In Part 7 we learned the funding process employed by former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress’s "No Child Left Behind," to funnel billions of dollars in public school funding to corporate interests in the private sector. Earlier chapters in the series demonstrated how the Bush administration’s re-write of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act has effectively 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 profited corporations and individuals close to President George W. 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 to date, and they now line up to expand their profit margins during the next six years, as NCLB is being re-authorized by this Congress. Can you identify the losers?
IN AN EARLIER CHAPTER, we learned that former Education Secretary Bill Bennett entered the business of education in 1999, co-founding a company called K12 Inc., which offered a menu of services "as an option to traditional brick-and-mortar schools," even providing public schooling to private homes via the Internet. Though Bennett had been a critic of those emphasizing the use of computer technology as a standard teaching tool, K12 used computer technology to create a whole new classroom – a "virtual academy." Following passage of Kress’s NCLB, Bennett’s company qualified as a "supplemental educational services" provider, giving him access to NCLB grants – apparently $4 million in grants to do business in Arkansas alone.
It was Bennett’s success at fishing grants from NCLB for use in Arkansas that drew attention in August, 2004. An article published in eschoolnews and found here http://www.eschoolnews.com/... details the concern about Bennett’s "online charter school" that benefited his "for-profit education company." In addition, public school advocates told eSchool News that through Bennett’s company, "federal funds are being used to subsidize education for home-schooled students at the expense of public schools. State officials used the grants to create the Arkansas Virtual Academy, a two-year-old program that provides online learning to students from home with curriculum supplied by Virginia-based K12 Inc., Bennett's for-profit company."
I think this is what’s called one hand washing the other.
In Part 7, we learned how the "supplemental educational services" part of the racket works: School districts receiving federal funds are required by law to hold 20 percent of those funds aside, anticipating that its schools will fail to meet NCLB’s annual yearly progress formula. When that "failure" is certified by test scores, the district is then required to use those set-aside federal funds to pay "supplemental educational services" providers to open up shop in their communities.
But Bennett’s K12 got its funds for the "virtual academy" in Arkansas directly from the U.S. Department of Education, eSchool News reported, thanks to a tidy little program, tucked away by Kress in the 2001 package, called the Voluntary Public School Choice Program, which is billed as a "competitive grant" program under NCLB. Eschoolnews reports, "The program's aim is to expand the options for public-school students, and department officials are supposed to give priority to projects they think will have the greatest impact in moving students from low-performing public schools to higher-performing ones."
So, on paper, Kress’s "Voluntary Public School Choice Program" is supposed to help kids already enrolled in public schools to move to a different public school if they choose. But that’s not how Bennett’s K12 used its grant money. Education Week magazine reported in July 2004 that only 25 percent of the students using Bennett’s "virtual academy" came from public schools. Sixty percent were the children of home-schoolers, and the remaining 15 percent were students enrolled in private schools "or their schooling history was unavailable," writes eSchool News.
The Education Week investigation "also reported that ED [the Department of Education] awarded the grants despite the fact that the Arkansas project scored lower on a series of independent reviews than at least one other program that wasn't funded--a highly unusual occurrence, ED insiders said, and one that raises the question of whether the program received preferential treatment as a result of the political ties among Bennett, Arkansas state officials, and Bush administration officials."
"’ ‘Anything with Bill Bennett's name on it is going to get funded,’ one ED employee reportedly said."
Of course, the Department of Education and Bennett’s K12 cried foul, telling reporters that "the Arkansas project was needed to provide another option for parents and students in a state where many schools were failing to meet the standards put in place by NCLB."
Notice the qualifier: Bennett’s scheme was not necessary to help people leave schools that were failing to teach kids, only to help people leave schools that were "failing to meet the standards put in place by NCLB." Many argue, we’ve found in Parts 1 through 7, that the difference isn’t subtle.
Bennett sent K12’s "senior public relations manager," Jeff Kwitowski, to handle damage control with eSchool News. "Kwitowski said the academy received more than 1,300 applications for the new school year, despite having only 430 slots to fill," he told them.
At the same time, the Department of Education dispatched spokeswoman Susan Aspey to deliver this talking point: "the department maintains the right to fund additional programs, regardless of how they score on independent peer reviews."
We might conclude from this explanation that a proposal to use federal dollars to entice parents to withdraw their students from a public school and enroll them in online classes might be proven, undeniably, to be a waste of taxpayer resources, but if Bennett’s name was coincidentally attached to the proposal, it would be funded anyway – because the department has the right to fund the program regardless of any evaluation.
Aspey hit that talking point hard for eSchool News: "We always have the discretion to fund additional applications, and that's exactly what happened in this case," Aspey told the paper.
And, just to put Bennett’s "virtual academy" – the only one of the nation with his name attached to it – in context, eSchool News reported this:
In several states--most notably Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--disputes have arisen between virtual charter schools and the public school officials who claim these online schools are siphoning away students and the public tax dollars that follow them. In many cases, these disputes involve cyber charter schools run by for-profit companies. But the Arkansas Virtual Academy is one of the first such virtual school project to be federally funded.
"To see money diverted from our public school coffers to support a for-profit company helping parents home-school [their children] does not seem like an appropriate use of public money," said Barbara Stein, a policy analyst at the National Education Association.
Though students in the academy learn from a home computer, K12's Kwitowski said, once enrolled they become public-school students, subject to the same state and national testing standards as their peers attending brick-and-mortar schools. Any virtual school that fails to show gains in student achievement runs the risk of being labeled "in need of improvement" under NCLB, just as any other public school does, he said.
"The agreement around here is that we want to be treated like any other public school," Kwitowski said...
But isn’t "any other public school" accountable to a locally-elected or –appointed school board? Doesn’t "any other public school" have teachers and principals and bus drivers and secretaries and janitors who earn a salary from the district rather than offer one service or another by company contract, for profit?
A year after eSchool News published its report on Bennett’s for-profit, NCLB-funded "virtual academy," former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt published a salient little anecdote found here http://www.tpmcafe.com/... about an interaction he had with Bennett. The anecdote is brief, so I’ll reprint the entirety:
When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work.
At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.
Well, I thought, at least he's candid about his true views.
