 20 other districts."
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University gave a little more flesh to the "antagonistic relationship" that Quattrociocchi mentioned. Dillon explains, "A study released in February by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University examined the experiences of 11 districts, from New York to Chicago to Fresno, Calif. It concluded that negotiating contracts and overseeing the tutoring providers ‘placed enormous administrative burdens on districts’ and that the requirement to withhold 20 percent of Title I money for transfer and tutoring programs diverted resources from the neediest schools."
I’d say that’s cause for more than just an "antagonistic" relationship, and one of the study’s authors, Dr. Gail Sunderman, agrees with me. "These schools are being told to improve, but they're no longer going to get the money they need," Sunderman told Dillon.
And Bruce Hunter, lobbyist for the American Association of School Adminstrators – the school administrators who serve as the pass-through for Kress’s funding stream to the private sector – told Dillon that districts are suffering. "Many districts will lose teachers and gain tutors," Hunter told Dillon.
Of course, the Bush administration disagreed with the fact-based reality, sending an education spokeswoman to tell Dillon there was "no evidence right now" that Hunter’s assessment was correct. And Gene Hickok, the acting deputy secretary of education, tried to deflect Dillon’s attention from the racket altogether, telling him, "This law creates a new opportunity for parents. I don't have much patience with those who argue that spending money on tutoring for kids hurts the schools. The point isn't the school, it's the child."
Unbeknownst to Hickok, a good teacher may have a little something to do with a student’s success, but the notion of it is so profitless and status-quo that it might have been easy for Hickok to overlook. But it’s hard to overlook when reading the observations of the "supplemental educational services" coordinator at Wentworth Elementary School in Dillon’s report. In six months (from November 2003 to the date of Dillon’s report in April 2004), Wentworth’s sixth- to eighth-graders had as many as six different Princeton Review tutors come and go.
Why such high and rapid turnover? The coordinator, Lenore Strickland, told Dillon, "the tutors have no consistently held students’ interest."
"It's just, `Sit down and read,' " Strickland told Dillon. "The kids say, `This is just like school — boring.' So they'll be running around and hitting each other, and the teachers get annoyed."
Dillon concludes with this expensive bit of shame:
Princeton tutors have frequently ejected unruly students from the class, forcing Ms. Strickland, a public school employee, to baby-sit, she said. Other days no Princeton tutor has shown up, forcing her to watch the entire class, she said.
Wasi Young, a poet and musician who taught for Princeton Review here from January until he quit in March said: "It was extremely hard to get those kids' attention. They were boisterous and shouting from the day I walked into the class."
Something tells me that while tutors came and went because of the "boisterous, shouting students" whose attention couldn’t be "consistently held," the checks to those private companies providing "supplemental educational services" still were cut, and they didn’t bounce, and a company made a profit, thanks to Sandy Kress’s NCLB.
But that’s only one example of the "supplemental educational services" half of the racket – there are many more – and then there’s the testing-and-assessment half of the racket that we’ve only briefly mentioned.
