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July 24th, 2014

7/24/2014

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Just a few more days on education policy------let's continue to look at higher education and Maryland is ground zero for the dismantling of our public education system at all levels.

Yesterday I showed that Economic students are demanding universities stop teaching only neo-liberal economics-----they said the field had become so narrow as to block all other thought.  Think how that translates to Common Core in our K-12.  They intend to do the same thing in our grade schools as they have done in universities.......narrowed the curricula to corporate policy.  'Competition' replaces personal best......'Getting the edge' becomes bullying........'Taking out the competition' becomes rape.  The level of aggression in our schools and universities is growing because of this corporate mentality.  Attacks on women are soaring even at universities because Chancellor Kirwan does not see himself as a public servant upholding public justice and Rule of Law-----


WE WILL SELECT WHOMEVER WE WANT TO BE HEARD IN ELECTION FORUMS AND THERE WILL BE NO DISCUSSION ON ANY UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CAMPUS THAT IS ANTI-NEO-LIBERALISM!

We heard recently that UMUC----the online college structure that O'Malley spent hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars to create is failing miserably.  No one wants online education yet neo-liberals funded by Bill Gates and Wall Street are going to push this until we have no choice they say.  O'Malley even went overseas to push our active military to use their GI Bill education benefits on these online degree programs----IT IS A DISGRACE.  As you will see below there is absolutely no research that shows these online education programs are providing any quality or creating higher achievement.  The data is not there.  The only reason they are creating these online venues for 90% of Americans is that it is cheap and only prepares for a job.

FORGET THE WELL-BALANCED EDUCATION THAT IS BROAD AND ALLOWS GRADUATES TO APPLY THEMSELVES TO MANY FIELDS.

First UMUC was going to be made a non-profit so the public could not see how it operates.....now University of Maryland is keeping a failed structure alive but wants to deregulate.  Bill Gates requires online instruction and neo-liberals are going to give it to him!
  The amount of education funding wasted on these global corporate policies mirrors O'Malley's tying the public to Hilton and Hyatt hotels in order to keep them from losing money.  Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are lost every year in all categories of industry in what is clearly public malfeasance and fraud against the citizens of Maryland.  Why do we need a UMUC Asia/Europe?

Meanwhile financial aid and grants are being cut and that aid given is being tied to these cheaper structures as WE THE PEOPLE see our strong public education dismantled by neo-liberals. 

DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN TO CHANGE THIS----THIS IS REPUBLICAN POLICY-----NEO-CONS ARE JUST AS BAD.



UMUC’s Mission in Asia


The mission of University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in Asia is to offer academic programs to United States military communities throughout Asia and the Pacific. While serving overseas, students can take a single course or many courses leading to a certificate, an Associate of Arts degree, a Bachelor of Arts degree, or a Bachelor of Science degree. Since University of Maryland University College is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, students can take courses with the intention of transferring their credits to other colleges or universities in the United States. Students may also continue their studies with UMUC online. Additional information is available at www.umuc.edu.

Although the educational setting is overseas, UMUC’s programs in Asia are in all respects comparable to those offered at public institutions of higher learning in the United States. Courses are taught by faculty whose credentials meet standards set by appropriate University of Maryland University College academic departments in Adelphi, Maryland. All UMUC courses taught in Asia carry University of Maryland University College resident credit. UMUC is committed to maintaining standards of academic excellence. The past 50-plus years demonstrate that those standards can be maintained in overseas settings.



UMUC Europe offers thousands of courses for students interested in associate's and bachelor's degrees and undergraduate certificates. UMUC also offers graduate-level certificates and several master's degrees in Europe. With UMUC's 150 locations worldwide, and extensive online offerings, students can begin and finish a degree with us regardless of where they are located.


I bet the citizens of Maryland did not even know UMUC was a global corporation.  Meanwhile fewer Maryland citizens are going to 4 year universities.


I don't hold any credence to these online workplace comment programs because they work like American Idol.  It is good to see a consistent referral to 'people needing to be treated with respect'. ' Low pay with no opportunity to grow'.  THIS IS NOT AN ENVIRONMENT WE WOULD WANT IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY.  THAT IS WHAT A CORPORATE STRUCTURE LOOKS LIKE.  That is because it IS  a corporate structure.  Under neo-liberals labor is treated as badly as if a Republican were in office yet every election Maryland labor unions get behind these neo-liberal pols.  We need the citizens of Maryland taking back the Democratic Party to reverse this failed neo-liberal/neo-con policy!



“Failing company, horrible management” Academic Advisor (Current Employee) Pros – Great vacation/time off. Get to become a state employee after 3 years.

Cons – Moral is so low! Micromanaged beyond belief, constant layoffs, not worth you time.

Advice to Senior Management – Treat us like the educated adults that we are. Learn to value your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Add Employer Response
  1. Apr 8, 2014
    • Culture & Values
    • Work/Life Balance
    • Senior Management
    • Comp & Benefits
    • Career Opportunities
     

    “Not good. Too many secrets and financial problems” Administrative Assistant (Current Employee) Largo, MD I have been working at UMUC full-time for more than 8 years


    Pros: Convenient location and great benefits Cons: Low pay and minimal advancement Advice to Senior Management: Treat the regular people like people No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company… More

                    

Below you see what the deregulation issues discussed by Mikulski and Kirwan will include----as you see again everyone in the system is in the dark as to what these discussions look like.  WE DON'T ALLOW CITIZENS IN MARYLAND KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


UMUC considering plan to become independent nonprofit with ties to university system
Under proposal, it would no longer be a state entity; president seeks input from university community




By Nayana Davis, The Baltimore Sun

7:54 p.m. CDT, July 10, 2014

The University of Maryland University College, which has been struggling with declining enrollment, is considering severing some ties with the state university system to avoid burdensome regulations and work more closely with the private sector.

Under the proposal, the university would become an independent nonprofit organization that retains an affiliation with the state system. The school's president, Javier Miyares, said during a Thursday town hall meeting in Largo that the idea came from a task force of experts organized by the university as a response to a shrinking student body.

UMUC, a mainly online institution, has struggled with a competitive online education market and a smaller military. Members of the military or their families make up about half of the college's students.



The main objective of the proposal is to more readily secure partnerships with the private sector, including working with companies to make courses more employer-friendly and building relationships to help students secure jobs. Miyares said such partnerships can be challenging to forge as a state agency.

"This way we would not be bound by all the regulations and statutes that apply to a public state agency," Miyares said.

University officials also hope the move would help it attract more students outside the United States, though it would retain the University of Maryland name. Based in Adelphi, UMUC offers courses to students in 24 countries.

The plan would allow the university to keep ties with the 12-institution University System of Maryland, but the details have not been worked out. "The validity and credibility you get by being part of the University of Maryland system is huge," Miyares said.

No immediate action will be taken on the task force recommendation, as the school begins a process of soliciting feedback from the college community. University officials said there are few concrete ideas on how the effort would be implemented at this stage; Miyares said he wanted to get input first.

UMUC has the support of the University System of Maryland to look into alternate business models.

"The university is facing some significant challenges," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the system. "They are appropriately addressing those challenges."

Kirwan said a more concrete proposal would need approval from the system's Board of Regents before implementation, and possibly the governor and General Assembly. The governor's office declined to comment on the plan.

But some higher education experts expressed concern about the university putting out such a proposal with few details.


Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said it's not uncommon for public universities to form private-sector relationships to outsource certain functions, but it's unclear what the change in status would mean for the university.

"Honestly, I don't know what to make of this," he said. "The decision to operate under a different set of rules is interesting. Whether the move is good, I don't know."

UMUC has been struggling with declining enrollment both stateside and overseas since fall of 2011. Although the rate of decline stateside has remained less than 10 percent in the past three years, overseas enrollment declined 20 percent for spring 2014.

The school has struggled to increase enrollment because of competition from traditional academic institutions that have started offering Web-based classes and popular massive open online courses known as MOOCs, university officials said.

A shrinking military, which is facing large-scale budget cuts, also is a factor in loss of enrollment.

University officials said that 90 percent of its budget comes from tuition and 10 percent from the state. Other colleges in the university system get about 30 percent of their budgets from the state.

"We don't know what the future is going to be like," Miyares said. "But if we don't adapt, we will go into a death spiral."

UMUC's struggles are "a reflection of how competitive online education has become," Kirwan said. "What we do need is to explore if operational flexibility is possible."


"UMUC has been quite unique in the university system," Nassirian said. "It had been mostly self-sufficient because it provides excess revenue back to the system, but that [online] business model has not fared well as of late."

Traditionally, changes in business models for colleges have occurred when a struggling nonprofit university becomes a for-profit venture after a large corporation acquires it. Nassirian gave the example of the Clinton, Iowa-based school Ashford University being purchased by Bridgepoint Education.

Miyares said the change could occur as early as next summer. Academic programs and staffing levels are not expected to be affected if the model changes, unless enrollment continues to drop.

The school laid off 70 staff members from departments at the Adelphi and Largo campuses earlier this year, and 58 the year prior. The university employs about 2,000 in the U.S.

"The whole goal is to get enrollment up," Miyares said. "If enrollment is fine, there should be no dramatic difference to the academic side. This is a pivotal moment in our history."

nadavis@baltsun.com



________________________________________________

The article above gives yet another spin----that UMUC and online colleges are being edged out by the popularity of MOOCs-----only MOOCs are not popular.  They are used less frequently then online UMUC.  We are being fed nothing but spin and this happens more and more because the public universities that would be the first to shout THAT IS NOT TRUE ----IT IS SPIN are now the ones handing us spin because they are corporations.  Maryland Assembly was the very first to pass laws that move the accreditation process towards making these online structures legitimate.  NO ONE THINKS THIS IS GOOD POLICY.  Needless to say when it comes to bad education policy it is Johns Hopkins pushing it in Maryland.  Indeed, Baltimore is cursed with a gorilla in the room that pushes the worst of policy all so they can make more profits.


This looks like a Gates Foundation study-------most employers in North Carolina have not heard of MOOCS but 3/4 of them think they are good. Meanwhile, there is no interest in the public for MOOCs outside of simple extracurricular help with existing university structures. Gates says he will buy these policy implementation yet! You know, because he is the 'good billionaire' as NPR always tells us.



All Hail MOOCs! Just Don’t Ask if They Actually Work | TIME.com

Why Do So Many Students Drop Out of MOOCs?www.brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/...



Study: MOOCs Viewed Positively Among Employers

April 2, 2014 Inside Higher Education

Most North Carolina employers haven't heard of massive open online courses, but about three-quarters of them view MOOCs as having a positive effect on hiring decisions, a survey conducted by Duke University and RTI International shows. The study, founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also suggests 71 percent of employers could see themselves using MOOCs for professional development.

Think about how the real world views MOOCs but the article in the Maryland media makes you think they are supported.  It happens all the time because they can get away with it.  Online resources for education are good----everyone thinks online instruction adds to the classroom at any level.  The problem is that corporations have as a goal to replace the classroom with these online products ------aiming at the 90% of Americans becoming trapped by Vocational K-12.......
With all public education funding going to subsidize corporate research and Human Resources we have to make the cost of educating the 90% as cheap as possible say neo-liberals and neo-cons!  Calling MOOCS a democratizing tool in a nation with the strongest public education system in the world is a mockery.  STOP DEFUNDING AND DISMANTLING PUBLIC EDUCATION.


The University of Maryland is now taking a look at bestowing transfer credit to those who are able to demonstrate a specific level of knowledge after completing a MOOC.


- See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/can-moocs-be-a-solution-to-the-us-student-debt-crisis/#sthash.uhO1mk7Y.dpuf


Are MOOCs really dead?

  • By Jake New, Editor, eCampus News
June 6th, 2014 Recent studies suggest that MOOCs are very much alive, but are not a threat to traditional higher education For some educators and journalists, the rasping final breaths of massive open online courses (MOOCs) began late last year.

They followed nearly two years of hype and excitement that even the most skeptical of instructors and reporters got swept up in. Many of those who denounced the courses did so in a similarly frantic fashion, writing proclamations and open letters condemning MOOCs, as though they were caught in a great academic war.

Then, suddenly, a blow was struck. And it came from one of MOOCs’ most famous creators.

“Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger,” Rebecca Schuman wrote at Slate in November 2013.

It was a dramatic way of saying that Thrun had announced that his company, Udacity, would now focus its MOOCs more on vocational training rather than traditional liberal arts courses.

That Udacity was only one company of a growing number focused on MOOCs — and that many of these platforms, including its main competitor Coursera, still aimed to disrupt traditional higher education — did little to slow the wave of speculation.

It was the capper on a year of MOOC hand-wringing. If 2012 was the “year of the MOOC,” then 2013 was the “year of the MOOC backlash.” Those who trust Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” believed MOOCs were going through a common “trough of disillusionment,” that would soon be followed by a “slope of enlightenment.”

But by the start of 2014, many were already asking: “Are MOOCs dead?”

The answer is not as sensational as the question. MOOCs aren’t dead — not yet -- but they likely won’t be replacing any traditional means of higher education, either.




Here is the source of creating a massive online system of education for the 90% in Maryland-----Wall Street itself!  The quality of education drops each time they grow this online education industry.  Since it isn't working at the university level they are now talking of sending it to K-12 vocational.  Sitting children in front of computers for online classes the goal of education reform as vocational K-12----YOU BET


Johns Hopkins Offers Nine-Course Specialization in Data ...www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2014/coursera...   CachedThe series of nine MOOCs are now open for enrollment and free to anyone. ... 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205. ... Courses Careers Accreditation Web Policies ...

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July 23rd, 2014

7/23/2014

0 Comments

 
THE REASON MARYLAND IS SILENT AS THE REST OF THE NATION BRINGS OUT MILLIONS IN PROTEST OF NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CONS POLICIES IS THAT ERHLICH/O'MALLEY HAS WORKED HARD TO PRIVATIZE MARYLAND'S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.  IT IS HERE THAT HOLDING POWER ACCOUNTABLE BEGINS AND THAT IS WHY NEO-LIBERALS FROM CLINTON TO OBAMA ARE WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO MAKE THEM INTO CORPORATIONS.

We saw yesterday that it is University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan seeing the need to deregulate universities.  Maryland has allowed for-profit career colleges defraud for a few decades now because of deregulation of private career education so now we need to see the same in our public universities.  Kirwan says we are making money using taxpayer money to patent research but we need to super-size the profits from the products we are now sending to the corporate structures attached to our campuses----YOU KNOW---THE 'BIOTECH FACILITIES'.  Kirwan and Mikulski are not only talking about getting rid of a silly regulation that is out of date----they are intending to deregulate how universities can operate as businesses.  All those requirements for receiving taxpayer money for research that make the public partners in this research need to go.  We have proprietary patents now with that taxpayer funded research and it is heading for the open market for profit! 

Below you see what Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards.  Corporations are dismantling their research facilities because universities ARE THEIR RESEARCH FACILITIES.  University students are now paying tuition to work in a corporate research project for free supported by NIH and NCA research money.  IT'S ALL ABOUT CREATING JOBS!  Actually, college grads are as likely now to remain unemployed now as at the time of the 2008 crash because global corporations and neo-liberals are keeping the US economy stagnant.  So, these students are more likely to work as VISTAs then to get a job in the field for which they received a degree.  Meanwhile, the foreign students coming in to get degrees------doing OK especially if they go back home to work for the US corporation overseas.  FREE LABOR PAID FOR BY TAXPAYERS----NOW THAT MAXIMIZES CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.  See why taxes and tuition are soaring on the working and midde-class?  It costs lots to subsidize every corporate activity.

CORPORATIONS NO LONGER NEED RESEARCH FACILITIES------UNIVERSITIES DO THE RESEARCH AND ANYTHING THAT IS SUCCESSFUL COMES TO THE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS THROUGH STARTUPS BUYOUTS.  THE PEOPLE THEY HIRED TO DO THE WORK IN PRIVATE RESEARCH LABS ARE NOW STUDENTS PAYING TUITION.

The process of patenting university research while having corporations 'partnered' with these universities is a mockery as if people cannot see that this is why student tuition is soaring and all of taxpayer money is funding this 'university' research leaving no money for student financial aid and grants. Directors of these 'university' research facilities being paid like corporate executives.

LET'S GO BACK TO PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AS PUBLIC EDUCATION!


Below you see what deregulation Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards......making universities driven by profit-----



Colleges Urged to Count Patents in Tenure Reviews

April 29, 2014
  Inside Higher Ed


Universities should begin making patents and other industrial and commercial research count toward promotion and tenure, in an effort to stimulate such research nationwide, argues a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "There is a fundamental disconnect between technology transfer activities and incentives for faculty members in terms of merit raises, tenure and career advancement," Richard B. Marchase, co-author and vice president for research and economic development at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said in a news release. "Beyond the monetary benefit of licensing, which is small in most cases, there is presently little to no benefit to a faculty member's merit raises, tenure and career advancement."

The paper builds on a 2012 report from the National Research Council and other groups saying that business and industry have "largely dismantled large corporate research laboratories that drove American industrial leadership," and which argues that research universities must "fill the gap."
In the new paper, called "Changing the Academic Culture: Valuing Patents and Commercialization Toward Tenure and Career Advancement," the authors argue that filling the research gap will entail changing the university "rewards culture" to value not only large research grants but also professors' patents and other commercial activities. Co-author Eric Kaler, president of the University of Minnesota, notes that this kind of work should not replace but "add to" traditional means of assessing scholarly activity. The paper's lead author is Paul R. Sanberg, senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida and president of the National Academy of Inventors. An abstract is available here.


_________________________________________________

Keep in mind the same global corporations for whom University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan and neo-liberals work are the same entities keeping the US economy stagnant-----and it is deliberate.  Remember, the bond market is going to crash causing a greater recession is so there is no intent to employ these grads----but they do free work and pay to do it with ever-higher tuition.  THIS IS A SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND!

The media shout that all of this a great education policy.  That more students are being sent to college and graduating with skills that corporations need.  OH REALLY? 

THEY NEED THEM TO WORK FOR FREE WHILE PAYING FOR COLLEGE AND THEN FORGET ABOUT IT AFTER GRADUATION.

The structure neo-liberals and neo-cons are building have the job pipeline coming from the Ivy League schools-----business leaders now come from these schools and any startups that may come from the public universities are simply bought by those corporations in the portfolio of Ivy League schools.  Working and middle-class grads are largely being funneled into poverty jobs or the military.


University of Maryland Baltimore County and Grabinsky were front page news as UMBC is the face of this free labor as corporate university.  While Maryland says its unemployment is 6.1% we all know that is only the number of people receiving unemployment checks.  Maryland's unemployment is 36% and growing with this economic model.  Remember, these are Republican policies of placing corporate profit first so voting Republican will not help----Democrats simply need to shake the corporate neo-liberals out of the Democratic Party!


FOLKS----THIS IS A NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC MODEL THEY CALL THE 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY!

All we need is to rebuild state economies having domestic businesses driving the economy and all of this will disappear.


The Deliberate Low-Wage, High-Insecurity Economic Model submitted by pmcovay3 ScienceIndex.com  Dec 2012

In contrast to the general biases of orthodox economists, the jobs crisis in America is not inevitable or natural-and more important, does not contribute to more economic efficiency through lower wages or more productivity. It is the result of deliberate political policy choices the nation has made at least since the early 1980s, when productivity was rising on a secular basis at a slow rate. Also, the policy choices were made before the rise of very low-wage emerging markets like China’s. In sum, there has been a low-wage, high-unemployment policy regime in the rich world, and especially in the United States, for a generation.


Students Call for Reform of Economics Education


May 6, 2014  Inside Higher Ed

Economics students in 19 countries have issued a joint call -- published in The Guardian -- to change the way economics is taught. The students' analysis (similar to that of some professors in the United States and elsewhere) is that economics has become too uniform in its approaches and too removed from real life. "[I]t's time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the past couple of decades," the letter says. "This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century – from financial stability to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."



All academics and analysts now look at employment figures as below----the employment to population ratio.  We all know some adults of working age may choose not to work but that percentage is not too high.  So, if 58% of the population is working------42% are not.  36% unemployment is about right.  As this article points out----with wages at an all time low people are now forced to have two incomes in a family.  The employment data media and government provides is simply meant to conceal this deliberately high unemployment.

Do you know who is not fooled by the failure of neo-liberalism------ECONOMICS STUDENTS!

The article above shows that university students are fed up with universities that only offer neo-liberal economic models in economic degree programs.  As this article states----WHY STUDY A FAILED ECONOMIC MODEL?  It is the duty of public universities to hold power accountable and give the public real data and we see this is not happening because of this corporate capture.

That is what university heads like Kirwan are doing.....they are appointed to force global corporate policies that no one wants and it is the governor that appoints these people to public universities.

Unemployment Data Manipulation The Economic Recovery is a Lie!
  By Seth Mason
Friday, November 1st, 2013  Wealth Daily

I've argued time and time again that, due to the severity of job losses during the Great Recession, there cannot be a true economic recovery until the labor market has recovered.

Unfortunately, hiring was weak in September, continuing a slowing trend that began in the spring.

To make matters worse, the majority of jobs created last month were menial in nature (nearly 2/3 of them were truck drivers, bureaucrats, salespeople, and temps). These trends have been ongoing throughout this economic depression.

The number of new jobs wasn't enough to keep up with population growth.

And yet the unemployment rate fell.

So, all is well... right?

Clearly, the "headline" 7.2% unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole story about the sad state of the American labor force.

You have to take any data from the Fed with a grain of salt, anyway, as the Obama administration has a vested interest in presenting the best-looking unemployment picture possible, just as all administrations have.

The employment-to-population ratio actually provides a much more accurate gauge of the health of the American job market — and wouldn't you know, it's been showing unhealthy readings since the economy crashed five years ago...

The proportion of Americans in the workforce has barely budged since falling from 63% to 58% during the Great Recession, as you can see on the following chart:



A Precipitous Decline

The last time the employment-to-population ratio was 58% — in the early 1980s — a relatively small proportion of American households sent more than one income earner into the workforce.

Now, in a nation of mostly one-breadwinner households, the 58% employment-to-population ratio was reasonable.

Today, however, due to a decline in real personal income (thanks for the inflation, Federal Reserve), most households send multiple income earners into the workforce.

In fact, it's not uncommon these days for households to have more than two income earners.

Under this paradigm, an employment-to-population ratio stuck at 58% like it's 1982 (when "homemaker" was still a common job title) is very unhealthy.


  Also worth noting is that a large percentage of the 58% of Americans who do work are working lower-quality jobs than they were before the economy crashed.

Although the population of the United States has increased by approximately 20 million since 2008, there are 5 million fewer “breadwinner” jobs in this country than there were before this economic depression.

"Breadwinner jobs" are those positions with a base salary of $35,000 or more that enable one to live independently, however meagerly. 

So the real health of the labor force is even worse than the unsettling 58% labor force participation rate!

Here we are, more than five years since the fall of Lehman, and the job market is still awful... and it's started to backslide again.



Niagara Falls

The Fed's Niagara Falls-scale liquidity pumping measures (I say "liquidity pumping" as opposed to "printing" because QE is only one of the Fed's tricks) clearly haven't had much impact on unemployment — or the federal government's $787 billion spending binge, also known as the grand "stimulus," for that matter.

Remember the laughable estimates of unemployment with and without the "Recovery Plan"?

According to the White House's October 2009 estimate (the dark blue line on the chart above), the Fed/federal government's plan should have taken us back to pre-recession unemployment levels by now...

Yet the unemployment rate sits at an unacceptable 7.2%.

And keep in mind the 7.2% headline unemployment rate belies the true awful state of the job market.

Considering the pitiful 58% employment-to-population ratio and the 5 million fewer breadwinner jobs since 2008, it would be an understatement to say that Washington's stimulus measures have failed to reduce unemployment. (That's assuming they were created for that purpose. More about that in a future article.)

We should expect more of the same from our esteemed central planners.

The Fed, which has officially delayed "tapering," will continue to pump indefinitely.

Uncle Sam will continue to borrow and spend like mad, whether he's wearing a DEM or GOP hat.

As a result, the "mother of all bubbles," as Nouriel Roubini has called it, will continue to expand...

And we'll continue party like it's 2006, only with higher unemployment.

We'll keep ignoring the fact that 2008 is just a couple of years away.

Happy crash 2.0!

Until next time,

Seth Mason for Wealth Daily
_____________________________________________


Having a policy that brings more foreign students into the US with the goal of green cards and employment in high-skilled jobs does nothing for the American people, the high unemployment, or creating quality education and higher achievement in our US students.  It is purely a profit-making scheme that continues to consolidate the wealth at the top.

Maryland pols are all neo-liberals so whether Milkulsi and Cardin working in the Senate on legislation to build corporate universities and send trillions of dollars to expand overseas as corporations-----or the Governor of Maryland O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly appointing these corporate university heads and building the corporate structures in our universities-----

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLY REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN MARYLAND BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.



Currency February 21, 2014

Should Universities Profit From Student Research?
By John Bringardner  The New Yorker





In 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Cornell University and Israel’s Technion would jointly open a new school on Roosevelt Island to help boost New York’s tech sector. The first buildings of the new campus won’t open until 2017, but classes are already under way in borrowed space on the third floor of Google’s New York office. And, on Monday, Cornell Tech, as the school is called, plans to announce that it has enrolled its first batch of post-doctoral researchers in a one-year “Runway” program, designed to launch them into business ventures based on their specialties: urban planning, e-commerce, health care. In an unusual twist, the school will invest in the companies founded through the program, but also allow students to keep ownership of the intellectual property they create on campus; typically, universities profit by keeping the rights to such property.



Cornell Tech isn’t the only institution to invest in student startups. Stanford announced last year that it would invest in companies founded by its students. M.I.T. also takes an equity stake in companies developed on campus. But Stanford and M.I.T. both require those companies to pay royalties on any technologies the students patent while in school.
Rather than negotiate complex patent-licensing rights with their researchers, Cornell Tech will treat the value of each post-doc position it awards—about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as an angel investment in any business spun out of the program; in exchange, Cornell Tech expects to get an average of a five-per-cent stake in each business. The Runway program echoes the accelerators and incubators popular among venture capitalists—three- or four-month programs in which entrepreneurs get resources to build new startups in exchange for a stake in their companies.

Universities didn’t always have the right to the spoils of the research they sponsored. The government spent heavily on research and development at U.S. universities during the Cold War, but new technologies developed with federal cash became government property. By 1980, the federal government had amassed twenty-eight thousand patents but licensed fewer than five per cent to companies that could turn them into products. That year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to keep and profit from the patents their students and researchers developed on campus using federal funds. The Economist called it “perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation in America over the past half-century.”

Soon, offices focussed on “technology transfer” opened up in schools around the country, staffed with lawyers who poked around campus research labs and flipped through student notebooks to suss out patentable research that they could license to corporations. A new chemical combination might become a blockbuster drug; a technological breakthrough could lead to smaller, faster semiconductors.

In 2012, American universities earned $2.6 billion from patent royalties, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. The tech-transfer model is entrenched in medical schools and in biotech development. But its usefulness in the software world has been less clear. The success of a software startup often depends less on any particular innovation than on how several pieces of technology fit together and appeal to users. A company’s value usually becomes apparent years after it has developed and refined its business model, not at the moment it files a patent application. Plus, the very concept of a software patent hangs in the balance: in December, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case that could eliminate them altogether.

Cornell Tech’s approach—taking an equity stake in each company instead of licensing rights to a handful of patents—may be a more straightforward way for the school to profit from spin-offs. “Universities look to place a value on technology at its inception, finding a fair rate for splitting royalties between the school and the inventor, but that’s not the way digital startups work,” Cornell Tech’s Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, said. “I think intellectual-property protection, especially in software and digital tech, is a very small piece of commercialization, one that becomes too big a part of the conversation when universities are involved.”

The Runway program is designed to turn deep academic research into a marketable product; its first post-docs have already spent years in the lab, sometimes running into dead ends and starting over in a way that pure academic research allows but investors don’t. “A principal mission of Cornell University is the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit and use of society,” the school’s existing intellectual-property policy reads. Whether society benefits most when knowledge is turned into an I.P.O. is an open question.

“The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” the historian and Stanford professor David Kennedy told Ken Auletta in 2012, in a report from Stanford. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.” And when students showed up for their first classes at the temporary campus, in January, 2013, Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell in Ithaca, told the Times, “The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s. Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.” (“Such potential for conflicts is quite manageable with the appropriate procedures in place, enabling this very effective interaction between students, faculty, and companies,” Huttenlocher told me.)

Yet universities are forging ahead with more business-oriented models. Over the past decade, angel investors, the main source of capital for startups, have made high-risk bets, providing money for startups to get off the ground in exchange for the right to a piece of the company’s equity if it succeeds. Most never do. Venture capitalists call their strategy “spray and pray,” sinking money into lots of different startups in the hope that at least one will be the next Facebook. It’s a gamble, but it could be a better way for universities to take advantage of the work their students are doing. The amount of revenue schools generate from patent licensing is small compared with over-all university budgets. Alumni philanthropy brings in far more money. “What would happen if schools gave up rights to their students’ intellectual property?” Adam Shwartz, the director of Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, which runs the Runway program, asked. “Their patent revenue goes to zero, but down the line the successful alumni give back far more money. Here we have the first controlled experiment of this nature.”

Rendering of Cornell Tech by Kilograph.
____________________________________________

Below you see how bad the success rate of this model is for the student /school so a corporation directs the research it wants to fund----gets free labor and a taxpayer funded research facility----and VOILA all the failures are paid for by you and me.  No need for corporate R and D.  In lieu of corporate taxes these investment firms just send there money to these university projects and we are told this is the best mechanism for funding universities.

All work on campus is now product-driven-----professors are judged on patenting rather than academics or teaching.  Tenure is tied to being this corporate executive.  Students are engaged only in what will pay off and not with a broad education limiting their futures.  As this article shows it is the student that loses and graduates with the tuition debt and limited focus degrees.


What is sad is that the student's future success with whatever they create requires handing a percentage of future earnings to these university/venture capitalist and the few that do create successful businesses simply hand them to these global investment firms.  This is all simply universities as corporate facilities.

THE ENTIRE ACADEMIC MODEL HAS BEEN RUINED AND THE US IS AGAIN ON THE BOTTOM ACADEMICALLY IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS.  THIS IS WHAT MIKULSKI AND KIRWAN ARE SITTING DOWN TO BOLSTER.

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS: Here's How Bad Your Odds Of Success Are
  • Henry Blodget  Business Insider

  • May 28, 2013, 11:03 AM

As a wise investor puts it: "Many turtles hatch. Few make it to the sea."


Everyone knows that starting companies — and investing in startups — is a risky way to earn a living. But few people appreciate just how risky it is.

Thanks to a recent tweet from Paul Graham, the founder of "startup school" Y Combinator, we now have a better idea.

Graham says that 37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million.

Most entrepreneurs would probably view creating a company worth more than $40 million as a success (unless the company raised more capital than that). And, on its face, the "37 companies" number seems relatively impressive.

In fact, however, the number tells a scary and depressing story.

This number suggests that a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.

(Not all companies that sell for less than $40 million are "failures," obviously. Assuming a company hasn't raised much capital, a sale between $5 million and $40 million could be considered a success. But a high percentage of Y Combinator companies likely end up being worth zero. And for companies that are hand-picked by very smart investors, the 93%-below-$40 million rate is still surprisingly low). 

A company accepted by Y Combinator, therefore, has less than a 1-in-10 chance of being a big success.

More alarmingly, the companies accepted by Y Combinator are only a tiny fraction of the companies that apply.

Some have estimated that Y Combinator's acceptance rate is 3-5%.

If we use the 5% rate, we can estimate that Y Combinator has received about 10,000 applications for the ~500 companies it has chosen over the years.

Assuming Y Combinator has even a modest ability to pick winners, therefore, the odds that a company applying to Y Combinator will be a success are significantly lower than the odds of success of the companies accepted into the program.

If only 37 of the companies that have applied to Y Combinator over the years have succeeded, this is a staggeringly low 0.4% success rate.

Put differently, only one in every 200 companies that applies to Y Combinator will succeed.

The reality is that Y Combinator probably misses a few winners, so the actual odds are probably slightly higher.

But in case any entrepreneur or angel investor is deluding themselves into thinking that startups are an easy way to cash in, they might want to think again.









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July 22nd, 2014

7/22/2014

0 Comments

 
Now that universities are corporations we need to get rid of all that public protection stuff that will keep them from being profitable.  Forget all that silly stuff about educating Americans to be citizens and leaders......forget equal opportunity and access for the disabled......you cannot maximize profits that way.  Let's open our universities to the world's rich and let them attend simply because they can pay higher and higher tuition.  THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CON FOR YOU.....IT'S ALL ABOUT PROFIT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!

As you can see it is Maryland behind this deregulation attempt just as it leads in corporatization of universities into global systems. 


LOOK----THERE'S MIKULSKI -----MISS NEO-LIBERAL HERSELF.  SHE HANDED A COOL TRILLION OF TAXPAYERS MONEY OVER TWO DECADES TO MAKE JOHNS HOPKINS A GLOBAL CORPORATION AFTER ALL.

Also at the lead is University of Maryland Chancellor Kirwan-----you know----the one Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland is taking to court for rigging the elections for governor by choosing which candidates were heard on public university campuses across the state-----all of which is illegal.  Sure, we solve this corruption by fewer regulations!


WE WILL SELECT ANY CANDIDATE WE CHOSE FOR THESE ELECTION FORUMS FOR GOVERNOR SAYS CHANCELLOR KIRWAN.


Oh, that's how you keep installing legislation no one wants ----you rig the system so we cannot get people in office that will reverse these policies!  THAT'S KIRWAN FOR YOU-----A TRUE GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERAL/NEOCON.  Public universities as the hotbed of democratic political debate?  That's no way to maximize corporate profits!

A New Deregulatory Push

February 13, 2014
By Michael Stratford  Inside Higher Education

WASHINGTON -- The last time the Higher Education Act came up for a vote in Congress in 2008, Senator Lamar Alexander trotted out a five-foot stack of cartons onto the Senate floor to show the enormity of existing regulations governing higher education.

Now that lawmakers are once again contemplating how to rewrite that massive piece of legislation -- which authorizes, among other things, the $150 billion-a-year federal student aid program -- Alexander is returning to his props.

Speaking to a group of community college leaders Wednesday, Alexander unfolded the full paper version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was taller than he is, to underscore his distaste for the federal government’s bureaucratic reach onto college campuses. And last week he made the same demonstration before a group of private college presidents.

Alexander said Wednesday that his goal is to “simplify and deregulate” higher education in the upcoming renewal of the Higher Education Act -- a process he has said should “start from scratch.”

“What we’re trying to do is establish a continuous process for deregulation to overcome the continuous momentum for overregulation,” he said, noting that the “inertia” for creating new regulations comes from across the political spectrum.

“The conservative senators, from my party, they’re sometimes the worst,” he said, describing how he has to remind his colleagues that they are “the party of federalism, the 10th amendment” when they want to impose conservative ideas on how colleges should be run across the country.

All of their ideas “sound good, but you know what happens when you have to comply with it: it takes time and money away from your mission,” he told a group of community college trustees and presidents.

Alexander has formed, along with three other senators, a task force to recommend ways to reduce federal regulations on colleges and universities.  

That group of higher education leaders gathered behind closed doors at the offices of the American Council on Education on Wednesday to begin producing recommendations on how to deregulate the industry. The panel consists of college presidents from a range of sectors and higher education associations.

Reducing or eliminating regulations on colleges has long been a goal of the higher education lobby in Washington, though previous efforts have largely been unsuccessful.

William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and co-chair of the task force, said he was encouraged by the Congressional interest in reducing regulations.

“What seems different this time is the very strong commitment of these four senators,” Kirwan said. “They are determined to address this issue and get our help in finding some meaningful reforms.”


Alexander and Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, attended Wednesday’s meeting, and two other lawmakers -- Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, a Democrat, and Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican -- are also on board.

The panel will focus on identifying “the most egregious, excessive regulations," but will also make recommendations on the Education Department’s rule making process in general, Kirwan said.

“The hope is that we can make some suggestions that will enable us to meet our obligations and be accountable to the federal government but to do so in a way that is cost effective and not excessively bureaucratic,” he said.

Kirwan said that one example of the type of regulations that his task force would be targeting is a campus safety rule that requires colleges to collect crime information from local police jurisdictions when students study abroad or when athletes travel to an out-of-town hotel.

The task force hopes to produce a report on its recommendations within the next 12 months, Kirwan said. The group will also be coordinating with the National Research Council, which was directed by Congressional appropriators last month to conduct a $1 million study of the cost of regulations on higher education.

Kirwan, who also chairs the subcommittee at the NRC that will oversee the study, said that work would be focused on all federal regulations that affect higher education, while the Congressional task force would focus only on Education Department regulations.

_______________________________________
This is what Kirwan and his group of global corporate bosses think they are going to do with our universities and deregulating gets rid of all that public justice and civil rights stuff....you know----THE US CONSTITUTION AND OUR STATUS AS AN EQUAL PROTECTION DEMOCRACY.  Who in the world wants people like this deciding what is good.


That is what testing from K onward is about----the state determining how a child will be tracked and into what vocation from elementary school on. Remember, school privatization means the entity deciding will be corporations. This is already happening in Baltimore and it is nothing but autocratic.

O'Malley has made his career as Governor of Maryland building these tracking systems into our schools at every level......it is failing miserably although spin will make it sound a great success.


It is the for-profit colleges AND THAT DEREGULATION that distorted who and how students went to college last decade and it is infused with fraud and corruption so it is not our decades-old system of allowing families to decide where and what that child will pursue that failed----

IT IS THE SAME PEOPLE WRITING THESE PRIVATIZATION POLICIES THAT DISTORTED A GOOD SYSTEM.


This article is long but please glance through!


College material or not: who should decide?


By Valerie Strauss March 26 (The Washington Post)

College, of course, isn’t for everybody, but who should decide — and how and when — which students should go and shouldn’t? In this post, Kevin Welner and Carol Burris ask whether the decision should be made by policy makers and school officials or parents and students after young people have had equitable opportunities to learn in elementary and secondary school.

Welner is the director of the National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. He is the author of the 2008 book, “NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.” Burris is the award-winning principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.


By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

Robin should become a printer. That’s what Robin Calitri’s school counselor told his dad in 1965. Robin thought his counselor’s advice was just swell. He wasn’t a motivated high school student. But his dad, who was a professor of English Literature at Hofstra University, made it clear to the counselor that his son was going to college.

Robin later became the principal of Long Island’s South Side High School and was a finalist for the national principal of the year in 1999. He would tell that story about the counselor whenever he explained the harm done by tracking—the sorting of some students into classes that are not designed to prepare those children for post-secondary education.

If his dad had gone along with the counselor’s recommendation, his son would likely have ended up in a trade that was becoming obsolete. To his credit, Robin understood that this was precisely the situation faced by children in working-class and poor families. Research on tracking and choice confirms this; working-class and poor families, as well as parents without a college education, are more deferential to the advice of school authorities and less willing to push back on the system. Robin also understood that a young person’s future hangs in the balance when school authorities are making rules that will cut off college as an option.


Yes, we can all agree: college is not for everybody. But should school officials and top-down policy makers decide based, for example, on Common Core college readiness test scores, or should the decision be left to parents and students after schools have given them meaningful, enriching, equitable opportunities to learn?


While college is not for everybody, opportunities to be prepared for college definitely should be.
When college-educated parents have the capacity to secure the college advantage, they certainly seize it for their own children. It is not unusual, for example, to see upper middle class parents spend thousands on tutoring—including tutors for the SAT and the college essay. College-educated parents understand that a four-year diploma is key to securing financial success.

That’s just one reality that Mike Petrilli, the executive vice president of the Fordham Institute, refuses to confront in his article in Slate, with the man-bites-dog title, “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material” Is exactly what we should be telling a lot of high school students.”

The “we” who are the deciders is left somewhat undefined, but it’s safe to assume that the use of “we” does not give power and capacity to the students themselves.

Before continuing, this is a good spot to pause and acknowledge when we are talking about other people’s children. The two of us, like Mr. Petrilli, represent families where post-secondary education is a given. Accordingly, we’re essentially debating what’s best for those “other” families. As we contemplate tinkering with their fate, it is wise to remember John Dewey’s axiom:

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

Perhaps we are unwise in working our tails off for our children to go to college. But unless and until we acknowledge this, we should be wary of sending other families down a different path.


The vocational education push isn’t coming from just Mr. Petrilli. As he notes, it’s also coming from a project headquartered at Harvard University (apparently with no irony intended) as well as from policymakers throughout the nation. The Education Commission of the States recently studied the “State of the State” addresses from the nation’s governors and found that “at least 13 governors and the D.C. mayor outlined proposals improving or expanding CTE [career and technical education, aka vocational education] options for students.”

Mr. Petrilli and the governors are correct to the extent that they are simply acknowledging that not all children will go to college and that those who do not should nonetheless have opportunities to thrive. It is also true that the decision to forgo or delay college should be made before graduation day.

From that point on, however, the “sort and select” advocates get almost everything wrong. Their fundamental two-part assumption is, first, that they can and should identify children who are beyond academic hope. Second, they believe that it is possible and beneficial to identify these children early, separate them from their academically oriented peers, and put them on a track that hopefully prepares them for post-secondary employment but does not prepare them for college.


Equitable schools reject such tracking policies because they believe in the American Dream and because they have learned from past mistakes.
History tells us that schools should not be in the business of foreclosing children’s options. At the start of the 20th century, schools faced an influx of immigrants, and policymakers responded by creating programs for those who were called the “great army of incapables.” Vocational tracks prepared immigrants to be factory workers, while the children of well-off parents were given a college preparatory education. This pattern of separating students into different classes was repeated during the era of racial desegregation as a way to maintain segregated classrooms—and then again in the 1970s when students with special needs were increasingly enrolled in mainstream schools.

History and research show that when schools sort in this way, it is the disadvantaged children who are directed toward lower-tier tracks. No matter what criteria are used—scores, recommendations or even choice—the same patterns of stratification occur. Accordingly, when lawmakers adopt these misguided policies, they open up opportunity gaps that inevitably lead to the achievement gaps that these same lawmakers then decry.

Mr. Petrilli concedes that he understands the danger. Describing the bad old days, he writes, “Those high school ‘tracks’ were immutable, and those who wound up in ‘voc-ed’ (or, at least as bad, the ‘general’ track) were those for whom secondary schooling, in society’s eyes, was mostly a custodial function.” Yet he turns back to voc-ed because, as he contends, the odds are otherwise too long for disadvantaged students.

Beginning with the statistic that only 10 percent of these disadvantaged students earn a four-year degree, Mr. Petrilli asserts that if we work really hard as a society maybe this number would rise to 30 percent, which for Mr. Petrilli is not good enough. Since recent data show that 33.5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 have at least a bachelor’s degree, that sounds like a pretty good outcome to us. By the way, that’s the highest percentage ever for Americans, and it doesn’t include those who earn two-year degrees as well as certificates in our community colleges and post-secondary technical schools.


The “You’re Not College Material” approach is the same one we use far too often in schools.  Too many kids hear--You’re not ‘honors’ material, or Challenging science and math isn’t for you. And every time that strategy is used, we see the same results—classes that are stratified by social class and race. It’s an approach that reinforces existing inequalities. To say in a supposedly neutral way that not all students will go to college is disingenuous without first acknowledging something else: that what’s really being said is that we should accept that college is for the already advantaged.

On some level, Mr. Petrilli grasps these concerns—when he acknowledges the past harms of tracking and that “when judgments were made on the basis of ZIP code or skin color, the old system was [deterministic, racist, and classist].” What he doesn’t acknowledge is that his new system would be the old system.

It’s interesting to us that the Petrilli article’s argument relies in part on the German system of tiered schooling, where college-bound students head to the Gymnasium while vocation-bound students head to the Hauptschule or Realschule. Yes, it’s true that students attending the German vocational schools do better than voc-ed students here, in part because of a more equitable job sector following graduation. But a team of German psychologists recently published an article in The Journal of Educational Psychology on the effects of the German vocational track on the development of student intelligence—and they found that students in the academic track experienced substantial IQ gains as compared to those voc-ed students. Not only did the learning gap grow, so did the very capacity to learn between German academic and vocational students. That outcome should give us pause.

Our quarrel is not with offering vocational opportunities in high schools. Rather, we favor a smart and fair approach that works for children and families who, at the right time and place, make the choice for a career after high school.
We might, for example, retool our two-year colleges so that they offer more programs in technology and other marketable areas, without making students jump through remedial hoops to stay. We might also follow the lead of Finland and prepare students with a strong and equitable academic education without tracking until age 16, and then allow them to make meaningful career and life choices. We may even look at promising models, such as California’s Linked Learning schools, which integrate career preparation while still preparing students for college. High schools have an obligation to do their best to prepare students for college and career; preparation for both has more overlap than often assumed.


We reject, however, No College for You! proposals that sort  14 year olds into vocational high schools. South Side High School, one of the best in the nation, would likely be a very different place if co-author Carol Burris’ predecessor, Robin Calitri, had obliged his counselor when he was told “Kid, you are not college material.”  That counselor did not have the right to make that decision—and neither does Mike Petrilli.



___________________________________________

Neo-liberals installed the education policy in South Korea after the Korean war that it is trying to install in the US today.  The difference is that the US has a history of public education and people as citizens with the rights to legislate and equal protection laws.  From Korea this policy traveled to China and Singapore and involves very autocratic and pedantic learning where parents in these countries have been fighting for decades to get rid of it.  NO ONE LIKES THESE NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION POLICIES.  Look below and you see the AFT union leader Weingarten with Arne Duncan praising this neo-liberal model.  Weingarten allowed the AFT to support these Race to the Top and Common Core policies for the first years of Obama's terms but the public outcry and teachers grew too large for Weingarten to follow the neo-liberal lead and as you see in the article after this one-----the AFT is now fighting Obama's and Wall Street's education reform.

IT WAS THE PUBLIC OUTCRY THAT FORCED THIS UNION LEADER TO STOP FOLLOWING NEO-LIBERALS.  WE MUST HAVE THE PUBLIC PROTESTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY TO SUPPORT TEACHERS IN KILLING THIS VERY BAD EDUCATION REFORM.  NEITHER REPUBLICANS NOR DEMOCRATS WANT THIS REFORM.  IT IS ONLY ABOUT MAKING EDUCATION INTO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.



I spoke at great length about the Finland model for education that has made Finland number 1 in education.  Finland embraced the American model of the 1950s and 1960s while the US was dismantling the best in the world public education to make this corporatized model they are pushing today. 

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE GOING BACK TO THE PUBLIC EDUCATION BUILT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AWAY FROM THIS AUTOCRATIC CORPORATE MODEL.




Which winning ideas could the U.S. steal from Singapore?


Singapore has one of the best education systems in the world, according to international assessments. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talk about its performance. United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten visited in 2012 and her counterpart at the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, has praised its teacher training. And in 2012, Singapore was featured in the first-ever International Summit on the Teaching Profession as a country that many places – including America – could learn from.



In light of all this hype, I spent the past week in Singapore visiting schools to find out why they are so successful. But, not surprisingly, there’s no big secret or magic trick that the United States could simply copy tomorrow. Rather, my impressions were of a nation where education is respected, where educators and administrators think critically about their jobs and the qualities they want their students to develop and where self-reflection is ingrained. Those are qualities already found in many American schools, and that reformers are trying to spur in others.

But some of Singapore’s latest strategies go beyond or challenge some of the most popular ideas right now for improving American schools. At the same time, it’s important to remember the vast differences between the two countries that make it difficult to transfer ideas. Here are my main takeaways from my conversations with educators, students and education officials:

- Singapore is looking to revamp their standards. As most states in America continue the rollout of the Common Core State Standards, an internationally benchmarked guide laying out what students are supposed to learn in each grade in math and English, Singapore also has changes planned. But education officials there are more concerned about some less tangible skills, like collaboration and creativity, and coming up with ways to systematically introduce those into the curriculum. In theory, the end goals of Common Core and Singapore’s newest push are similar. They both aim to create individuals with critical thinking skills who can thrive in a modern economy. But as we try to copy Singapore’s methods, like their math sequencing, educators there are already moving on to new ideas.

- Lots of Singaporean students are stressed. The country is looking for ways to reduce this and trying to decrease the emphasis on grades and test scores. The Ministry of Education is trying to reduce the emphasis on the primary school exit exam, which all students have to take to determine which secondary school they will attend, for instance. But many people told me one of the biggest challenges will be changing the mindset of parents. Not all students in Singapore worry endlessly about exams, but several people said that for those that do, parents are a primary source of their anxiety.

- Singapore is small. As several people pointed out to me, if you drive for an hour in any direction, you arrive at the water. While some people told me the small size of the country has disadvantages for education – it severely limits options for field trips for instance – it also has its benefits. Most notably, the country’s size, along with the fact that the schools are run by a centralized authority, allows the Ministry of Education, the National Institute of Education – which trains every teacher in the country – and the schools to be in close communication about research and new strategies. New programs can be implemented quicker and the National Institute for Education can easily keep track of what is actually happening in classrooms to tweak its offerings when needed.

- The schools are big. Half a million students are enrolled in the island’s schools, but most schools have student populations of more than a thousand – even at the primary level. With that many students, classes of 35 to 40 are typical, but nothing seemed disorderly. The atmosphere in the classrooms that I visited switched between formal and relaxed. Students bowed to greet visitors and again to thank them for coming. They stood up to speak whenever called upon, and chatter while a teacher was talking was almost nonexistent. At the same time, though, laughter was common. Teachers would gently tease students and discussion was highly encouraged.

Not everything Singapore does would apply to our much larger, decentralized education system and not everything they do should be emulated. But there are some inspirations we could draw from the country, such as trying to get more high-performing students into the classroom as teachers or being more explicit in the character qualities we want students to develop – without obsessing over how to measure them.

__________________________________________

As a social democrat I do not want to break from the Democratic Party-----I want to take the Democratic Party back from corporate neo-liberals.  The important thing is that more and more people are understanding where this is going and know we can stop and reverse this no matter what political stance you take.  We need Republicans pushing against this as these policies are written by neo-conservative and neo-liberal think tanks.

'The way forward for teachers requires a complete break with the pro-corporate trade unions and Democratic Party.


.......calling for Duncan’s resignation, saying he had championed a “failed education agenda” consisting of policies that “undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.”




Seeking to regain credibility, US teachers unions criticize Obama’s education secretary
By Phyllis Scherrer
22 July 2014


After spending the last five-and-a-half years collaborating with the Obama administration’s attack on teachers’ jobs and conditions, the two teachers’ unions in the US recently passed resolutions seeking to distance themselves from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his anti-public education policies.

The National Education Association (NEA) passed a resolution at its national convention in Denver, Colorado, on July 4, calling for Duncan’s resignation, saying he had championed a “failed education agenda” consisting of policies that “undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.”

This was followed by a July 13 resolution at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference in Los Angeles, California, which called on President Obama “to implement a secretary improvement plan” for Duncan, modeled on the punitive testing measures used to fire “failing” teachers. “If Secretary Duncan does not improve, and given that he has been treated fairly and his due process rights have been upheld, the secretary of education must resign,” the statement read.

The conventions were held just weeks after Duncan’s enthusiastic support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Vergara v. California case, which attacks tenure and another job protections won by teachers over decades of struggle. At the time Duncan hailed the right-wing forces behind the lawsuit, saying, “millions of young people in America” are “disadvantaged by laws, practices, and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students.”

The NEA and AFT resolutions, however, were nothing more than an exercise in damage control by the unions, aimed at reviving the credibility of both unions, which have been undermined by their collaboration with Duncan and the administration’s pro-corporate “school reform” agenda. The resolutions will have no affect whatsoever on the continued collaboration of the teachers’ unions with the Obama administration.

In fact, the day the NEA convention passed its resolution, officials from the rival AFT were at the White House meeting with Duncan to collaborate on the implementation of a new “teacher equity plan,” another teachers “evaluation” plan to rid poor school districts, with the assistance of the unions, of higher paid, more senior teachers.

Duncan dismissed the NEA resolution with the contempt it deserves, saying, had NEA officials not been at their convention, “I think they would have stood with us on this” today, too. He congratulated new NEA President-elect Lily Eskelsen Garcia and added, “We’ve had a very good working relationship with the NEA in the past.”

In addition to concealing their own role, by presenting Duncan as the author of this anti-teacher agenda, the unions are seeking to protect President Obama and the Democratic Party. The teachers unions promoted the lie that Obama would reverse the attacks of his Republican predecessor. In fact, the Democratic president has gone well beyond the attacks associated with Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001.

Under Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) the administration allocated $4.35 billion to fund a “competition” designed by the Bill & Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, Boeing, Walton Family and other Foundations. School districts were forced to vie against each other for funds already severely reduced under Bush’s NCLB—federal funds that under the War on Poverty reforms of the 1960s were allotted directly to districts serving high percentages of students in poverty.

Under RTTT “winning” districts are those who agree to fire teachers and close or privatize schools based on poor standardized test scores, which are chiefly the result of poverty and decades of budget cutting, not bad teachers. Since the implementation of RTTT, public schools have been starved of funding, 330,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs, at least 4,000 public schools have been closed, and the number of students enrolled in charter schools has doubled.

Obama and the Democratic Party have embraced the anti-teacher nostrums long associated with the most right-wing sections of the Republican Party. This is underscored by the fact that former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and several other former Obama aides are spearheading a national public relations drive to support lawsuits in New York and other states, modeled on Vergara, to overturn teacher tenure, seniority and other job protections.

On the local level, Democratic mayors and school officials from Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to Detroit, New Orleans and Washington, DC, have spearheaded the attack on public education and expansion of for-profit charters.

The well-heeled executives who run the teachers’ unions--including AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel who received salaries of $543,150 and $306,286 respectively in the last year alone—are not opposed to the pro-corporate school “reform.” On the contrary, they are only looking to be partners in this process, as the AFT slogan, “School reform with us, not against us,” makes clear.

Both the NEA and the AFT were direct recipients of Gates’ money for the implementation of the so-called Common Core curriculum, which will be used to further attack teachers, while subordinating public education to the needs of profit-making technology and publishing companies. In 2012, the AFT accepted $4.4 million in order to “work on teacher development and Common Core Standards.” In July 2013 the NEA endorsed the Common Core and was awarded $6.3 million to assist with developing the Common Core Curriculum.

As teachers became wise to the character of Common Core, and every more disdainful of the AFT’s support of it, AFT officials tried to distance themselves from Gates last March by refusing to take any additional money from the Gates Innovation Foundation Fund, only one of several conduits of the billionaire’s money to the AFT.


Part of the grandstanding against Duncan is the increasing turf war between the AFT and NEA and their competition for dues money among a shrinking number of teachers. The AFT convention passed a dues increase by 45 cents per month this year and 55 cents per month next year, for a total monthly dues bill of $18.78 for each member by September 2015—largely to offset the loss of Gates money—and is increasingly seeking to get a foothold among low-paid charter teachers, as well as non-teaching members like nurses.

The NEA, the nation’s largest union, with just over three million members, including teachers, paraprofessionals and higher education instructors, has seen a significant drop in membership. Since the 2010-2011 school year, which coincides with the recession and the election of Obama, union membership for the NEA is down by 201,000 of its teacher members.

Under conditions in which more states are enacting Republican-backed “right-to-work” laws, which end automatic dues deduction from teachers’ paychecks, and sections of the Democratic Party are openly discussing dispensing with the services of the unions altogether, the AFT and NEA are doubling down to ensure state and local officials that they can be relied on to slash costs, destroy teachers’ conditions and suppress opposition to the closing of schools and the attack on education.

Over the last five years there have been growing struggles of teachers—in Wisconsin, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, St. Paul, Minnesota, and other cities—which have led to a direct clash between teachers on the one hand and the Democratic Party and their servants in the trade unions on the other.

Well aware of the growing anger of rank-and-file teachers, a section of trade union bureaucracy and its supporters in pseudo-left movements like the International Socialist Organization, whose supporters have gained union positions in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and other districts, are doing everything they can to refurbish the image of the teachers’ unions.

Their model of “social justice unionism” has proven to be a dead end as the betrayal of the 2012 teachers strike, by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and Vice President Jesse Sharkey, a supporter of the ISO, showed. The CTU shut down the nine-day strike by 26,000 Chicago teachers before it could develop into a direct political confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel—Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff—and the White House.

This betrayal gave Emanuel the green light to close 50 schools and lay off 3,500 teachers and school workers. As a reward, an AFT-affiliated union was given the franchise to “organize” low-paid teachers at the Chicago United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) charter schools run by one of Emanuel’s closest supporters.

Lewis and the CTU are now promoting the idea of running “independent” political campaigns in Chicago. Far from challenging the Democratic Party and advancing any independent political strategy for the working class, these campaigns fully accept the domination of society by the corporate and financial elite and are solely aimed at pressuring the Democrats to more effectively use the unions as partners in the dismantling of public education.


The way forward for teachers requires a complete break with the pro-corporate trade unions and Democratic Party and the fight to mobilize the working class as a whole against the profit system and to defend all of the democratic and social rights of the working class, including access to high quality public education.


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Below you see how other states still have democratic debates and open elections while in Maryland any politician that speaks against neo-liberals and neo-cons are censured.  We must fight for free and fair elections to make sure we can vote these neo-liberals out of office.

Remember, Common Core is not about quality education.....it is about controlling what is taught.  Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are already standardized and we do not want our humanities and liberal arts standardized because that is what makes the US a plurality and democracy-----differing points of view.  So this is simply a policy meant to give global corporations control of what our children learn in classrooms.

We have the AFT, the CTU, and it looks like the UFT moving against these education reforms and now we need parents and communities fighting with them.  It does not matter your political stance----these policies hurt all Americans.


New York Now Leads the Way in the Movement Against Common Core- At The Polls | With A Brooklyn Accent
20 Jul 2014   | Common Core · New York Share NPE News Briefs

Something truly extraordinary has happened in the New York State Gubernatorial race-something with broad national implications.  A big money Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who thought he was going to make himself a front runner in the 2016 Presidential Race by ramming through legislation requiring teacher evaluations based on Common Core aligned tests, has generated so much opposition among teachers and parents that there are now three different Gubernatorial candidates who oppose Common Core- the Republican candidate, Rob Astorino, the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins, and the new and quite formidable challenger in the Democratic Primary, Zephyr Teachout.

There are two reasons this situation is “game changer”

First, it shows how much opposition to Common Core is emerging  across the political spectrum.  For the last year, Common Core supporters in the media, the corporate world, and the US Department of Education have tried to portray Common Core opponents as extremists whose views should be rejected out of hand, but the what we have in New York is a mainstream Republican, a strong candidate on the left, and a liberal Democrat all saying that Common Core is untested, undemocratic and a threat to strong, locally controlled public schools.  And this position is going to be put forward strongly from now until election day. Even if Andrew Cuomo wins the Democratic primary, he will be facing two strong anti-Common Core voices in the general election.

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May 16th, 2014

5/16/2014

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LEAVING THE PUBLIC AND PUBLIC SECTOR GOVERNMENT COFFERS IN DEBT CREATED BY MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD ACROSS ALL INDUSTRIES=====THIS IS THE TOP PRIORITY FOR ALL AMERICANS REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT----DO YOU HEAR YOUR CANDIDATE SHOUTING THIS!?



I spoke earlier of how US graduates are experiencing the highest level of unemployment after graduation in modern history and student loan debt has placed many in the hands of a Department of Education run by Wall Street credit collection businesses making these loans as predatory as credit cards.  We know global corporations and their pols are deliberately keeping the US economy stagnant because high unemployment moves Americans deeper into poverty and keeps them desperate for jobs.  This entire industry of internships with VISTA and Teach for America is designed to steer youth from starting careers and gaining wealth to doing the job of what was the public sector.  This is killing the middle-class and it creates a system of indenture for our children.  Remember, the US had a strong economy before Reagan/Clinton neo-liberalism because our economy was driven by domestically with small and regional businesses and strong wages and benefits that allowed families to have disposable income-----THE OPPOSITE OF WHERE NEO-LIBERALISM TAKES US.


I want to talk more about our children and college grads with student loans.  First, let's look to how the 1% actually marketed college students into college debt at the same time privatizing student loans from Federal loans to Wall Street loans.  Remember, the students feeling this loan debt are the working/middle class and poor.  The cost for college is going up for these students as the cost for the affluent goes down.  The goal in education reform in America right now is a tiered system that keeps the working/middle class and poor out of strong 4 year universities and tracked into the cheapest higher education opportunities like community college and online degrees.  After all, education is wasted on 90% of Americans say the 1%!

Below you see how student loan debt worked just as subprime loan debt.....a complete relaxing of terms for loans when loans were made private.  Mind you, student loans when Federal were a well-run and public interest.  George Bush and public media pushed the idea last decade that your child must get a masters degree or above to land a job at the same time they were building the global structures that would crash the economy and hand off power to global corporations everyone knew would create this stagnant job market.  IT WAS DELIBERATE.  So, loading people with debt knowing the economy will crash---sound like the subprime mortgage fraud?  You betcha.  Meanwhile they were raising the price of tuition to build the corporate structures that took universities from academics for US students to being corporations marketing and recruiting students from around the world.
So, once again, it is the working/middle class desperate for financial relief falling into the hands of predatory lending because there is no public justice or oversight and accountability protecting the American people.

The poor are being used simply to funnel public money to for-profit higher education with high tuition mostly paid by taxpayer money and no receiving no benefit in employment for the most part.  Same as subprime mortgage loans.  In both the subprime mortgage scam and this for-profit mortgage scam the goal is simply to move public money to the same people at the top while loading debt onto citizens. 

This is happening because all of the public sector designed to protect the public and provide stability have been dismantled.

Of course it is the TV stations geared toward low-income audiences loaded with these loan predators.  I called the Maryland Attorney General about the level of fraud and predatory advertizement on media in America and was told they did not get involved until millions of dollars were lost to these frauds.


  1. Student loan debtors targeted by fraudsters- MSN Moneymoney.msn.com/...student-loan-debtors-targeted-by-fraudsters   CachedThose shackled with student loan debt are increasingly being targeted by scams and shady companies promising relief.


    _____________________________________

    Remember, a corporate nation seeks revenue from its citizens to be used to maximize profits for corporations.  That's why trillions of dollars in corporate subsidy and corporate fraud are making profits soar as neo-liberals pretend there is a government debt and deficit---tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud recovery would pay all government debt.

    We know in Baltimore the government has now become predatory on its citizens for revenue as massive amounts of corporate subsidy take all public revenue.  That's what is happening with our children and student loans.  Corporate bankruptcy allows corporations to shed almost all debt-----no bankruptcy for a social good---student loans.  Ideally, higher education should be free for goodness sake.

    STOP VOTING FOR CORPORATE POLITICIANS IN PRIMARIES----WE MUST REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WITH LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES!

    We are being led to believe that Congressional democrats are doing all they can and are thwarted at every turn by republicans on these issues.  The problem is who the President appoints as head of Department of Education----in this case Arne Duncan who is privatizing the heck out of this agency-------and the failure to pursue massive for-profit education fraud.  Doing just that would greatly reduce pressure on students and families.

    DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING THIS?  IN MARYLAND ALL POLS ARE CORPORATE AND WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AND NOT PUBLIC JUSTICE.


Obama Student Loan Policy Reaping $51 Billion Profit

Posted: 05/14/2013 11:18 pm EDT  |  Updated: 05/15/2013 3:49 pm EDT  Huffington Post



  1. Figures made public Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office show that the nonpartisan agency increased its 2013 fiscal year profit forecast for the Department of Education by 43 percent to $50.6 billion from its February estimate of $35.5 billion.

    Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation's most profitable company, reported $44.9 billion in net income last year. Apple Inc. recorded a $41.7 billion profit in its 2012 fiscal year, which ended in September, while Chevron Corp. reported $26.2 billion in earnings last year. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo reported a combined $51.9 billion in profit last year.

    The estimated increase in the Education Department's earnings from student borrowers and their families may cause a political firestorm in Washington, where members of Congress and Obama administration officials thus far have appeared content to allow students to line government coffers.

    The Education Department has generated nearly $120 billion in profit off student borrowers over the last five fiscal years, budget documents show, thanks to record relative interest rates on loans as well as the agency's aggressive efforts to collect defaulted debt. Representatives of the Education Department and Congressional Budget Office could not be reached for comment after normal business hours.

    The new profit prediction comes as Washington policymakers increasingly focus on soaring student debt levels and the record relative interest rates that borrowers pay as a potential impediment to economic growth. Regulators and officials at agencies that include the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank of New York have all warned that student borrowing may dampen consumption, depress the economy, limit credit creation or pose a threat to financial stability.

    At $1.1 trillion, student debt eclipses all other forms of household debt, except for home mortgages. It's also the only kind of consumer debt that has increased since the onset of the financial crisis, according to the New York Fed. Officials in Washington are worried that overly indebted student borrowers are unable to save enough to purchase a home, take out loans for new cars, start a business or save enough for their retirement.

    Policymakers also are worried about the effect that high interest rates on outstanding student debt may have on the broader economy. Congress sets interest rates on federal student loans, with rates fixed on the majority of loans at 6.8 and 7.9 percent.

    But as the Federal Reserve attempts to lower borrowing costs for everyone from households and small businesses to large corporations and Wall Street banks, student borrowers have not been able to benefit.

    Compared to a benchmark interest rate -- what the U.S. government pays to borrow for 10 years -- student borrowers have never paid more, increasing the burden of their student debt as wage increases and yields on investments and bank accounts fail to keep up with the relative increase in student loan interest payments.

    President Barack Obama recently asked Congress to tie federal student loan interest rates to the U.S. government's borrowing costs. In a possible sign of congressional intent, leading Democratic senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that would keep existing interest rates on some student loans for the neediest households fixed at 3.4 percent, rather than allowing them to revert back to their original 6.8 percent rate.

    The legislation, dubbed the "Student Loan Affordability Act" and proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), aims to help a small subset of future student borrowers who take out loans over the next two years. The bill does nothing for existing student debtors.

    "Today's figures from the CBO underscore the urgent need for Congress to prevent the July 1 interest rate hike and address the crushing debt placed on students," said Tiffany Edwards, spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

    Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official overseeing the regulator's student debt efforts, has warned policymakers to not focus solely on future borrowers.

    “The whole student loan problem is a problem that should be of deep concern to this body,” said Richard Cordray, CFPB director, during testimony last month before the Senate Banking Committee. “These are young people that we should care a great deal about.”


    “They’re the ones with the ambition, aspirations and dreams, and they're getting saddled with debt that they don't understand,” Cordray said of student borrowers. “It's holding them back and it's making them unable to rise and succeed and become leaders in our society.”


    He added: “It's a significant problem and we're going to be doing everything that we can to address it at the bureau.”

    The CFPB has been focusing on helping existing borrowers refinance high-rate debt or modify the terms of their loans. In a report earlier this month, the CFPB lamented that borrowers are unable to refinance their obligations after they have graduated from college and secured well-paying jobs.

    "Corporate entities, homeowners, and many others have been able to refinance debt at quite low rates, and student loan borrowers are wondering why they can't do the same," Chopra said.

    The CFPB suggests that increased concentration in the student loan market may inhibit refinancings and debt workouts. Lenders and the Education Department profit when borrowers pay higher rates than they otherwise would in a normally-functioning market.

    Unlike traditional lenders, though, the Education Department's profits are barely dented by loan defaults. For loans made in 2013 that eventually default, the department estimates it will recover between 76 cents and 82 cents on the dollar. Bankruptcy rarely discharges student debt.


    The Education Department's collection efforts are aided by loan default specialists, including NCO Group Inc., a company owned by JPMorgan.
  2.  The Obama administration is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation's most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of the four largest U.S. banks by assets.

    _______________________________________

    We all know that the massive frauds of last decade were centered in large extent in neo-liberal states----from New York to California, from Maryland to Illinois.  Nancy Pelosi's district in California is ground zero for for-profit education fraud and the subprime mortgage fraud for instance.  Maryland has record subprime mortgage frauds and foreclosures and for-profit education frauds because it allows these corporations to come to Maryland and openly prey on the public.  Republicans of course do the same, but the democratic party is the people's party and tasked with protecting labor and justice.


    Insider Trading by Congress throughout these massive corporate frauds was exposed and Congressional response was----to pass a law that Congress cannot be charged with Insider Trading and to make sure Rule of Law remains suspended with no public justice.....which by the way is itself illegal in a Equal Protection/Rule of Law nation.

    THIS IS THE PROBLEM FOR STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND REBUILDING PUBLIC JUSTICE IS THE SOLUTION.  SEE WHY CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND AND HER JUSTICE PLATFORM CANNOT GET MEDIA AIRTIME IN MARYLAND AND ESPECIALLY BALTIMORE WHERE ALL THIS FRAUD RUNS RAMPANT?

    Keep in mind this one corporation mentioned in this article is the very tip of a massive iceberg in fraud in the education/financial  industry and NOT ONE WORD IS MENTIONED OF THE NEED FOR JUSTICE FOR THE PUBLIC.



TruthOut.org / By Danny Weil
 For-Profit Education Fraud Tied to Political Elite

A bipartisan group of the nation's political leaders have close ties to for-profit college scams. Now, an $11 billion lawsuit is forcing some of them into the spotlight.

         On Friday, April 13, 2012,

  1. The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Chinea Washington, claims The Art Institute of California, Hollywood, led her to believe that federal grants and loans would cover the entire $89,000 cost for a bachelor's degree in interior design.

    In November 2011, after three years of study, Washington was provided notice by the "college" that she had reached the federal loan/grant aggregate limit of $52,340 and that it would cost $37,000 to complete the degree. Washington dropped out with $52,160 in debt. Because The Art Institute's credits are not transferable, Washington has been swindled out of $52,000 and three years of her life.

    The only way to describe $89,000 for a four-year degree with non-transferable credits from a non-academic college is as a fraud and a swindle, and that characterization possibly fails to convey the frustration and downright victimization students like Washington must feel.

    Like subprime mortgages, for-profit colleges are a scam driven by payment of commissions to sales staff known as recruiters. The payment of commissions to high-pressure salespeople is so central to the scam that the umbrella trade group for for-profits, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), has sued the federal government to overturn its ban on incentive pay.

    It cannot be stated strongly enough: for-profit colleges could not engage in the ongoing exploitation of students and theft of federal money without the direct cooperation and assistance of the federal government in what can only be termed an immoral economy. The same forces that demonize everything government does or attempts to do are busy feeding from the government trough. The hypocrisy is untenable, the federal subsidies unfathomable and the lack of criminal prosecution unconscionable.

    For-profit colleges are a kickback scheme where politicians enact favorable legislation and regulations that allow for-profit colleges to maintain access to student loans and grant money. The for-profit colleges then "give" a small cut of the federal money back to the politicians to enact favorable legislation.

    In the cases of Senator Snowe and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), their husbands have operated under the cover of their wives as they directly benefited, and continue to benefit from, their positions as shareholders in for-profit college companies. Snowe and Feinstein are accomplices in the ongoing evisceration and defrauding of citizen taxpayers and students, which explains the pair's complete silence on this matter.

    The so-called ruling class of government officials and elected politicians, to which Feinstein and Snowe clearly belong, is little more than a gaggle of white-collar criminals which facilitates and benefits from the diversion of taxpayer money into private coffers. It all takes on the appearance of legitimacy. Unfortunately, this is not a victimless crime. Like Washington, thousands of students who attend these subprime institutions are left with tens of thousands of dollars of nondischargeable debt which ends up ruining their lives.

    There is a vast network of former and current government officials who actively participate in the for-profit college swindle. Some of the conspirators are well known, and include: Mitt Romney, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), John Kline (R-Minnesota), Alcee Hastings(D-Florida), Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), Steve Gunderson (R-Wisconsin), Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Brian Moran, Snowe, Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi (D-California), and John Boehner (R-Ohio). The group also includes Obama administration officials and supporters such as Lanny Davis, Anita Dunn, Hilary Rosen, Anthony Miller and Charles Rose.

  2. Courthouse News reported a class-action lawsuit by students filed in federal court against the Art Institute of California and its owner, Educational Management Corporation (EDMC). As reported in Truthout, Sen. Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) husband, former governor of Maine John McKernan, is chairman of the board of EDMC and a former CEO of the company.  The company also faces an $11 billion false claims lawsuit by the federal government and 11 states.

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    Not surprisingly we have solutions to student loan debt that work to maximize bank profits and protect education industry profits----and we have other policies that may work to the public's advantage.  This is what needs to happen.

    Bankruptcy needs to happen because this entire decade was about predatory lending---handing money out that should not have been given.  Banks have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure loans will be repaid.  So, discharge all private student loans in bankruptcy and make the banks take the losses.  They can then go after the for-profit education industry for massive fraud. 


    There is a problem with bankruptcy if the Federal and state governments never try to address the fraud.  The for-profit industry keeps the fraud and Wall Street comes back to hit the American people for their losses.  So, we must have Rule of Law address the fraud while pursuing bankruptcy.  You are hearing only the bankruptcy mantra.

    The Loan Forgiveness policy pushed by Obama is yet another attempt to corner the student into a repayment program that will be bad for the student in the long run.  It is also designed to hit the working/middle class with full debt payment----because $20,000 over 10 years would be paid in full while Ivy League school debt of $100,000 to $250,000 would be largely forgiven after ten years.  It is not a coincidence that over the last decade Ivy League parents have largely used private student loans to pay tuition rather than cash. 

    Tying the working/middle-class to this Forgiveness policy that as this article shows is infused with restrictive requirements is not good for the public.

Bankruptcy, Not Forgiveness, for Student Loans
Inside Higher Ed  
December 7, 2012 By Jenna Ashley Robinson

While many approaches have been taken to the problem (trying to cut university costs, for example), there seem to be just two proposals for lessening the burden on the students themselves. These are to allow the loans to be discharged in bankruptcy or to forgive the loans altogether. Both have been the subject of Congressional bills.

Only one of these has the proper long-term incentive effects, and even it should be hedged with some restrictions: restoring limited bankruptcy protection. That is, students should be allowed to get out of their student loan burden as part of bankruptcy proceedings, just as they are able to get out of car loans now. However, this option should be restricted to private loans and should be allowed only after a set amount of time, such as 5 or 7 years, as it was prior to 2005.

While Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has proposed the idea of restoring bankruptcy protection for borrowers of private student loans several times, it has gone nowhere. Instead, there’s a growing chorus in favor of loan forgiveness. U.S. Representative Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) introduced H.R. 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, earlier this year.

The law would allow students to pay just 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years, whatever their total loan amount; then, the remaining debt would be canceled. This is the “10-10 standard.”

In addition, under this bill, the current 3.4 percent cap on undergraduate student loan interest rates (enacted by Congress as a temporary measure) would be made permanent. Private borrowers whose educational loan debt exceeded their income would be allowed to convert their private loan debt into federal Direct Loans, and then enroll in the “10-10” program.

A critical part of the bill is to reward graduates for entering public service professions -- like teaching and firefighting -- with even greater forgiveness. Already, under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, some graduates can have their loans forgiven if they work in public service for ten years. Few students use the current programs, however, because the rules dictating structure of repayment are relatively restrictive, as Inside Higher Ed recently reported.

The Clarke bill would lower the public service requirement to five years. Similarly, medical graduates would be rewarded for working in underserved communities by reducing the service requirement to 5 years from its current 10 years.

While this bill would benefit the small proportion of students who have extremely high debt levels, it would enormously distort incentives for students and universities -- causing larger problems in the long run.

The problem is that loan repayments will be the same whether students borrow cautiously to attend a state school or borrow extravagantly to attend an exclusive private university. Their payments will be capped at 10 percent of discretionary income for ten years. Because future students will know about the option of loan forgiveness, it will destroy any incentive for them to borrow prudently. They will have no reason to consider the varying costs of higher education.

Their unfettered willingness to borrow will have a ripple effect. Because the federal government will ante up (until it runs out of money), more and more money will flow to the schools through these loans, spurring them to continue to raise tuition and minimizing pressure on cutting costs. (Greater demand typically leads to higher prices.) Students would be simply middlemen -- passing government largesse on to colleges and universities that can’t stop their habit of seeking revenue wherever possible.

Limited bankruptcy protections would send a better message to both graduates and lenders. In 2005, Congress prohibited private student debt from being discharged through bankruptcy, except in rare cases. Government student loans have not been subject to bankruptcy protection since 1976, when Congress exempted them following reports that new doctors and lawyers were filing for bankruptcy to avoid paying student loans.

Indeed, if bankruptcy were available, many young graduates -- who often have no major assets such as a house or a car -- would be tempted to walk away from loan obligations. The federal government lends money to any student who meets minimum standards; it does not evaluate whether the student is likely to pay the money back.

Thus, restrictions are needed to make bankruptcy “work.” First, there should be a waiting period before students become eligible for bankruptcy protection -- perhaps five years after beginning to make payments on student loans.

Second, only loans from private lenders would be dischargeable through bankruptcy. The famous cases of student debt in the $100,000-plus realm tend to include large amounts of private loans. Lenders were able to rely on federal laws preventing bankruptcy -- so the sky was the limit. Federal loans, on the other hand, are capped at $31,000 for dependent undergraduates and $57,500 for independent undergraduates.

By making private loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, there would also be a ripple effect -- a good one. Lenders would become much more cautious. They would actually consider the likelihood that the student would be able to pay back the loan. Instead of relying on government policy to guarantee their profits, banks would have to return to time-tested, responsible banking practices. In the end, fewer students would take private loans and total debt would decrease.

Current student loan policy has led young people down the wrong path -- away from frugality and prudence to profligacy. It’s time to start sending better signals.




December 7, 2012 By Jenna Ashley Robinson

Student loan debt is soaring.

Since 1999, average student loan debt has increased by more than 500 percent, and in 2010, it exceeded outstanding credit card debt for the first time in history. Total outstanding student loan debt, by some counts, exceeded $1 trillion this year.


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We want to be clear----the target of people of color happened with this for-profit education scam as was the subprime loan scam.  It is the middle-class who feels the brunt of inflated university tuitions created from corporatized universities.  So, corporate pols are allowing the government coffers to be soaked with the frauds against the low-income families and then killing the middle-class with corporatized university tuition and unregulated loan amounts.

Again, this was not only a republican policy-----it is a neo-liberal policy.  All of this began with Clinton and deregulation and global market building that allowed banks and corporations the power to become unaccountable and large enough to effect the entire nation.  IT WAS DELIBERATE AND IT INVOLVES CONGRESSIONAL PROFITEERING.

So, Clinton teed the loaded golf ball, Bush took a huge whack sending that loaded ball all over the course and into the rough, and Obama came along and declared the loaded ball lost and simply dropped a new ball on the course as if the first ball was never loaded.

SUSPENDED RULE OF LAW AND DISMANTLING OF OUR PUBLIC JUSTICE SYSTEM HAS BEEN HAPPENING SINCE CLINTON-----AND IT ALL TIES TO TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT THAT ENDS OUR ABILITY AS CITIZENS TO PROTECTION UNDER LAW.

Keep in mind in Maryland, TV stations aimed at low-income are still saturated with for-profit education industry advertizements from the very institutions shown to be defrauding and offering little value to students and taxpayers.  For-profit schools run continuous advertizement while receiving most of their money from taxpayer aid.  It is not that we do not want low-income to have the aid-----we want to be sure these programs help them----that is what a democracy and democratic party does!
Below is a great article ====it is long, but try to glance through. Remember, Obama ran on holding the for-profit education industry accountable and this article refers to steps taken by Obama in addressing this-----

THAT NEVER HAPPENED.  THEY WATERED DOWN THESE POLICIES TO HOLD THE INDUSTRY ACCOUNTABLE AND HAVE NEVER RECOVERED THE FRAUD.


The Subprime Student Loan Racket

With help from Washington, the for-profit college industry is loading up millions of low-income students with debt they'll never pay off.

By Stephen Burd   Washington Monthly
 
At the age of forty-three, Martine Leveque decided it was time to start over. For several years, she had worked in the movie business, writing subtitles in Italian and French for English-language films, but her employer moved overseas. She then tried her hand at sales, but each time the economy dipped sales tumbled, along with her income, and as a single mother with a teenage son, she wanted a job that offered more security. She decided to pursue a career in nursing, a high-demand field where she could also do some good.

While researching her options online, Leveque stumbled on the Web site for Everest College, part of the Corinthian Colleges chain, which pictured students in lab coats and scrubs probing a replica of a human heart and a string of glowing testimonials from graduates. “Now I know exactly where I am going. And now I’m making very good money,” enthused a former student named Anjali B. The school, near Leveque’s home in Alhambra, California, offered a Licensed Vocational Nursing program that would take her just one year to complete. When Leveque contacted the admissions office, she was told she would receive hands-on training from experienced nurses in state-of-the-art labs with the most modern equipment—including a recently purchased $30,000 mannequin that could simulate the birthing process. She also says recruiters told her that she would be able to do rotations at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, one of the nation’s best hospitals.

Leveque was intrigued, though she was initially put off by the $29,000 tuition. But the school’s recruiters assured her there was nothing to be concerned about: Everest had an exceptional track record of helping students find employment—they claimed the typical Everest College LVN graduates landed a job paying between $28 and $35 an hour straight out of school. And the school would arrange a financial aid package to cover her costs.

In the end, Leveque decided to enroll. The day she came in to fill out her paperwork, she says, the recruiters rushed her through the process and discouraged her from taking the forms home to look over. They told her that she would be taking out private loans in addition to federal loans that are traditionally used to pay educational expenses, but did not explain what the terms of those loans would be. “They just kept telling me that ‘we’re with you,’ and that they would try to get me the maximum amount of federal loans allowed,” she says. Only later did she learn that those private loans—which made up 42 percent of her “financial aid” package—carried double-digit interest rates and other onerous terms*.

To make matters worse, the program did not come close to delivering on the promises that had been made. The instructors had little recent medical experience. Instead of really teaching, she says, they usually just read textbooks aloud in class and sometimes offered students the answers on tests ahead of time. On the rare occasions when Leveque and her class were given time in the lab, she found that the equipment was broken down and shoddy—except for the expensive new mannequin, which no one knew how to use. Instead of the promised rotations at UCLA Medical Center, her clinical training consisted of helping pass out pills at a nursing home. (A spokeswoman for Corinthian Colleges denied many of Leveque’s allegations, insisting that the company does not condone cheating, that all LVN instructors at Everest College have “at least the minimum qualifications” set by the California Board of Vocational Nursing, and that UCLA Medical Center “is not and has never been” one of the school’s official clinical training sites.)

Since graduating in 2008, Leveque has been unable to find a nursing job, perhaps because she never learned how to perform basic tasks such as giving shots. Instead, she works as an occasional home health care aid earning at the most $1,200 a month—not enough to pay her rent on the cramped apartment she shares with her sister and son or keep gas in her car, much less pay off her student loans. As a result, her loan balance has ballooned to approximately $32,000, and she has no idea how she will ever pay it off*. “My credit is ruined,” Leveque says. “I made one mistake, and I will be paying for it for the rest of my life.”

Leveque’s story is far from unique. Each year, more than two million Americans enroll in for-profit colleges, also known as proprietary schools, and their popularity has only grown since the financial crisis. While traditional four-year colleges are struggling with dwindling student bodies and budget gaps, proprietary schools are reporting record enrollments as the newly unemployed try to retool their skills so they can wade back into the job market. Some of the largest for-profit chains say their numbers have doubled over the last year.

The students who are flocking to these schools are mostly poor and working class, and they rely heavily on student loans to cover tuition. According to a College Board analysis of Department of Education data, 60 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients at for-profit colleges graduate with $30,000 or more in student loans—one and a half times the percentage of those at traditional private colleges and three times more than those at four-year public colleges and universities. Similarly, those who earn two-year degrees from proprietary schools rack up nearly three times as much debt as those at community colleges, which serve a similar student population. Proprietary school students are also much more likely to take on private student loans, which, unlike their federal counterparts, are not guaranteed by the federal government, offer scant consumer protections, and tend to charge astronomical interest—in some cases as high as 20 percent.

These figures are all the more troubling in light of these schools’ spotty record of graduating students; the median graduation rate for proprietary schools is only 38 percent—by far the lowest rate in the higher education sector. What’s more, even those students who make it through often can’t find jobs. The reason for this is simple: while some proprietary schools offer a good education, many more are subpar at best. Thus large numbers of students leave with little to show for their effort other than a heap of debt. Not surprisingly, students at proprietary schools are far more likely to default on their loans than those at other colleges.

The appalling treatment of disadvantaged students at the hands of proprietary schools ought to be a national scandal, especially at a time when America desperately needs more college graduates to stay competitive. But the problem has barely registered in Washington. That’s partly because the proprietary school lobby has enough clout among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to keep the issue quiet. But Congress and the Obama administration have also had their hands full advancing other higher education reforms—in particular, legislation to kick private lenders out of the federally subsidized student loan program. This will create tens of billions of dollars in cost savings that will go toward larger Pell grants for low-income students. But that measure, vital as it is, affects only lending within the federal student loan program. It leaves untouched the private loans that are increasingly being foisted on students like Leveque and the loosely regulated schools that are profiting as a result.

The for-profit higher education sector is no stranger to scandal. In the 1980s and early ’90s, it came to light that hundreds of fly-by-night schools had been set up solely to reap profits from the federal student loan programs, in part by preying on poor people and minorities. The most unscrupulous of them enrolled people straight off the welfare lines, and got them to sign up for the maximum amount of federal student loans available—sometimes without their knowledge or consent.

The rampant abuses caught the attention of the news media, sent shockwaves through Capitol Hill, and led to a year-long, high-profile Senate investigation led by Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat. The standing-room-only hearings had all the trappings of scandal, with trade school officials pleading the Fifth and a school owner, who had been convicted of defrauding the government, brought to the witness table in handcuffs and leg irons.

Key lawmakers considered kicking all trade schools out of the federal student aid programs—a virtual death sentence given the institutions’ heavy reliance on these funds. But Congress ultimately stepped back from the brink and instead strengthened the Department of Education’s authority to weed out problem institutions. Under the new rules, for-profit colleges had to get at least 15 percent of their tuition money from sources other than federal loans and financial aid. Also, if more than a quarter of a school’s students consistently defaulted on their loans within two years of graduating or dropping out, the school could be barred from participating in federal financial aid programs. The idea was to get rid of those schools that were set up solely to feed on federal funds and didn’t provide the meaningful training students needed to get jobs and pay off their debt. As a result, during the 1990s more than 1,500 proprietary schools were either kicked out of the government’s financial aid programs altogether or withdrew voluntarily. In an effort to rein in abusive recruiting tactics, in 1992 Congress also barred schools from compensating recruiters based on the number of students they brought in.

These changes shook up the industry. The old generation of trade schools gradually died off and were replaced by a new breed of for-profit colleges—mostly huge, publicly traded corporations. The largest, the Apollo Group, owns the University of Phoenix, which serves more than 400,000 students at some ninety campuses and 150 learning centers worldwide. Others include the Career Education Corporation, which serves 90,000 students at seventy-five campuses around the world, and Corinthian Colleges, which serves 69,000 students at more than 100 colleges in the United States and Canada.

Not only did these companies promise that their schools would be more responsive to the needs of students and employers than the previous generation, they also said they would be more accountable to the public because, as publicly traded companies, they were heavily regulated. “We’ve seen a fire across the prairie, and that fire has had a purifying effect,” Omer Waddles, then the president of the Career College Association, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1997. “As our sector has weathered the storms of recent years, a stronger group of schools is emerging to carry, at a high level of credibility, the mantle of training and career development.”

In reality, the new breed of schools had quite a bit in common with their predecessors; in some cases, they even operated out of the same buildings and employed the same personnel. What’s more, rather than making them more accountable, the fact that they were publicly traded created a powerful incentive for them to game the system. After all, to keep their stock prices up and investors happy, the schools had to show that they were constantly expanding, which meant there was intense pressure to get students in the door and signed up for classes and financial aid.

With so much at stake, these schools quickly found ways to skirt the new rules. To get around the caps on student loan default rates, for instance, many of them began hiring agencies to help former students get forbearances or offering lines of credit so alums could make their student-loan payments—but only during the initial two-year window, when defaults were counted against the school by the Department of Education. After that, students were left to wrestle with the debt on their own. As for the rule requiring schools to get at least 15 percent of tuition from nongovernment sources, it had some unintended consequences. Rather than, say, enrolling people who could afford to pay some tuition out of pocket, many schools started pushing students to take out private student loans.

Previously, this kind of loan had gone exclusively to graduate and professional students pursuing careers in high-paying fields like law and medicine. The financially needy students who attend for-profit institutions couldn’t qualify for them because of their less-than-stellar credit records, their lousy graduation rates, and their spotty record of finding work in their field. But this began to change around 2000. At the time, college tuition was skyrocketing—a trend that has only accelerated—and federal grants and loans weren’t keeping pace. To fill the gap, financial aid officers started cutting deals with lenders to bring in private loan money. In the case of proprietary colleges, most of the large publicly traded chains forged arrangements with Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company. (Once a quasi-government agency like Fannie Mae, it became entirely private in 2004.) In exchange for pots of private student loan funds that they could dole out at will—meaning without regard for students’ ability to repay the debt—the schools gave Sallie Mae the right to be the exclusive provider of federal student loans on their campuses. Lenders vie fiercely for this privilege because federal loans are guaranteed by the government, meaning the Treasury pays back nearly all the money if the borrower defaults. Thus lenders get to pocket generous fees and interest and bear almost no risk.

Sallie Mae clearly understood that these private loans were going mostly to subprime borrowers who might not be able to pay them back; in 2007, Senate investigators uncovered internal company documents showing that executives expected a staggering 70 percent of its private student loans at one for-profit school to end in default. Investigators concluded that Sallie Mae viewed these loans as a “marketing expense”—a token sum to be paid in exchange for the chance to gorge on federal funds.

From the schools’ perspective, it didn’t much matter whether students would be able to pay off their debt any more than it mattered if they stuck with the program or graduated with the skills they needed. As long as students were enrolled long enough to be considered a “start,” meaning that they attended classes for a week or two, the schools got to keep some of the money, and they got to include students in their official enrollment tally, which gave Wall Street the impression they were expanding. Having a cache of private loan funds to dole out also allowed the schools to clinch the deal right away—no need to grind through a stack of forms or wait for a third party to approve the loan application. Thus recruiters could lock students in before they experienced buyer’s remorse.

At best, the George W. Bush administration and the Republican-led Congress turned a blind eye to these schemes. At worst, they made it easier for the schools to carry them out. In his first term, Bush packed the Department of Education with allies of the proprietary colleges. Before becoming the assistant secretary for post-secondary education, for example, Sally Stroup worked as a lobbyist for the University of Phoenix. Under her leadership, the agency took the teeth out of regulations that were designed to rein in abuses of the 1990s, including the incentive-compensation ban for recruiters.

Not surprisingly, many schools began resorting to hard-sell tactics to bring students in. In 2004, the Department of Education found that corporate bosses at the University of Phoenix routinely pressured and intimidated their recruiters to put “asses in the classes.” At some of the campuses, enrollment counselors who didn’t meet their targets were sent to the “Red Room,” a glassed-in space where they worked the phones under intense management supervision. What’s more, in recent years dozens of former students have filed suits alleging they were misled about classes and programs proprietary schools offered, as well as about their prospects for graduating and getting jobs in their fields of study. While the seriousness of the abuses vary, in some cases they amount to outright fraud, with recruiters pressuring students to sign up for classes that don’t actually exist or to enroll in programs where the instructors lack even basic expertise in the field. The push to get students in the door also created more pressure to steer people into private loans.

The frenzy only intensified after Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act in 2005. This made it almost impossible for those who took out private student loans to discharge them in bankruptcy and, not surprisingly, turned the private student loan market into a much more appealing target for lenders.

s a result of these changes, private loan borrowing has skyrocketed. In the last decade alone, it has grown an astounding 674 percent at colleges overall, when adjusted for inflation. The growth has been most dramatic at for-profit colleges, where the percentage of students taking out private loans jumped from 16 percent to 43 percent between 2004 and 2008, according to Department of Education data.

The spike in private loan borrowing is dismal news for students. Unlike traditional student loans, which have low, fixed interest rates, private educational loans generally have uncapped variable rates that can climb as high as 20 percent—on par with the most predatory credit cards. Private loans also come with much less flexible repayment options. Borrowers can’t defer payments if they suffer economic hardship, for instance, and the size of their payment is not tied to income, as it sometimes is in the federal program. Private loans also lack basic consumer protections available to federal loan borrowers. With a traditional federal student loan, for example, if a borrower dies or becomes permanently disabled, the debt is forgiven, meaning they or their kin are no longer responsible for paying it off. The same goes if the school unexpectedly shuts down before a student graduates. But none of this is true of private loans. Also, because it is so difficult to discharge private student loans in bankruptcy, when students take them out to attend schools that provide no meaningful training or skills they can find themselves trapped in a spiral of debt that they have little prospect of escaping.

Theresa Sweet, a thirty-three-year-old California resident, took out about $100,000 in private loans between 2003 and 2006 to study photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, which is owned by the Career Education Corporation. At the time, she says the Brooks recruiters—who have frequently been accused of misleading students—told her that graduates of their photography program typically made at least $60,000 straight out of school. In fact, since graduating three years ago she has been unable to find paid work in her field, and, while she has managed to get forbearances on her student loans, the interest has continued to stack up. She now owes more than $200,000.

Looking back, Sweet admits that she was naive in trusting the recruiters. But she can’t help but wonder how she ever qualified for the loans in the first place, especially given that when she applied she was unemployed. “If it were me, I never would have loaned me the money,” she says. “Who in their right mind would lend $100,000 in unsecured debt to an art major?”

Like Sweet, graduates of proprietary colleges often struggle to find jobs in their fields. This is because, in many cases, they don’t get the skills they need to compete. After all, it’s far easier and less expensive for schools to boost enrollment numbers through aggressive advertising and recruitment than to expend the resources to build quality schools. Corinthian and Career Education, which own the schools Leveque and Sweet attended, have faced the most damning allegations when it comes to educational quality and steering students into shady private loans. Other chains have better reputations on these fronts, among them the University of Phoenix and DeVry University. But even they have a spotty record of graduating students.

or awhile it looked like the meltdown on Wall Street, and the ensuing credit crunch, would put an end to predatory lending at for-profit schools. In 2008 Sallie Mae quit offering subprime private loans to students at for-profit colleges because the astronomical default rates had helped throw its stock price into a nosedive. But the proprietary college industry has found a way around this roadblock, namely making private loans directly to students, much the way used-car lots loan money to buyers rather than going through a third party. For example, in a recent earnings call with investors and analysts, Corinthian said that it plans to dole out roughly $130 million in “institutional loans” this year, while Career Education and ITT Educational Services Inc., another for-profit chain, have reported that they expect to lend a combined total of $125 million.

These loans could prove to be even more toxic than the private ones offered by Sallie Mae. This is because some schools are packaging them as ordinary consumer credit, which has even fewer built-in safeguards than private student loans, especially when it comes to disclosure requirements. This makes it easier for schools to mislead borrowers about the terms of the debt they are taking on. In one class-action lawsuit filed earlier this year, former students of Colorado-based Westwood Colleges allege they were duped into borrowing institutional loans at a staggering 18 percent interest. According to the complaint, the college’s corporate bosses advise their admissions officers to sign students up for these loans without revealing how costly they are going to be. Thus borrowers don’t learn about the steep interest until after they leave school and receive their first loan bill. Worse, the lawsuit alleges that some students have been signed up for loans without their permission.

Jillian L. Estes, a Florida lawyer who represents the plaintiffs in the case, says she has been approached by two dozen former Westwood admissions representatives who admit that they deliberately avoided telling students about the terms of these loans. “They knew they’d never be able to enroll these students if they were up front with them,” Estes explains. (In their written response to the lawsuit, Westwood College officials offered a “categorical rejection” of the allegations brought by Estes and her clients.)

Significantly, many proprietary schools are pushing institutional loans even when they know students won’t be able to pay them off; Career Education and Corinthian Colleges only expect to recover roughly half of the money they distribute through their institutional lending programs, according to communications with shareholders. Why would they lend knowing they won’t get the money back? Because any loss is more than offset by federal loans and financial aid dollars, which, despite the surge in private educational lending, still fund the bulk of tuition at proprietary schools. Say a student gets a $60,000 federal financial aid package and supplements it with a $20,000 institutional loan. The school comes out $40,000 ahead even if the borrower ultimately defaults. Plus, getting students in the door pumps up enrollment numbers, which makes for happy shareholders.

Meanwhile, as the credit crunch eases, traditional lenders may well go back to making private loans to proprietary school students, especially given the changes afoot in the industry. President Obama aims to get rid of the program that allows lending companies to collect lucrative fees and interest for serving as the middleman on federal student loans and instead have the government offer the loans directly. Once forced out of the federal student loan program, traditional lenders will have a powerful incentive to seek profits by wading deeper into the private student loan market, and for-profit schools, with their exponential growth, could once again be an appealing target.

The good news is that the Obama administration seems more inclined than its predecessor to stand up against the abuses of proprietary schools. In May, the Department of Education revealed that it was considering reversing changes the Bush administration made to weaken the incentive-compensation ban. It is also thinking about adding teeth to the rules requiring proprietary colleges to show that graduates are finding “gainful employment” in their field and cracking down on schools that willfully mislead prospective students. “Our overall goal at the Department of Education in post-secondary education is to make sure that students … have the information they need to make good choices,” Robert Shireman, the deputy undersecretary of education, told financial analysts and investors during a conference call earlier this year.

These proposals are a good start, but more steps will be needed. For starters, the Department of Education should publish the data that it already collects on the number of students at each school who default over the lifetime of their loans. At the moment, it only releases the number who default during the first two years after leaving college, which is of limited value, not only because this is such a short time span, but also because the rates can be easily manipulated by schools.

Just publishing lifetime default rates would give prospective students a clearer picture of the risks of enrolling in a particular school. But the impact would be far greater if Congress used this data, along with graduation rates, to weed out abusive institutions; ideally, any school that failed to meet a certain threshold should be kicked out of the federal financial aid programs.

At the same time, Congress should require companies that offer private student loans to give the same kinds of flexible repayment options and consumer protections as are available through the federal student loan program, including allowing borrowers to repay their loans as a percentage of their income. Lawmakers also need to revisit changes Congress made to the bankruptcy code in 2005, which make it exceeding difficult for financially distressed borrowers, including those with private student loans, to discharge their debt in bankruptcy.

These changes would go a long way toward helping people like Martine Leveque escape their mountains of debt and ensuring that future students don’t wind up in the same situation. It would also guarantee that taxpayers don’t go on bankrolling giant companies that profit by exploiting those who are struggling to build better lives.
_____________________________________________


I want to end by emphasizing----if you look at media you will think Obama and Congress tried to reform this industry-----it was the courts that stopped them for example.  Yet, simply enforcing Rule of Law and recovering trillions of dollars in fraud from this industry would have put them all out of business!  THAT IS HOW YOU TAKE CARE OF THIS PROBLEM.....WE DO NOT NEED NEW LAWS----WE NEED RULE OF LAW.

You will see the long list of for-profits that stole the trillions of dollars and they are still going strong in Maryland.  What you do not hear is that they are killing union apprenticeship programs----the best in the world at training for all kinds of workplace employment -----being dismantled by these for-profit schools----which is the point.  Both republicans and neo-liberals are trying to kill unions and labor and these privatizations do just that.


SEE WHY THE MEDIA CONTROLS SO COMPLETELY WHICH CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR GET AIRTIME?  ALL CANDIDATES EXCEPT CINDY WALSH HAVE BEEN SILENT AND WILL CONTINUE TO IGNORE MASSIVE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION!



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April 10th, 2014

4/10/2014

0 Comments

 
NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE PUSHING THESE EDUCATION REFORMS AS FAST AS THEY CAN BECAUSE NO ONE WANTING A DEMOCRACY WITH A BILL OF RIGHTS WANTS THESE REFORMS....DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN.

IF YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS ARE NOT SHOUTING AGAINST THIS.....IF COMMUNITIES DO NOT RISE AGAINST THIS ......YOU WILL LOSE DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND BE LEFT WITH AUTOCRATIC JOB TRAINING FROM KINDERGARTEN THROUGH CAREER COLLEGE.


HERE IS A LETTER FROM A PARENT AND HER EXPERIENCE WITH BALTIMORE AND MARYLAND EDUCATION REFORM:


This is my daughter, my sacrifices, the wind beneath my wings, the whole of my heart,my one and only and the catalyst for my advocacy. 3 months ago I posted that my daughter was being bullied in school. The school did not act responsibly & I removed her from school for her safety & to keep me from going to jail.
I stepped down from many of my community efforts to focus on my daughter and my family. For 3 months I studied the history of Balto City's special education & the legislation that is in place to protect our children. I can confidently say that the school system does not take our children's future seriously. My daughter has been out of school for 3 months and no one has contacted me to see if she is alive or dead. I soon realized why it's possible to have such a high percentage of special ed students go from the school system to the prison system and homelessness. It's not just the school system's fault, parents have to start showing up & representing their children. We have a small window of time to set the stage for our children's future.
 My daughter will began attending her new school on Monday for an appropriate safe education. If this could happen to us, an informed parent & special education advocate; imagine what could happen to a parent that is not showing up. The disparity and heartache I endured as a parent, brought me to my knees so many times. I was preparing to leave Maryland in order to give my child the best there was to offer. I never ask people to pray for me because I believe my relationship with God & Universe is solid, but I asked a new to pray for me because my spirit had broke. I don't want another parent's spirit to break while wanting better for their child. Though some in the community may be disappointed, my focus will remain with my daughter and special education. 32,000 special ed students were arrested in Maryland last year and no one cares. I believe that I can make a difference in the prison and homeless rate with our children and I'm going to try.
Thank you MH for your prayers. When much is given, much is required.

Whether Race to the Top or Common Core----the intent is to create an education environment structured completely on workplace training done as cheaply as possible.

The biggest issue to remember in judging the effects a policy like Common Core will have on the US is this: the idea the standardization will increase quality or achievement has no basis....all research shows otherwise. Take STEM courses....Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.....all of these subjects are based on facts so they are already standardized. To change the context of democratic education and plurality in society because the conservative states want to teach creationism over evolution is ridiculous. If national standard tests require knowledge of evolution and if evolution is taught in university......that will be the standard. What danger lies in Common Core is the standardization of the humanities and liberal arts. Keep in mind that it is the humanities that gave us THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. You know, when all people are citizens having the right to education created by and including lives and accomplishments of all citizens. This is the major reason any democracy would reject Common Core. Every region of America has its own vision of history, religion, civics, psychology, literature, etc. This is what makes a plurality. In nations like China where plurality is not allowed-----they have standardization like Common Core. Remember when Bush/Cheney famously stated history would be kind to their administration even after they pushed the US into systemic fraud and corruption.....started war with lies.....removed the US from International Criminal Courts because they pushed crime and torture around the world? Well, Common Core started its development in the Bush Administration and you can bet the standard history lesson for Bush/Cheney will be that their administration was a beacon for American progress.


Regarding what Race to the Top really looks like in Maryland:

Below you see an article in the Baltimore Sun that addresses a media report on the state of education reform in Maryland.  I only posted the first part so look for the article in its entirety.  The point I make here is that while this report looks at factors that assess this reform it completely ignores what most people see as the major factors.  This is deliberate.  If public education is to be dismantled then the public cannot know the goals of these reforms.

Let's look at what we are told and what is actually happening.  I shared this with a friend having a special needs student in Baltimore City schools and she was shocked.
  Remember, special needs is not only physical disability-----it includes emotional and slow-learners as well.  TRUTH BE TOLD----IT WILL INCLUDE MOST OF US.
________________________________________

There are three issues with AP in Maryland.  One can be seen with a CATO Institute chart that shows the school spending curb in Maryland grow while SAT scores stayed flat and low.  Conservative CATO uses that to say more money does not improve education.  In Maryland, fraud and corruption takes 1/2 of most kinds of public funding from the system so we can best assume that this chart shows that it is the fact that the money never made it to the classrooms that caused SAT scores to remain flat.  Indeed, Maryland schools are so underfunded as to lack basic resources for decades. 

The same is happening with AP......the funds are allocated but are not used effectively or are redirected completely.




There is a second side to AP in Maryland.  IN Baltimore, AP is used as a development tool.  In Baltimore you have Dunbar High School designated as an AP school with almost none of the original students capable of achieving in AP.  The reason Dunbar was made AP was to change the student population from low-achieving and underserved to affluent.  This means you will have students never meant to be in AP failing to pass these tests.

The third side to this AP issue is a deliberate intent to skew education data by making it appear that Maryland had a high number of achieving students and therefore strong education programs when it doesn't.  This is a systemic problem in Maryland.  Skewed data all meant to make a politician or program look successful when it isn't.  Parents across the state are crying foul over this one.  So, limiting underserved schools to teaching math and reading just so those grades would rise while neglecting all other subjects causing these students to fail science and social studies for example.  Having AP classes just to have them while not funding these schools enough to make the classroom changes needed is purely political.

As an academic who writes about this nationally I will continue to encourage reporters who take the time to do good research to hold power accountable.



Destiny Miller sits in AP Biology class at Woodlawn High School. Among Baltimore County schools, AP class grades at Woodlawn have some of the weakest correlations with AP test scores, Sun analysis has found. Maryland schools have been leader in Advanced Placement, but results are mixed


Top students at low-performing schools can earn As and Bs, but still fail the exams


Story by Liz Bowie | Photos by Amy Davis  BAltimore Sun



Destiny Miller went online this summer to check one last set of grades from her senior year at Woodlawn High School — scores on three Advanced Placement exams.
The 18-year-old sat alone on her bed waiting for the scores to appear on her smartphone. For many top students like Destiny, the scores might seem an academic footnote; she already had her diploma and had been admitted to college. Yet the idea that she might not have succeeded on the AP tests made her so anxious that, just as the scores began to download, she turned her phone face down, unable to look.

Destiny was experiencing the pressures of being a pioneer on the frontier of Advanced Placement, one of thousands of minority, low-income students being targeted for a nationwide expansion of the rigorous college-level courses. She took a deep breath, turned her phone back over and looked at the three numbers on the screen.

For such students, the scores show how well their education prepared them for college and whether they might earn college course credits, potentially saving thousands of dollars in tuition. For federal and state education officials who have invested $400 million in taxpayer dollars over the past decade to subsidize AP exams for bright, low-income students, the stakes are even higher.

So far, the expansion has not lived up to its promise. It has not delivered vast numbers of students from low-performing high schools to selective colleges with credits in their pockets, helping to bridge the academic gulf between the nation’s rich and poor. Too often, students who haven’t been prepared in earlier grades flounder in AP classes, or are awarded A’s and B’s in the courses and then fail the AP exams.
.............


____________________________________________


When education becomes about profit there is no room for any student that just will not bring the most profit to the corporation owning these schools.  Goodbye special needs structures and good bye equal opportunity and education based on what is good for the student's learning experience.....

Baltimore City schools are now individual businesses with principals given so little money they look at a student with special needs as costing money and work to get rid of them.  That is what school choice and charters do....sets the stage for bypassing equal opportunity all the while handing a large chuck of public education financing to what are private businesses as charters.

Competition and fighting for funding leads to fraud and corruption in our education system just as our entire corporate and governing structure has today.  Quality and access is gone.......democratic education is gone.....and an autocratic standardization is established.  This is what Race to the Top with Obama and Bill Gates pushing nationally and Johns Hopkins and Rawlings-Blake/Baltimore City Hall and O'Malley/Maryland Assembly see as education reform.


ALL OF THE CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND WILL ADVANCE THIS EXCEPT CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND.



Youth group accuses district of pushing out students


DAVID MAIALETTI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER


 BY SOLOMON LEACH, Daily News Staff Writer leachs@phillynews.com, 215-854-5903Posted: April 09, 2014


A GROUP OF current and former students launched a campaign yesterday to identify peers they claim have been pushed out of Philadelphia public schools through closings or cutbacks to key programs.

Youth United for Change said the closure of 24 schools last year, combined with cuts to the school district's Re-Engagement Center and slots in accelerated schools, has left students who drop out with few options.

"Being pushed out is unfair," said YUC member Maury Elliott, a former Simon Gratz High student who briefly re-enrolled in an alternative school. "The school district and the [School Reform Commission] fail to stop this injustice. Instead, they influence it."

Outside school district headquarters, members of the group wore T-shirts that read, "Have You Seen Me?" and stood in front of large makeshift milk cartons with blacked-out pictures.

About 10,000 students were displaced by last year's closures, the district said. Most have been accounted for, but 600, whom YUC described as "missing," have not.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said an analysis indicated the 600 students either left the district, enrolled in private or parochial schools, or dropped out. Dropout numbers, he said, are typically a year behind.

YUC said another major blow has been cuts to the Re-Engagement Center, which provides former students with re-engagement options and links them to services. The center's workforce is down from five full-time staffers in 2011 to one this year, plus a few interns, the district said.

YUC wants the district to implement better tracking systems for student transitions; acknowledge that school closures increase the likelihood of dropouts; locate and re-engage missing students; conduct and release an analysis of school closings; and fully fund the Re-Engagement Center.

Gallard said that the center is an important part of the district and that the hope is to restore resources to that and other programs.

"This goes to the heart of the conversation we've been having since we had to lay off over 4,000 employees," he said. "It's all directly connected to funding."

_______________________________________
Make no mistake......this privatization will marginalize most families into substandard education.  Remember, only 10% of people would fall into the Advanced Placement category that these privatizers have decided are the only students needing a humanities and democratic rich education.

Baltimore has the most cruel system of culling and throw-away tiering of schools in the nation.  It is all done while Maryland media present education data that is false and propaganda that makes all of this privatization look like creation of quality education and achievement. 

Remember, as most parents and academics know, Common Core
lowers our current level of achievement, it does not enhance it.  While rigor was deliberately removed from classrooms over the last few decades to force achievement to fall......when public schools are allowed to function as they should with full funding and resourced-----THEY PROVIDE THE BROADEST AND DEEPEST EDUCATION AND RIGOR.  America ranked #1 in the world with people of color excelling when democratic education was thriving.



April 5, 2014 · 4:14 pm ↓


Jump to Comments
Quick: send your kids to charters lest they be “tossed in the lion’s den with the special needs student!”

Today, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by journalism professor Andrea Gabor that essentially describes a “two-tier” educational system: one created by the presence of charters that leaves the neediest students behind. And although many official charter spokespeople wouldn’t dare say it, it’s the practice of driving out children with special needs that accounts for lots of the “success” charters brag about.

Gabor devotes a good deal of her attention to charter school attrition, focusing on the effects “no-excuses” policies have on students with special needs:

Some students with I.E.P.s find charters, which often foster a no-excuses culture, a poor fit, and leave voluntarily. But sometimes there’s pressure: Administrators may advise parents that the school can’t support a child’s disability, or punish kids for even the slightest disciplinary infractions. However it happens, it leads to rising special-needs populations at nearby public schools.

Chrystina Russell, the founding principal of Global Technology Preparatory, a Harlem middle school, says charter-school “refugees” often showed up at her school after Oct. 31, when the Department of Education makes key funding decisions for traditional public schools based on head counts. This means that it can be difficult for the schools to hire additional teachers or support personnel when new students show up (though some funding is updated for special-education students who transfer by Dec. 31).

Global Tech had no post-October transfers this year, but had as many as eight two years ago. Nearby Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science has had about a dozen so far this year.

Global Tech, where more than one-third of the students have I.E.P.s, does impressive work despite the challenges. If special-education kids — most of whom are black and Hispanic boys — are segregated when they get to high school, they are unlikely to graduate. So Global Tech is committed to mainstreaming them in general-education classes by the eighth grade. Instead of suspending disruptive students, the school takes away extracurricular sports privileges and holds lunchtime detentions and meetings with parents. Some of its special-needs students have been accepted to the best public high schools in the city.

Gabor further notes that the charters which push out special needs students are often the very same ones to claim that they enroll the same types of students as do district schools.  Those charters aren’t, however, bound to “most regulations governing traditional public schools,” and their enrollment and financial policies allow them to manipulate the populations they serve.

Gabor ultimately concludes that “if charter schools are allowed to push out existing public schools, they should, at the very least, be subject to the same accountability measures for enrollment, attrition and disciplinary procedures, to ensure that the neediest students are being treated fairly.”

Amen.

Shortly after its publication, Gabor’s piece was flooded with comments, many echoing her sentiments about the misleading nature of charter schools’ “success.”  (Yay to the NYT for actually publishing a piece with this type of content; it seems, given the support for traditional public education voiced in the comments, that it was a welcome addition to the op-ed section.)

But perhaps most interesting is that the few commenters who advocate for charter expansion highlight exactly what’s wrong with charters in the first place: in general, they are publicly-funded experiments in resegregation. And, disturbingly, many people seem to be okay with that.

Here are some comments, copied and pasted from the NYT page, which show that many charter supporters condone the segregation of our nation’s children–whether it be in terms of race, class, socio-economic status, or ability/special needs.  All emphasis here is mine; misspellings and typos are not!



_________________________________________


As schools in Baltimore are closed because Carl Stokes and City Hall have decided that public funding of public schools will end and all schools will be tied to corporations and private funding......Baltimore adds its next round of national charter chains that have as a goal ending high school education and replace this with vocational job training.  Now, who goes to these schools?  It depends how your child tested in pre-K and the track that Johns Hopkins decides they see best.  This is what school privatization is about.  Restructuring schools with the complete drive being the cheapest vehicle producing made-to-order workers who will have no ability to move beyond the scope of that career focus and most of this leads to poverty wages.

This will hit communities of color first as they have no one speaking out for them.  Wall Street uses the fact that many people will think this will only happen to underserved schools.  Keep in mind-----WALL STREET INTENDS THIS TO REPLACE ALL PUBLIC EDUCATION AND ASK AS WELL....WILL MY CHILDREN BE MIDDLE-CLASS IN A WORLD WHERE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT----TPP----IS LAW?  OF COURSE NOT.

As I said, urban areas like Baltimore and Philadelphia are being used to create a privatized structure that will be expanded all across the state of Maryland and Pennsylvania.  For those wanting to be rid of Brown vs Board of Education giving equal opportunity and protection with Race to the Top remember, conservatives are shouting because of Common Core and loss of control of their public schools and charters....so this is a bipartisan issue and it hurts all Americans regardless of class, race, or region.


Below you see that a plan to have students graduate with an associates degree......remember, what they have in community college now is simply corporate job training.  These students will graduate with a certificate equivalent to training received by any Human Resources program and every time a person changes jobs,......and we know that jobs are now on contract.....you have to go back to these community college job training programs to start another job. 

YOU WILL BE TRACKED INTO A CAREER LINE FOR LIFE BECAUSE YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO AFFORD, NOR WILL YOU BE GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY FOR HIGHER EDUCATION.


Adding a Baltimore Public School to its portfolio?  Sounds like consolidation of a school system readying to become a private national charter chain.


Four new schools apply to open in city Applicants include early college program



Erica L. Green 7:00 p.m. EDT, April 8, 2014  Baltimore Sun

Four new schools are vying to open in Baltimore in the next two years, including an early college high school that would bring a successful model to the city that allows students to earn a college degree by the time they graduate.

The Bard High School Early Colleges network, which operates five tuition-free college programs in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, applied to open a campus in Baltimore in the 2015-2016 school year.

The organization applied to operate a "contract school," meaning it would have an entrance criteria, that would serve 500 students in grades nine through twelve. Its college-preparatory programs focus on a liberal arts and sciences education, and allows students to complete an associate's degree by the time they graduate high school.

The Baltimore Curriculum Project, which currently runs three charter schools in the city, applied to add Govans Elementary School to its portfolio.

The school would serve 459 students in grades Pre-K through fifth grade. The application says that the BCP would bring an "array of experiences" such as visual and performing arts and physical activities.

Morgan State University has applied to save the Bluford Drew Jemison STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) Academy, which has been on the district's radar for closure.

The school was one of two all-male academies started for young men in the city -- and highly sought after by parents -- but whose operators faced several challenges and recently had their charter licenses revoked. The city school board, however, has searched for a way that the school could stay in operation.

Morgan has proposed to operate the school, which would be called the Morgan State STEM Institute, for 644 boys in grades six through twelve. The school would continue to focus on the sciences and has the goal that "all students will be able to graduate within a five to six year period with a high school diploma and an associate's degree in a STEM area.

In 2016-2017, the National Education Partners has applied to operate William C. March Elementary School. The school would serve 850 students in East Baltimore.

The applicants will participate in a public review over the next several weeks. The school board will vote to accept or reject the applications on May 27.

____________________________________________

Returning to warehousing of people with special needs and disabilities because corporations and the rich will no longer pay taxes will include not only students with physical disabilities.....it will include students who are low achievers.  Remember, THE BEST OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD are the people getting what has been standard public education in America.  Not many students are going to test into Advanced Placement.



Governor Cuomo and charter lobby 'strong-arming' bid to evict special needs students in favor of corporate education expansion

NYC Parents vs. Wall Street-Backed Charter Schoolswww.commondreams.orgParents protest on the steps of the New York City Department of Education on Tuesday, April 8. (Photo: @NYChange/ Twitter)Parents and public school advocates staged a dramatic protest outside the..


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March 18th, 2014

3/18/2014

0 Comments

 
LISTEN TO THE CANDIDATES FOR DEMOCRATIC OFFICES.  DO THEY EDUCATE YOU AS TO THE PROBLEMS OF MAKING OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION PRIVATE, OR DO THEY TALK OF SMALL 'PROGRESSIVE' BONES THAT GO WITH THIS CORPORATIZED SYSTEM?

NEO-LIBERALS ARE PRIVATIZING PUBLIC EDUCATION AS FAST AS REPUBLICANS AND IT KILLS DEMOCRACY AND WILL MAKE OUR NATION THIRD WORLD.


Efficient and effective workers make US global corporations more competitive they say!  Well, that has nothing to do with citizens and their quality of life since these corporations are stealing everything that is public!

Regarding corporate NPR/APM calling higher education funding 'entitlements that are history':

Isn't it LOL when corporate media describes as entitlement the higher education funding taxpayers receive for spending their entire working life paying taxes?  Education funding is of course a citizen's decision to use the tax revenue they pay in a way they want.  On the other hand, corporate NPR/APM taking taxpayer money while working as corporate media are receiving corporate welfare.  See the difference?

Let's talk about the state of higher education funding.  I have pointed out more than once the cost of higher education is too high because of the corporatization of universities these few decades.  It is the administrative structures around this corporatization that American taxpayers and students paying high tuition are supporting.  So, dismantling this corporate structure is the solution to lower student tuition not to mention getting back to rebuilding higher education in America.  We are ranked second world in higher education because of this corporatization.  So, policies offered by Maryland democratic candidate for governor Anthony Brown in 'capping higher education tuition' are of course not the answer.  What Brown is saying is that it is fine to corporatize our universities and charge what are already too high tuition prices.  Brown will also continue O'Malley's defunding of higher education grants and financial aid with the goal of sending most Maryland students to this cheapened vocational track education path.  THAT'S NOT VERY DEMOCRATIC IS IT?  INDEED, NONE OF THIS MEETS THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM.  Only neo-liberals would take education policy in favor of corporations at the expense of public interest.

Maryland just passed a budget funding that provides scholarships for KIPP charter chain students only.  KIPP is a national charter chain that will become the private charter structure that takes public schools and the Maryland Assembly place bias in this system to encourage more students to attend KIPP for example.  You keep hearing from WYPR how Maryland colleges are in high gear with corporatized campuses full of free labor and taxpayer-funded start-ups

BUT YOU DO NOT HEAR THAT MARYLAND UNEMPLOYMENT IS 36% AND THE LABOR MARKET IN MARYLAND IS BUILT FOR CONSTANT LABOR TURNOVER.

All across America citizens are protesting, shouting, and demanding these policies stop.  Haven't heard about all this?  You must be listening to corporate media.  You know more about Ukraine then you do events in your own country.  THE OUTPOURING OF AMERICANS AGAINST THE CORPORATIZATION OF PUBLIC K-COLLEGE IS HUGE!!!!!!  IT'S THE LARGEST MOVEMENT SINCE THE CIVIL/LABOR RIGHTS MOVEMENTS IN THE 1960s and yet, Maryland moves along with the same corporate policies.  That's when you know the politics in your state are crony and neo-liberal.

AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION IS PROTECTED IN THE CONSTITUTION AND IS THE CORNERSTONE OF OUR DEMOCRACY.  WE EDUCATE TO GIVE ALL CITIZENS THE ABILITY TO BE LEADERS OF BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT AND TO BE CITIZENS WHO EXERCISE THEIR RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.

Using Federal higher education money to build corporate structures within universities and state using state higher education funds to market overseas for foreign students and to build a tiered structure of online degrees to track most students is a very, very, very bad policy for democracy.  The first thing an autocratic society does when it represses its citizens is take control of education and media.  SOUND FAMILIAR??????  YOU BETCHA!



Marjorie Elizabeth Wood

  Op-Ed Published: Friday 14 March 2014

Once hailed as the “Great Equalizer,” public higher education today has arguably become a driver of inequality.

Striking for the Public University

Earlier this year, hundreds of faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago canceled their classes and went on strike. In the first faculty walkout in UIC history, they picketed the campus for two days.

What could professors possibly have to complain about?

Nearly everything. And it might not be what you think.

Today, more than half of all faculty are part-time, or adjunct, instructors. Many of them lack employer-provided health insurance coverage and job security. When accounting for temporary, full-time positions such as lecturers and visiting faculty, a whopping 76 percent of all instruction in American higher education is provided by contingent, temporary, or part-time educators.


But professors are not only worried about income and job security. The UIC faculty strikers, for instance, have broader concerns about a trend of declining investment in American public universities and a related rise in crippling student debt. Nationwide, public investment in state universities — previously made possible by progressive taxation — has declined sharply over the last 30 years. To make up for lost state funds, universities raised tuition. What used to be a collective burden borne by taxpayers was transferred onto the backs of students. Now at a staggering $1.1 trillion, student loan debt has surpassed Americans’ total credit card debt.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of public university employees are doing better than ever. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, there has been a sea change in executive compensation, with pay packages for some public university presidents surpassing $2 million. Hiring of administrative staff has exploded, growing more than three times the rate of faculty hires.

UIC’s Dr. John Casey, a lecturer and leader in the faculty union, has witnessed these developments firsthand since he started as a UIC graduate student 13 years ago.

“There is a sense that the school is being taken away from us,” Casey said. As he described it, a build-up of administrative staff at UIC has led to “corporate management” making unilateral decisions about the welfare of faculty and students, usually to the detriment of both.

Not surprisingly, the faculty members who went on strike are demanding higher pay and better working conditions. But as Casey explained, they also feel that something bigger is at stake. “This is not just about the money,” he said. “We want the entire city to understand that this is their school.”

The sense that public higher education itself is under attack has led to remarkable unity among  among both permanent and temporary faculty. They’ve become so unified that the faculty members created a localized union for the cause. A unique aspect of UIC United Faculty is that it is evenly comprised of both groups. “This aspect of our union is special to us,” said Casey. “We know what we’re fighting for.”

While the rise of inequality has become a familiar story, inequality in the university is a lesser-known — and more ironic — tale. Once hailed as the “Great Equalizer,” public higher education today has arguably become a perpetuator of inequality. This stark reality at UIC fueled the rise of the faculty union. Underlying their demands is a collective sense of urgency to save a great public university.

UIC professors have set a powerful example. Other faculty around the country should follow their lead. The rest of us must stand behind them. Together, we can take back our public universities.

_______________________________________________

This will become the rule as almost no regulation and no public method of accountability or way to seek justice just opens this category of education to the same for-profit frauds last decade. This move to give accreditation to these online schools seeks to dismantle a long-proven and strong public higher education model of accreditation. We did not have a problem of graduates not being prepared to work, we have corporations telling us we will vocationalize our public education so that those newly hired will be ready for work day one. THAT IS THE FUNCTION OF HUMAN RESOURCES AND NOT OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM.

MARYLAND WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO ADOPT ALL OF THE ONLINE EDUCATION POLICIES AND NOW ACCREDITATION. THE QUALITY IS NOT THERE!


We could fully fund education grants and financial aid by simply recovering trillions of dollars in for-profit education industry fraud.  Rather than seeking justice, neo-liberals are simply building more private/public structures that will continue to defraud students and taxpayers while giving no results.  We do not have a broken system, we have neo-liberals working to end the first world public education that made this nation great.

STOP VOTING FOR NEO-LIBERALS.  RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AGAINST NEO-LIBERALS.



Induced to Fail?


 February 24, 2014 By Carl Straumsheim


A group of former Excelsior College students have sued the institution over its online associate degree program in nursing, claiming the self-paced, competency-based curriculum clashes with an expensive and "subjective" clinical exam.

In the complaint, filed in a federal district court in New York, 17 former students in Excelsior’s associate degree program in nursing from 11 different states say the college sold them “
an
 ‘educational’
 program
 that
 was
 devoid
 of
 any
 education,
 and
 ... an
 ‘objective’
 test,
 which
 was
 anything
 but
 objective.” The students, many of whom have decades of experience in the medical field, are suing Excelsior for breach of contract and deceptive
 or
 misleading
 practices.

The nursing program’s curriculum can be accessed online or, for students without Internet access, as a set of CD-ROMs. Once students have passed several nursing theory exams, completed 21 out of the 31 required credits and taken a computer-based clinical assessment test, they take the college's Clinical Performance in Nursing Examination. The 17 students, however, say the coursework did not prepare them for the CPNE, and that Excelsior withheld information about the test until they “had
 expended
 resources
 and
 were
 irreversibly
 committed
 to
 completing
 the
 program.”

“Excelsior
 did 
not 
provide 
consumers 
with
 the
 clinical 
education
 that
 it 
promises,” the complaint reads. “
Instead, 
it 
provides 
a 
test.”

Competency-based education has attracted considerable interest lately, but the learning approach is not new territory to Excelsior. The college has been in the field for a long time, and has in fact been cited by some as evidence of the potential for competency-based education.

Still, several states have in recent years raised questions about the preparedness of Excelsior’s graduates. California does not allow recent graduates to apply for registered nurse licenses, for example, and 14 other states require those who have passed the CPNE to log hundreds of hours of experience before becoming eligible.

Some studies have challenged those claims about competency-based education. In one example, the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning in 2012 found Excelsior’s graduates and students from other programs pass licensing exams at the same rate.

In a January 2013 exit survey, several recent graduates of the nursing program at Excelsior singled out the CPNE as the one aspect of the program they would change. Some recommended more practice materials and changing the test from a pass-fail system to a percentage score, while others called it “traumatic” and said it “ruined the [Excelsior College] experience.”

The CPNE costs $2,225 per attempt, and students are given a test date between three and eight months after signing up.

One of the 17 students, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not sign up to retake the test after failing it the first time. The student described being subjected to “psychological tricks,” such as facing constant interruptions and having to whisper the reasoning behind each step of the clinical process. At one point during the test, the student said a registered nurse walked up and said “I feel really sorry for you guys.”

“They were trying to induce you to fail,” the student said. “When you’re playing against a stacked deck, you don’t stand much of a chance of winning.”

The group of plaintiffs also includes Jillian Phelan, who passed the CPNE “solely 
because 
of
 the
 Examiner’s
 discretion.” In Phelan’s case, the complaint says her examiner “assisted
 [Phelan] on
 six
 (6)
 different
 occasions
 during
 her
 examination” and “informed
 [Phelan] that 
she
 felt
 that
 the 
program 
was
 ‘unfair.’”

John
 Hermina, who represents the 17 students, declined to speak on the record, as the complaint was filed as recently as Wednesday.

William M. Stewart, assistant vice president at Excelsior, also said the college is not yet in a position to comment. He pointed out that the nursing program has been accredited since 1975, and that more than 42,000 students have earned associate degrees from the college and are working as registered nurses.

John F. Ebersole, Excelsior's president, also highlighted the college's experience in the field. "Facts are that this is a 40-year-old program that has produced more than 50,000 graduates and has been designated a Center of Excellence in Nursing Education by the National League of Nursing for the past 7 years," he wrote in an email. "We are proud of what we do and what we have achieved."
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I have already shown on a number of occasions that the propaganda of a failing US public school system is bogus.  Indeed, urban schools were defunded with few resources and this does lower achievement.  The solution is to fund them and give them resources not to closed schools down and replace schools with charters that do nothing better.  Temporarily using private funding to skew results hides the long-term goals of ending equal opportunity and access to education.

Consider that currently over 70% of Americans have been brought to poverty and another 20% are not far above poverty.  The goal will be to have 90% of Americans in this captured tiered vocationally tracked system.  Add to that the goal of neo-liberalism's BEST OF THE BEST OF THE WORLD outreach to immigrants from around the world and you see that most leadership will go to a select few while the people who are citizens are largely impoverished.  THIS IS THE SOCIETAL STRUCTURE OF THIRD WORLD NATIONS. 

EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO DEMOCRATIC AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND PROTECTION UNDER LAW!


Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

March 15th, 2014 by admin |

by Diane Ravitch

Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Marcj 12, 2014 – A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school" usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn’t stop the claims and boasting.

It turns out that there is actually a scholar studying the phenomenon of the "the cultural production of ignorance."

He hasn’t looked at the attack on public schools, but his work shows how propaganda may be skillfully deployed to confuse and mislead the public. Michael Hiltzik of theLos Angeles Times writes about the work of Robert Proctor of Stanford University:

Robert Proctor doesn’t think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don’t know can hurt you. And that there’s more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.

Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It’s a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.

The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson’s files, "Doubt is our product." Big Tobacco’s method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo’s author wrote, but to establish a "controversy."

When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society.
Big Tobacco’s program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.

FUD was pioneered decades ago. Now public education is the target, and privatizing it is the goal. I hope Professor Proctor turns his attention to this issue, where a well-funded propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential Democratic institution.

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

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WELL, IF PENNY PRITZER LIKES IT IT MUST BE BAD POLICY!  NO ONE HATES LABOR AND JUSTICE MORE THAN THIS HYATT HEIRESS.


ALL ACADEMICS AND EDUCATION ADVOCATES SAY THERE IS NO SKILLS DEFICIT-----ONLY CORPORATIONS WANTING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM TO BE THEIR HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENTS


This is a great article that shows how neo-liberals are moving all government agencies towards working for corporations and ending Federal agencies working to protect the public interest.

We saw Obama and Arne Duncan privatize the Department of Education....it is run by Wall Street.  Race to the Top privatizes K-12.  This gives a good look at how the Department of Labor is now being redesigned to work for corporations.  That is why Maryland's Perez was placed into this position.....Maryland is well on its was to privatization of K-college.

We see here that Labor is now about preparing workers for jobs.  Corporations say they want workers ready to work day one and neo-liberals are giving it to them.  This is what privatizing all of our community colleges is about.  Each time a person changes jobs they will have to go back to community college to start the next job and we know in this environment, job assignments are short.  So, over and over and over people will come to community colleges just as they used to go to Human Resources and go through a few weeks of job orientation.  Only now, it is all paid by taxpayers.  The funding for training all employees for all jobs will be tens of billions of dollars.  See why there will be no money for student aid to stronger 4 year universities?  All education help will go to job training and career certificates.  Bye Bye equal opportunity and access to education.  So, with corporate business structures at colleges you have students working for free while paying tuition with no guarantees of a job.  Remember, the social democratic structure had students graduating from school and entering union apprenticeships paid for by unions and businesses hiring and the employee was paid for the work done.  See how that maximizes profits?


THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU----KILLING DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES TO MAXIMIZE CORPORATE PROFIT.  SEE RAWLINGS-BLAKE STANDING WITH THE GROUP?  SHE IS THERE BECAUSE SHE DOES WHATEVER A CORPORATION TELLS HER TO DO.

Below you see Chicago is ground zero for these schools as job training policies and guess what?  Obama and Rahm Emanuel are from Chicago!  GO GUESS!  Also from Chicago-----the strongest protest organization of community groups against these education policies handing our schools to corporations.

Feds to Mayors: Work with Industry on Workforce Development Officials from the departments of Labor and Commerce told city leaders at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting to take a hands-on approach with their area businesses to match workers with jobs.

by Chris Kardish | January 23, 2014  Governing

Mayor Scott Smith, of Mesa, Ariz., speaks during the opening press conference of the 82nd winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. AP/Evan Vucci 17  35  2  18  0         Labor economists may be divided over how much the gap between employer needs and employee skills is driving long-term unemployment, but there’s no shortage of anecdotes at the ground level about businesses that can’t fill job openings. The country’s mayors are in a position to do something about it, federal officials told an audience at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C.

Representatives of both the departments of Commerce and Labor offered sobering statistics on the nation’s unemployment problem, activities at the federal level to alleviate joblessness and highlights of innovative programs at the city level.

About 10.4 million people are unemployed, with another 2.4 million not counted as unemployed because they’ve given up their search. Job openings are up 66 percent since the end of the recession, but hiring rates are up only a quarter since that time.  Sometimes those unfilled vacancies require businesses to raise wages, review the skills needed for the job or take other steps, but government also needs to reassess how it invests in workforce development, said Kate McAdams, senior advisor to Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.  

“We need to bring everyone together in partnership to ensure training responds to industry needs,” she said.

There's considerable debate about the seriousness of the so-called skills gap, with some economists blaming corporations for low pay and others insisting labor markets show no difference in demand between low-skilled and high-skilled jobs .
But employer surveys show that, at least among the minds of business leaders, a gap does exist. In an Adecco survey of 500 executives last fall, 92 percent said there's a serious skills gap in the U.S. workforce, though 44 percent of respondents said "soft skills" such as communication and critical thinking are the most serious deficits.

The skills gap has also dominated state-level policy, appearing again and again in gubernatorial State of the State speeches opening 2014.
In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal wants to expand tuition-free technical training to more high-demand fields, low-interest loans at community colleges and launch a task force with businesses to better understand how to align educational offerings with the needs of private industry. In Idaho, where state leaders are rebranding K-12 education “K-through-career,” Gov. “Butch” Otter is calling for more instructors in high-demand programs to reduce the time needed to graduate.

But McAdams noted many cities are taking proactive steps, forming public-private organizations that work as job recruiters and trainers. Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, launched in 2012, is one such initiative. The nonprofit provides free recruitment, placement and training services to employers. A Chicago-based health care technology company called GoHealth recently announced it’s on pace to hire more than 650 new employees this year with Chicagoland’s help, well above initial forecasts of 250. More than 140 of those employees so far have come through the organization’s “train-to-hire” program as licensed insurance advisors and sales representatives.

Chicago has also worked aggressively to revamp training through its community college system by partnering with more than 100 businesses for direct input on curricula, course offerings and job placements. In Chicago's community colleges, associate degrees are now built around occupational certifications that offer better jobs and pay. Students can earn credentials that offer employment but continue working toward a full degree.

Tying class offerings to workforce needs also extends to K-12 education, said Mayor Christopher Cabaldon of West Sacramento. That means finding ways to give subjects real-world applications, forging relationships with businesses to encourage youth “apprenticeships” and encouraging all paths to training, he said. In a city with the highest number of job openings per capita in the region but one of the worst unemployment rates, the leadership needs to try something new in the area of economic development, Calbadon said.  

“As a mayor, much of my focus is finding new companies and building around those we have. That strategy has diminishing returns and is not addressing in really deep ways…our long-term political responsibilities,” he said.

______________________________________


Thanks to the AFT for getting in
the stop privatization protest.  Please shout out in Maryland as Baltimore is building a template for the state!


Check out Cashing in on
Kids and help us spread the word by sharing with your social networks.


American Federation of Teachers


For-profit charter schools that operate in the dark without basic public transparency and without strong public control too often put their bottom line ahead of the public interest
and high-quality public education.

  Is the rapid expansion of charter schools about helping kids learn or about enabling for-profit operators to rake in millions in tax dollars?   Find out.

So, last week, in partnership
with In the Public Interest, the AFT launched the
website Cashing in on
Kids—a one-stop shop for the facts about for-profit
education in
America.

While we are working to reclaim the promise of public education, these for-profit charters are cashing in on kids. Help us call them out.

The site profiles five for-profit charter school operators:

K12 Inc., Imagine Schools, White Hat Management, Academica and Charter Schools USA.

It identifies several issues that need to be addressed in charter school policy, including public control, equity, transparency and accountability, and it analyzes the impact of profit-taking and privatization in charter schools, where student results are mixed and mismanagement is widespread.

Curious to see how Jeb Bush’s friends are cashing in on kids? Check it out.

We built this site because we want parents, educators and policymakers to be better informed about the impact of profit, money and private interests in education, particularly charter schools.

Check out Cashing in on Kids, and help us
spread the word by sharing with your social networks.

In unity,

Randi
Weingarten
AFT President

P.S. Don’t forget to “like” Cashing
in on Kids on Facebook and to follow it on Twitter.

___________________________________________

As the American people shout 'WE DO NOT WANT THIS EDUCATION REFORM' neo-liberals working for global corporations push harder and faster to get this in place.  Please note that when education is taken out of your communities and privatized you will be losing the last public place of community cohesion.  Having individual students locked into computer lessons and worst, virtual classrooms deliberately disconnects people from their communities.

All of this would not be happening without Race to the Top.  Obama and neo-liberals pressed this republican education policy by holding states hostage to Federal education funding and in the process gave states the right to choose educational platforms.....ending Federal control of public education.  While Common Core and testing seek to centralize, the structure of public schools is being deliberately torn apart.

MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS SAY 'WE ARE MOVING FORWARD NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK'!




Teachers Union Launching Massive Campaign Against Education Reform Movement



Posted: 12/05/2013 5:03 pm EST  |  Updated: 12/05/2013 6:37 pm EST

  The American Federation of Teachers union is unveiling a seven-figure advertisement campaign ahead of Dec. 9, a day that the group has billed as a "national day of action" against the education reform movement and push alternative solutions.

“Public education is under attack and underfunded throughout our country," the advertisements read, according to materials AFT, the nation's second-largest teachers union, provided to The Huffington Post. "Now, communities are coming together for our schools and our children to champion great public schools as the heart of our neighborhoods. … Together, we can make sure our schools are places where all kids can thrive and the voices of those closest to the classroom are heard.”

In an interview, AFT President Randi Weingarten said the AFT is spending about $1.2 million on the push. The radio, online and print advertisements, including a full-page ad in USA Today, are running through Dec. 9 in 30 cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia. The messaging is framed around the idea of "reclaiming the promise" of public education, according to AFT materials.

Weingarten said various protests are expected to take place in at least 60 cities on Dec. 9. For the day of action, AFT has collaborated with the National Education Association, America's biggest teachers union, groups like the Schott Foundation, and community organizations like the Chicago-based Journey for Justice Alliance. The groups are circulating a document, "the principles that unite us," to outline their cause: making sure public schools "are public institutions"; fostering the creation of community schools; fighting so-called privateers; respect for teachers; and schools that are "welcoming and respectful places for all" and fully funded. The document says the groups do not entirely oppose charter schools, but that those schools must be regulated and accountable to the public.

The unions are calling the movement a groundswell of organic support against the usurping of public schools by "corporate interests" that want to make a "market-based system of schooling" involving high-stakes testing and attacks on collective bargaining. An AFT one-pager obtained by HuffPost lists the day's purpose as "to begin to create a national echo chamber for our vision and narrative." The memo calls on groups to "mobilize large numbers of parents, students, community residents and union members" to "tell stories of the impact of the corporate agenda on students," and, in some cases, "target an agent of the corporate agenda."

Weingarten said the idea behind the campaign came from a human rights conference in Los Angeles and through town halls AFT held in different cities. "We want to fight austerity, but we also want to come up with a proactive way of trying to change public education," she said. "You see a grassroots movement that says no -- not just no we have enough, no we're critical -- but these are the kind of reforms we need to help kids succeed in life, college and career. We thought it was important to have one day to mark that."

In Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union is expecting 500 teachers, students and residents to hold a press conference near City Hall and march to the State of Illinois building to deliver a wish list to the governor.

Friday, in advance of the Day of Action, activists in Austin, Texas, are slated to march from the Capitol South Steps to the Federal Building to rally with unions and advocate for their agenda. In Boise, Idaho, teachers and unions plan to advocate outside the Capitol for more funding.

Weingarten acknowledged that the effort is a sort of rehash of previous campaigns. "People have been engaged in this effort for awhile. This is bringing people together like we have never done before in a thoughtful and deliberative process that is also about action," she said. "It's the growing of a movement."

Others took a different view. "The kinds of things that they have been against -- more options for families in low-performing schools, higher standards for students and stronger accountability for results -- those are all things that the public is strongly in favor of," argued Tim Daly, who oversees TNTP, an alternative teacher certification group. "Instead of being against things that the public is in favor of, there have been efforts to shift attention to red herring issues like privatization."
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December 30th, 2013

12/30/2013

0 Comments

 
EDUCATION POLICY IN AMERICA BECOMES ALL ABOUT LABOR AND CORPORATE PROFITS.  DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND LICENSING REGULATORY AGENCIES IN STATES ARE NOW TIED WITH STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION----

AND AS WITH CORPORATIZATION OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES, ALL THE PUBLIC MONEY FOR EDUCATION IS PAYING HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY TO ADMINISTRATIVE SALARIES, PRIVATE CONSULTING FEES, AND EDUCATION BUSINESSES LIKE PEARSON.




What needs to change asks the panel below--------the politicians pushing this mess.  We need to send these pols packing so we can go back to building strong public education!  Please listen to this video-taped panel on education policy and ask----why are we not having these conversations in Maryland?

Why are these education professionals shouting that Race to the Top is bad, and in Maryland the education leaders are saying the opposite? 

IT IS WHO THE GOVERNOR AND MAYOR APPOINT IN EDUCATION LEADERSHIP.  SEE WHY DEMOCRATIC STRONGHOLDS LIKE BALTIMORE AND NOW PRINCE GEORGES COUNTY HAS LOST ITS ABILITY TO ELECT SCHOOL BOARD OFFICIALS! 

When school administrators are making hundreds of thousands of dollars and have little background in education.....when billions are being spent in education businesses that make huge profits with no positive effect----you see a fleecing of our education system.


CTU President Karen Lewis joins us to discuss the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind.


‪#‎1u‬ The Professors | Dec. 22, 2013 - No Child Left Behind: Time for a Change? | WYCC PBS...video.wycc.orgCTU President Karen Lewis joins us to discuss the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind.
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If you look at the article below this one you will see all of the educational programming that leads to high-skilled jobs and education readiness for future higher education are being dismantled supposedly because of costs constraints but it isn't a lack of money, it is where the money is being funneled.  If public money is going to replace a businesses human resources department and pay for ordinary job training for an individual each time he/she changes jobs, you are not going to have money to expose these students to more sophisticated skills development.

What we want to do is allow unions and labor organizations that have always handled this take that expense and connect our K-12 to all of the corporate facilities built on public university campuses.  Those hundreds of billions used to build 'world-class' campuses need to come back to the communities and tying them to our schools is a first step!


Budget cuts kill acclaimed space program for students at Northeast High

Several NASA astronauts visited the program over the years; at right is a photograph of astronaut Michael Anderson, who died in the Columbia accident in 2003. The closure is "really, really unfortunate," said junior Leon Frame, who was an astronaut this month in the final simulated mission. (ERIC MENCHER / File Photograph)GALLERY: ERIC MENCHER. In this photo, John Schneider (left) and… By Kristen A. Graham, Inquirer Staff WriterPosted: December 24, 2013

For 50 years, Northeast High School students have taken part in sophisticated simulated space missions that halted asteroids speeding toward Earth, repaired satellites, and landed on the moon.

That era is over.

Last week, the nationally acclaimed Space Research Center after-school program - and dozens of other academic clubs - were eliminated, yet more victims of the Philadelphia School District's ongoing budget cuts.

"It's really, really unfortunate," Northeast junior Leon Frame said. He was an astronaut this month on the program's final mission.

The Space Research Center program, known as SPARC, was just one of dozens of extracurricular activities dropped at Northeast because of fiscal pressures. Debate, dance, Science Olympiad, and other clubs also were cut.

Sports are funded by the district's central office and were not affected.

The academic clubs had operated with no budget since September, principal Linda Carroll said, and teachers volunteered in the hope money could be found to keep activities going.

But recently, "the people who have been running things said, 'As much as we want to do it, we can't,' " Carroll said. "I don't fault them. People get tired of being disrespected. They bank on our passion."

Carroll hopes to restore the clubs, and laments their loss.

"I feel so badly," she said. "The kids are the ones who are suffering."

The space program, which had 120 student participants this year, has a rich history.

In the early 1960s, at the height of the space race, physics teacher Robert A.G. Montgomery launched it to pique students' interest when the United States was in a frenzy to beef up science education. Early flight simulations happened on the auditorium stage, with a rudimentary capsule made of lumber.

NASA donated money early on, and it recognized the program on multiple occasions. Northeast's Medical, Engineering and Aerospace magnet program - which still exists - began because of it.

Eventually, a separate wing was built for the after-school club and the magnet program, with elaborate capsules built on site.


Several NASA astronauts have visited the program, and one of them, Philadelphia native Chris Ferguson, was honorary flight director and teleconferenced with students in 2007 and 2008.

Students studied engineering, robotics, computer science, and trained in CPR and first aid. Their work culminated every year in a two-day simulated space mission that required months of planning.

Funding the program has been a continual problem, said retired teacher Anthony Matarazzo, who served as its director from 1991 to 2005.

"They almost did away with it for the last few years," Matarazzo said. "They did flights, but teachers were volunteering. Each year, there was a little less."

The loss of the space program is a loss for Philadelphia, Matarazzo said. It drew students from across the city.

"It was a marvelous program. The kids who went through this program have become unbelievable assets to this country," he said. Alumni include engineers, professors, surgeons, computer scientists, and others.

Senior Jeremy Cruz, one of the program's managers, was crestfallen at the news of its elimination, news he had to deliver to his classmates in an emotional meeting last week.

"We were heartbroken, all of us, even the teachers," Cruz said.

He and others are frustrated that academic clubs were cut but athletics remain, and they have vowed to fight.


"We were angry. We were sad. But we weren't just going to take this sitting down," Cruz said.

Students have reached out to Mayor Nutter and others in the hope someone can help. Cruz estimated it would take several thousand dollars to restore the program.

Cruz's mother, Lisa Maldonado, knows what the space research program has done for her son. He's not into sports, but this activity gave him a chance to shine.

"This teaches them about teamwork, and they loved doing it - they loved the flights, everything," Maldonado said. "To take this away from them is such a shame."

The loss of the space program is a symptom of a larger problem. Systemwide, massive money troubles have stripped schools of staff, programs, and services. Many schools have not run clubs this year.

At Northeast, the city's largest school with more than 3,000 pupils, things are so dire there was no cash to pay for batteries for students' calculators. A fund-raiser was held to drum up the $1,600 needed to keep the calculators powered.

Principal Carroll knows what losing the space program and other clubs means.

"If you want children to get a quality education, you can't just talk about it - you have to back it up," she said. "We want to keep their interest, but we just don't have the funding for these extracurriculars."

_____________________________________________


One of the biggest complaints I hear from people in the workplace is that these programs do not emphasize workplace safety and teach employees labor laws and OSHA safety standards so we have workers entering the workplace without knowledge of these labor regulations and agency requirements.  Accidents and on-the-job injuries are at a record high and people do not feel safe while working their jobs because of this lack of readiness.  Apprenticeships would normally last several years where these job training programs are often several months at best.

So, as corporations disregard OSHA and labor law, as the Federal agencies tasked with overseeing workplace violations, this is another step towards ending New Deal labor protections.  In Maryland, the DLLR has no operations looking at workplace abuse, employee exploitation, and workplace safety......AND THAT IS THE AGENCY THAT DOES THIS.

We think that DLLR needs to spend its time and resources doing the job it was tasked to do and allow corporations and unions to train people for specific job readiness!



Putting employers in the driver's seat for job training New Md. program, other efforts across the country ask businesses to work together to close gaps in job seekers' skills


By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun 9:25 a.m. EST, December 29, 2013

Even as the manufacturing industry sheds jobs overall, a number of firms in Maryland want to hire — and aren't having an easy time of it.

That's what the Maryland Manufacturing Extension Partnership heard when the nonprofit talked to 40 employers this year. Most of the entry-level people the firms bring on don't work out, in part because it can be a culture shock to take a job in manufacturing for the first time, said Brian Sweeney, executive director of the manufacturing-assistance organization.

A new state program aims to fill such gaps with training designed and launched by employers. Twenty-nine groups in a variety of business sectors will get funding to analyze their needs and plan training next year, including the "boot camp" prep course envisioned by manufacturers, the state plans to announce Monday.

The Employment Advancement Right Now program, called EARN, is part of a national movement to get employers more deeply involved in efforts to develop a skilled workforce — a shift that has gathered steam in recent years as federal funding for training has shrunk.

Elisabeth A. Sachs, director of the EARN program for the state Labor Department, describes the benefits of the approach.

"Instead of … 'train and pray' — you sort of throw the money out there, hope people get a credential and then find a job — we're starting with strategically getting employers in an industry to the table and saying, 'What skill sets are missing, what curriculum changes, what on-the-job training, what expert teachers do you need to bring in … to get the skilled worker at the end of the investment?' "

The nation's major training programs in the 1970s, '80s and most of the '90s took a worker-centric approach.

"Very little was focused on understanding what employers needed," said Fred Dedrick, executive director of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, which aims to get industry more involved in training.

The 15-year-old Workforce Investment Act system requires states to appoint oversight boards made up mostly of employers. But Dedrick said that usually produces general ideas about needs — which he said is "not enough to build a program around."

Enter the industry partnerships, in which employers and industry groups in the same sector come up with specific plans for getting more trained job candidates. A growing number of states are encouraging and funding them.

"It's a real shift in the way we're doing occupational training in communities all over the country," said Rachel Gragg, federal policy director with the National Skills Coalition, which advocates for increased access to training.

Some Maryland employers organized years ago. The Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, for instance, was launched in 2005 with funding from local foundations to work on creating a bigger pipeline of trained entry-level workers.

In other cases, groups that help low-income people teamed with employers to make training more effective. Halethorpe-based Vehicles for Change, working with like-minded nonprofits including the Center for Urban Families and Catholic Charities of Baltimore, launched an auto detailing training program this fall with assistance from a local detailing firm.

Cockeysville-based Diamond Detail helped with the curriculum, donated equipment, trained the trainer and offered suggestions about how to organize the work area.

"Since they helped us set the program up, we're giving them first crack at our recently trained detailers," said Philip C. Holmes, director of the new Academy for Automotive Careers at Vehicles for Change.

Chuck Heinle, Diamond Detail's president, said he's hired three graduates already. The 190-employee company is growing fast and needs a pipeline of new employees. Heinle likes getting them already trained and with a reference from Vehicles for Change. The organization can monitor work habits, because students who finish the four-week training program temporarily stay on as paid apprentices.

Vehicles for Change is working to get other employers involved in the program — if only to come in and watch participants clean, polish and repair scratches in cars donated for low-income families.

"Our key strategy is to get the company to visit and see the quality of the work our students can do, and then our theory is, if they can see the demonstrated skills, the company may overlook some of the issues that our students are dealing with," Holmes said.

Homelessness, for instance. Four of the program's five apprentices are living in shelter arrangements such as transitional housing.

Tyrone Carter, one of the apprentices, lives at Christopher Place Employment Academy in Baltimore, a residential program run by Catholic Charities. As he cleaned a slightly dented Nissan last week, first with water and then with clay to pull out stubborn dirt and dust, Carter said he has two jobs now — detailer during the week and security guard in a homeless shelter on weekends.

_______________________________________________
If you look at the number of organizations tied to this nonprofit......many of them corporate representatives with some community organizations created just for the job training process.....and think to yourself

WE GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND EITHER WENT TO COLLEGE OR WAS HIRED TO A JOB AND TRAINED EITHER BY THAT BUSINESSES' HUMAN RESOURCES OR A LABOR APPRENTICESHIP.  WE GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE AND IF YOU HAD A DEGREE YOU WENT INTO MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT OR TO A PROFESSIONAL POSITION.

There was no need for this long list of organizations all taking public money to promote some kind of job training.  It is ridiculous and will lead to public money once going to strong advanced education now going to just placed people into individual jobs!


National Skills Coalition



Our Mission.

National Skills Coalition organizes broad-based coalitions seeking to raise the skills of America’s workers across a range of industries. We advocate for public policies that invest in what works, as informed by our members’ real-world expertise. And we communicate these goals to an American public seeking a vision for a strong U.S. economy that allows everyone to be part of its success.



How We Advance our Mission:

We organize.  We build multi-stakeholder coalitions that demonstrate broad-based support for a new national skills policy. We help our diverse coalition partners develop a common skills agenda that serves the common good. We then bring the real-world expertise of these workforce development practitioners into policy discussions.

We advocate.  We actively work to change policies. We do not focus on a narrow set of policies that impact a single stakeholder group, rather, we advocate across policy silos, ensuring that we’re helping all workers at every point in their careers. We also connect federal and state advocacy, providing policy expertise to our coalition partners to support their efforts both in Washington, DC, and in their state capitals.

We communicate.  We keep our members informed about policy efforts at the state and federal levels, providing timely and actionable information. We also reach out to people outside the workforce development field, helping our members reach new audiences and thereby better engage the American public.
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Below you see the words of educators in NYC in regards to Bloomberg and Wall Street's attempts to kill public education there.  Baltimore is a NYC satellite as Johns Hopkins is Bloomberg's to run.  We are seeing education policy straight from what is spoken of below brought to you by Alonzo and his privatizing Baltimore City School Board appointed by O'Malley.  Remember, the governor is appointing because Rawlings-Blake handed Baltimore City Schools to the state.

We need our schools back in Baltimore's hands and a mayor who works for the public interest and not Wall Street to reverse all these really bad policies as is happening in NYC.


Outsourcing Public Education: Things Fall Apart With The Incremental Privatization of NYC Public Schools
Jan. 27, 2007
1:19 pm
by Leo Casey


Edwize has obtained a copy of the RFP [Request for Proposal] for “Partnership School Support” that the New York City Department of Education has hidden from the general public in a remote precinct of its website accessible only to private vendors with passwords. In it one finds the details of one of the central components of the latest structural reorganization Chancellor Klein want to impose on New York City public schools.

What is remarkable about the RFP is the general plan to outsource to these private ‘partnership’ entities virtually all of the educational support functions traditionally fulfilled, for better or for worse, by the DOE. Instructional program, professional development, special education: all of these and more will now be organized and supported by the Partnerships. And in contrast to the current intermediaries such as New Visions and Urban Assembly, this RFP invites ‘for profit’ EMOs [Educational Maintenance Organizations, modeled after Health Maintenance Organizations or HMOs] like Edison Schools and Victory Schools to become Partnerships.

Corporate outsourcing operates generally on the theory that an organization should focus on its core mission, and turn over ancillary functions which are not central to its work to other institutions to run. Applied to education, such a theory would have an entity like the Department of Education outsourcing functions like transportation, food services and facilities, in order to focus on what is central to its mission, teaching and learning. One could argue that the DOE need not have top of the line luxury buses moving children or serve the most nutritious, most appealing food in its school cafeterias, and so could afford to outsource such services, but that it needs to provide world class, quality education in its classrooms.


But what the DOE proposes to do here is the inverse of this corporate model of outsourcing. They are taking the core mission of the Department of Education — the promotion of excellent teaching and learning which is at the center of any education worthy of that name — and are outsourcing it. Such a move is a tacit admission that those who make the decisions at Tweed are themselves incapable of providing educational leadership. They lack the most elemental understanding of how the world of instruction works, and so propose structural change upon structural change, with every one avoiding the substance of teaching and learning like it were the plague. If anything, they fear educational expertise, for it exposes their own lack of knowledge and leadership: just look at an organizational strategy which has systematically purged professional educators from the top echelons of the Department of Education. With this week’s retirement of Rose DePinto, in part a reaction to yet another structural revolution bringing more institutional chaos and instability, there remains in the inner councils of Tweed literally a single educator who knows what it takes to teach real classes and lead real schools — Eric Nadelstern, the last of the educational Mohicans. There is a sort of perverse logic to turning over to private entities what the current leadership at Tweed is so clearly incapable of doing itself, as a result of its own design.

The permanent revolution of endless structural reorganizations brought to us by Chancellor Klein has been bereft, from day one, of any educational vision and any instructional strategy for New York City schools. Instead, an obsession with structure — at its root, an obsession with power as an end in itself — has been the motivating spirit. The logic of this structure driven quest is the devolution not of educational decision making power and authority, but of accountability. The goal is to divest the Chancellor and the Department of Education of responsibility for what goes on in its own schools. Five years in charge, longer than any other Chancellor in two plus decades, and Joel Klein still blames everyone but himself for the shortcomings of New York City public schools. Now he wants to organize the entire school system around that political strategy of accountability and responsibility avoidance. A proper name for these perpetual organizational revolution and obsession with structure would be “Classroom Last.”

In this regard the details of the RFP are telling. Schools do not get to choose their partnerships — they can simply state their preferences, and the DOE makes the choices. Just as importantly, schools do not get to drop their partnerships if they find them useless or worse — only the DOE can do that. There is no system of accountability for the partnerships, no metrics by which their performance will be measured, no responsibility for their actual work in their schools — the best one can find is some vague language of how the DOE will canvas the schools to obtain their opinion on the quality of services provided. Most significantly, there is no responsibility and accountability for the Department of Education in Klein’s brave, new world. It turns over all of its educational support functions to the partnerships, and leaves for itself only the training of principals [the Leadership Academy], the setting of standards, the operation of the accountability system and actual decision making authority. All responsibility, all accountability rests with the schools.

This educational dystopia, one which Klein promoted in the recent Tough Choices, Tough Talks report, would remake public education in the image of what the Bush administration and the Louisiana Governor have done to the post-Katrina New Orleans public schools. The results in New Orleans should give anyone who cares about the education of children – and especially, children living in poverty who are at most risk for academic failure – serious pause about conducting more experiments in this vein. Make no mistake about it: we are clear that the management of our public schools needs to be reformed, and that real decision making power needs to be devolved to the schools, in the hands of school leaders, teachers, and parents. We need real empowerment of schools, not rhetorical empowerment smokescreens. We need public schools accountable to the public, not outsourced to private entities in a perpetual deferral of accountability by its top leadership. Klein’s “Classroom Last” will not accomplish these ends, but only make matters worse. It — and the New Orleans public schools — is a world perhaps best captured in the title of Chinua Achebe’s novel of post-colonial Africa, borrowed from a William Butler Yeats’ poem: The center can not hold. Things fall apart.

The way forward for New York City public schools is not putting up for sale the leadership of teaching and learning in New York City public schools. Rather, it is the replacement of a Chancellor of New York City public schools incapable of providing educational leadership with a Chancellor who can do precisely that. Since you can’t lead us in teaching and learning, Joel Klein, step aside for someone who can, someone who will accept responsibility and embrace accountability for himself and his administration, someone who will set about restoring the professional educational talent you have driven from the management of New York City public schools, someone who will empower New York City public schools to do their best.


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LET'S LOOK AT ONE ISSUE AS REGARDS EDUCATION AND JOB TRAINING......PRE-K. 

Now, pre-K is good, we like more money for pre-K right?  Only, none of the money gets to the classroom.....it is all administrative and building structures.

JOB TRAINING IS STARTING IN PRE-K WITH THESE NEO-LIBERALS.


Keep in mind the panel in the education discussion above stated clearly that none of the funding was getting to the schools and all are being sent to administrative agencies not even connected to education.  Keep in mind as well that Maryland has a long history of being at the low end of all social welfare funding.  Look at where we were in 2004.  Now, in Baltimore with tiered per-student funding and underserved and special needs children getting the least----most of our schools cannot even afford to buy toilet paper (unless a private corporation has partnered and donates tons of money).

I showed you how private non-profits are regarded as offering little help and actually appear to be fronts to move money.  Now, that's not ALL private non-profits, but those attached to these education reforms are just that.  From Special Needs to Wellness private non-profits, parents are seeing nothing useful from them and are shouting they are taking away all public voice on these issues.  INDEED, THAT IS WHAT THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS COMING WITH THIS REFORM ARE MEANT TO DO!

Look at yet another education issue that will take public education money and consider where they are going to spend that money.  Remember, the goal with education privatization is to create a Pre-K - college tracking of students through testing and assignment to vocational tracks from that testing.  So, we can bet that the pre-K funding listed below in the Federal stimulus is all about creating these education testing and structures for pre-K. 

THE CLASSROOMS THEMSELVES WILL GET ALMOST NOTHING......WHICH IS WHAT THE PANEL ABOVE IS REFERRING.




Costs Per Child for Early ChildhoodEducation and CareComparing Head Start, CCDF Child Care, andPrekindergarten/Preschool Programs

(2003/2004)Douglas J. BesharovJustus A. MyersandJeffrey S. MorrowAugust 31, 2007Welfare Reform AcademyUniversity of MarylandAmerican Enterprise Institute1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20036www.welfareacademy.org


Of those states with a prekindergarten or preschool program, state spending varied substantially, from a low of about $721 in Maryland to a high of about $9,305 in New Jersey(about $697 and about $9,000, respectively, in 2004 dollars)




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Remember how casinos and their profits were going to bring money to education coffers and we see it all being diverted to development projects around the casinos?  Job training for casino workers is education they say!  That is what is happening with all of the funding below.  It sounds great that funds are going to underserved schools, or funding head start but what are these private non-profits offering?

As we see with after-school programs attached to underserved schools.....it is more of the worst in education environment you can provide for students.  Pre-K will be more of the same.


DEMAND THAT RACE TO THE TOP AND EDUCATION FUNDING GO TO STRENGTHEN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND NOT BUILD A SYSTEM OF PRIVATE NON-PROFITS SERVING AS SCHOOL SUBSTITUTES!

The Stimulus Package: Education and Job Training By FARHANA HOSSAIN, AMANDA COX, JOHN McGRATH and STEPHAN WEITBERG



Category Programs Cost

Education and Job Training; Aid to States Help states prevent cuts to essential services like educationmore » $53.6 billion

Education and Job Training; Aid to Individuals Increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500, from $4,850 to $5,350 $15.6 billion

Education and Job Training; Tax Cuts for Individuals Expand higher education tax creditsmore » $13.9 billion

Education and Job Training Provide additional money to schools serving low-income childrenmore » $13.0 billion

Education and Job Training Provide additional money for special educationmore » $12.2 billion

Aid to States; Education and Job Training Create new bonds for improvements in public educationmore » $10.9 billion

Education and Job Training Finance job training programsmore » $4.0 billion

Education and Job Training Increase financing for Head Start and Early Head Startmore » $2.1 billion

Education and Job Training Finance technology upgrades in schoolsmore » $650 million

Education and Job Training; Aid to States Help states and local school districts track student data and improve teacher qualitymore » $550 million

Education and Job Training; Health Train primary health care providers, including doctors and nursesmore » $500 million

Education and Job Training; Energy; Unemployment Train workers for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy fields $500 million

Education and Job Training
; Aid to States; Unemployment Help states find jobs for unemployed workers $500 million Education and Job Training Provide additional money for College Work-Study program $200 million


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If you look at Baltimore City schools all of the education programs having to do with students becomes attached to private non-profits, yet if you look below at the wealthy Montgomery County where democratic institutions still work-----the public schools are the ones getting the funding and growing strong public schools.

Baltimore City schools are largely charters and vocational academies and private non-profits control all student enrichment......only many of the families are not feeling the enrichment.  After school programs are largely just more of the reading and math online training that fills the public schools in the city. 

REMEMBER HOW THE PANEL ABOVE DESCRIBED THE TOTAL EMPHASIS ON READING AND MATH TO THE DETRIMENT OF ALL OTHER SUBJECTS?  THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE IN BALTIMORE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.



Montgomery County
Grantee: Montgomery County Community Action Agency


Delegate Agency:

  • Montgomery County Public Schools
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Now, we know the reason Baltimore City as with other urban schools like Chicago and Philadelphia do not get the money Montgomery County does is that the majority of students are underserved and special needs.  The funding is being kept from these 'public' schools and placed in the hands of selected charters and religious organizations for the most part.  The programs that these groups offer are often tied with the national education businesses pushing privately developed programs.  Where an individual school designs each program to fit its community's needs.

For those thinking this is happening only in poor schools think again......middle-class schools are getting these canned programs as well.


Head Start The Y of Central Maryland

is one of the largest providers of Head Start services in Maryland. We are the Grantee for Head Start in Baltimore County and are a Delegate of the Baltimore City Head Start program. Our main objective is to prepare young, economically disadvantaged children for success in school and life. We provide comprehensive early intervention to low-income children and their families and help support parents as the first and primary educator of their children. Collectively, we serve more than 950 infants, toddlers and preschool children through our Head Start programs.



Baltimore City
Grantee: Baltimore City Head Start/Mayor's Office of Human Services 


Delegate Agencies:

  • Baltimore Metropolitan Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc
  • Dayspring Head Start
  • Emily Price Jones Head Start
  • Morgan State University Head Start
  • St. Bernadine's Head Start
  • St. Jerome’s Head Start
  • St. Veronica’s Head Start
  • St. Vincent De Paul Head Start
  • Umoja Head Start Academy
  • Union Baptist/Harvey Johnson Head Start
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As you see  below all of this is tied with private corporate non-profits and you can believe that Maryland is just the same.  We do not have the media coverage on this until after things happen......but it will be the same as Johns Hopkins is behind Baltimore's education policy and they are neo-cons just as in Georgia.

Posted: 11:20 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, 2013

All eyes on pre-k when Arne Duncan and U.S. business leaders converge here Monday

By Maureen Downey



Stephanie Blank is the chairman of the board of directors of GEEARS, the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. Carol Tome is the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Services of The Home Depot. 

They wrote this guest column to highlight Monday's 2013 National Business Leader Summit in Atlanta where U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will discuss the importance of investment in early learning to strengthen the economy and global competitiveness. 

 The summit, hosted by ReadyNation-America’s Promise Alliance and the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students (GEEARS), will bring together business executives and public officials to discuss support for early learning to build the nation’s workforce and strengthen the economy.

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Math Curriculum for Special Ed aligned to Common Core Standardswww.ablenetinc.com/
Curriculum/Equals-Mathematics-Program 

Equals is a Pre K-12 curriculum that provides the best in mathematics instruction for educators who work with special needs students or in alternative education programs.


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This is what vocational tracking gives you and in Chicago it starts with pre-K.  Remember, Arne Duncan and Obama come from Chicago and pushed this last decade on the citizens of Chicago and it is now being exported.  We know how much all parents and families are shouting against these reforms in Chicago and NYC.


It is not only the poor shouting so do not assume this is happening only in poor areas......it is happening to middle-class schools as well.  I Maryland, Baltimore is building a private structure for schools that will be exported to the state once finished


Cramming for kindergarten testsParents hiring tutors to prep preschoolers for CPS selective-enrollment exam

February 14, 2011|By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Tribune reporter
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To test into some of Chicago's top schools, incoming kindergartners must be able to do more than just count to 10 or rattle off the alphabet.

They could be asked to identify trapezoids, figure out how many cookies they'd have if Mom put two more on their plate, demonstrate advanced literacy skills and, for gifted programs, be able to infer relationships, recognize patterns and predict what comes next.

You can probably predict what comes next yourself: With 3,337 applications filed for about 500 seats in Chicago Public Schools' classical and gifted kindergarten programs next fall, parents are helping their preschoolers cram for the tests.

"It's just yet another example that the country has gone test crazy," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a national nonprofit that advocates for other methods of assessing young children. "This sort of insanity testing produces test coaching for little kids and gaming of the system by parents and others to figure out what's on the test and get their kid a leg up. We're not letting kids be kids, and we're making them into little Einsteins."

But with low-performing neighborhood schools an unattractive option and the cost of some private schools out of reach, many parents see CPS' selective enrollment programs as the best public education option in the city. As kindergarten is an entry year for most of those programs, many parents are hiring private tutors, researching tests used in other large urban school systems, finding age-appropriate questions online and doing whatever else it takes to get their kids on the right track early.

"I was blissfully naive about how this all worked when my older daughter tested for first grade," said Shannan Bunting. Even though with no special preparation her daughter made it into Decatur Classical Elementary, a top-scoring school, "we realized we couldn't do that for our second child and just hope to be lucky," she said.

This year she hired a former Montessori teacher to tutor her preschooler on everything from learning continents to sounding out words.



On our newsroom blog Trib Nation, how a conversation with parents became a sidebar on how to prepare kids for these tests. Such a move would not be unusual in New York, where parents have for years hired tutors and paid upward of $1,000 for "kindercramming" boot camps for 3- and 4-year-olds, but in Chicago it's a new phenomenon.

Although a test prep company called SelectivePrep offers courses for sixth-graders and up for admissions to top-scoring middle and high school programs, nothing similar exists for kindergarten.

And getting a child in a school for that first year can help them ultimately secure spots in subsequent years, which is becoming increasingly difficult. This year, CPS has 13,058 applications on file for approximately 1,150 seats in classical and gifted elementary schools. Some of the best schools have found themselves rejecting students who score as high as the 98th percentile on entrance exams.

CPS officials don't encourage prepping children for the tests because it skews the results, said Abigayil Joseph, head of CPS' Office of Academic Enhancement.

"We want children to come to the table with their natural ability, without having been prepared," she said. "That's how we find the best match. We don't want them to come in and do well because they've been prepped, but then be in an environment that's two grades above their level."

But that doesn't stop parents from trying to do what they consider best for their kids. Some even wonder why CPS doesn't follow New York's example and tell parents which test they use.

"Why is it that there's so much secrecy about it?" asked Gail Wilson, who hired a tutor to work with her two daughters to prepare for gifted testing. "They tell you (that) you can't prepare, but you can."

Author Karen Quinn, who parlayed her extensive research and her personal experience into a popular book, "Testing for Kindergarten," agrees with those parents.

"So much of it is exposure to concepts," said Quinn, who sells a $300 Candyland-like test-prep game she developed. "If they're practicing the kinds of questions that are on these kinds of tests, they will be more prepped than a child that goes in cold."

Quinn said her game can help spark the critical thinking parts of the brain and gets children familiar with answering test questions similar to those used for gifted programs. She also offers daily questions and tips to people who pay $5 a month to access her website, testingmom.com. More than 1,000 Chicago-area parents have joined.

Tutor Lemi Erinkitola started a tutoring company for kids as young as 3, preparing children, mostly on the South Side, for CPS' admissions tests. She said that when she went through the process with her own three children, she found few resources.


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November 04th, 2013

11/4/2013

0 Comments

 
Neo-liberals are working with republicans to kill labor and justice and that starts with union-busting public private partnerships and replacing union apprenticeships with a cheap public version that kills our higher education institutions as well.  THIS IS YET ANOTHER CORPORATE SUBSIDY ----THIS TIME TO HUMAN RESOURCES JOB TRAINING DEPARTMENTS!

VOTE YOUR NEO-LIBERAL INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!  WE NEED STRONG EDUCATION AND STRONG LABOR TO REBUILD OUR FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACY!!!

Regarding the NPR report on Washington State's vocational/career tech for public schools:

FIRST, THE LIVING WAGE IN WASHINGTON IS AT LEAST $15/17 AN HOUR AND NOT $13. SO, THESE MECHANICS ARE GRADUATING TO POVERTY WAGES IN A FIELD THAT HISTORICALLY PAID FAR MORE TO START.

SECOND....UNIONS ARE BEING BUSTED BY THIS ATTACK ON UNION APPRENTICESHIPS!

This reports talks of the Bill Gates privatization scheme for public education that has public schools as human resources departments for corporations. What a way to maximize corporate profits they say! They say students are graduating without the skills needed to do a job so they are trying to create an entire system of publicly funded job training programs that focus a student on one skill set all paid for by taxpayers and student tuition. So, if you go to these 'career colleges' and get a 'degree' for dental hygienist or auto mechanic you will find yourself having to go back to a career college to get yet another 'degree' if you need to change directions. Each time the goal is to make you ready to work from day one with no job training at the point of hire.

SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATIONS!!!! PROFITS ARE SOARING WITH THIS POLICY BROUGHT TO US BY NEO-LIBERALS!

Here is what has been in existence for decades------when we had a thriving economy and strong labor wages and benefits and corporations had profits enough. A student graduates from high school with a broad course of strong liberal arts and humanities tied with either a professional track or a vocational track. The students received strong class content in all subjects so regardless of what they decided when they graduated.....they were ready for most career directions. You either go to university where you again had strong liberal arts and humanities with your career major and when you graduated you were ready for any number of career directions in your major.....for example science.....not only dental hygiene. That science degree allowed you to move to research, laboratory, public service, all with just a little on the job training.

How about that student graduating with a vocational track? Well, they could go to a two year community college for an associates degree or they could go right from high school into a union apprenticeship found in most trades. Those apprenticeship programs over several decades were known all over the world for quality training and were open for all to apply. A company hired someone to a job and then paid for their training with the union sharing cost.....no taxpayer money involved. The worker got the job first and then was trained for the job and paid while they worked. This system allowed all students a direction after school and allowed for a broad-based democratic education that gave that student choices in career changes.

What we know from a decade of this corporate education reform that has for-profit career colleges doing the job of the union apprenticeships and requiring all this training be done before someone is hired is this----most people go through these corporate trainings and then do not get jobs. So the student and taxpayers hand profits to these training programs and then there are no jobs to be had. WHEN YOU ARE TRAINED ON THE JOB YOU HAVE A JOB ALREADY FOR GOODNESS SAKE! It is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money and funding meant for meaningful degree financial aid. Half of all public education financial aid went to these career colleges and most students did not get jobs.

So, what this report from Seattle tells us is how this dysfunctional system of job training is now going to move to high schools and in fact Baltimore is already doing this. We had a report on the Medical Arts high school and the dental hygienist program. I went to the news paper to see the job listings for dental hygienist in the Baltimore area and there were about a dozen listings. Now, this is a high school program rotating several groups of youth through a program that also has for-profit and other training groups doing the same thing. THEY ARE CHURNING OUT TONS OF STUDENTS PREPARING FOR DENTAL HYGIENE JOBS THAT WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE IN THE BALTIMORE AREA. It is a mess. They are doing this with Emergency care programs for ambulances. When all is said and done these students generally end up in home health care earning poverty wages with no way to change direction.

Well, we are told.....go to where the jobs are for dental hygienist.

The point here is that when K-12 concentrates on strong broad educational achievement people have more of an ability to navigate to different career paths as needed. Will students from vocational schools test as well on SAT if they decide to try that course? If we look at Baltimore where students are doing Teach to the Test with Reading and Math as the primary subject at the loss of all other subjects, you see we are making little progress. When the focus is vocational there is even less.

Brown vs the Board of Education and equal opportunity and access was about all public schools giving children the opportunity to choose a direction in their lives. What these school privatizers are trying to adopt has pre-school testing deciding what skills these children may have and tracking them accordingly with parents and students having little say. That is happening now in Baltimore as parents are finding the school choice being more directed to these charters/vocational tech schools. Baltimore schools were sadly neglected in funding and oversight for decades so resources and staffing failed to meet the needs of our students. We want strong public schools that allow all students a chance at career paths they choose!



Apprenticeship
From Wikipedia,

Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a structured competency a basic set of skills. Apprenticeships ranged from craft occupations or trades to those seeking a professional license to practice in a regulated profession. Apprentices (or in early modern usage "prentices") or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships. Most of their training is done while working for an employer who helps the apprentices learn their trade or profession, in exchange for their continuing labor for an agreed period after they have achieved measurable competencies. For more advanced apprenticeships, theoretical education was also involved, with jobs and farming over a period of 4–6 years.

To be successful, the individual must have perseverance, ambition, and initiative. Like a college education, the successful completion of an apprenticeship term does not come easily, but is the result of hard work on the part of the apprentice. In practically every skilled occupation, more than fundamental knowledge of arithmetic is essential. The ability to read, write and speak well is beneficial in any walk of life, but in some apprenticeship occupations it is more important than in others.[1]



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We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business.

So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today.  OH, REALLY??????



High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust.

It’s not surprising there is deception in the online school system or we wouldn’t have created the scam blog.  What is shocking to us is the accrediting agencies turning a blind eye to the abuses even while the Obama administration is passing stringent new laws about graduate employment numbers.  We knew we should be leery of some schools, now we know to be suspicious of accrediting agencies and their lack of action. Every potential student should read this and more.  High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. 

The Obama Administration just released final regulations requiring career college programs to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing access to Federal student aid. While many career college programs are helping to prepare America’s workforce for the jobs of the future, far too many students at these schools are taking on unsustainable debt in exchange for degrees and certificates that fail to help them get the jobs they need or were promised. These regulations are designed to ramp up over the next four years, giving colleges time to reform while protecting students and their families from exploitative programs.

“These new regulations will help ensure that students at these schools are getting what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “We’re giving career colleges every opportunity to reform themselves but we’re not letting them off the hook, because too many vulnerable students are being hurt,” Duncan continued.  Read the rest  http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/gainful-employment-regulations

Recently Philip G. Altbach wrote, “Hardly a day goes by in the United States without another report of malfeasance and exploitation by the for-profit education industry. ABC’s national television news featured a story about how the University of Phoenix, owned by the Apollo Group, one of the largest for-profit education corporations, misrepresents job possibilities to prospective students.”    Read the rest

The Career College Association (CCA), the lobbying organization of the for-profits has been busy explaining how the stories are the result of unfair reporting, or examples of just a few “rotten apples” in the barrel. Some who have been involved in the investigation, such as Senator Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa, has said that the entire barrel is rotten.

Several of the American accrediting agencies should be embarrassed by this situation. They have accredited many of the for-profits, and now must deal with the implications of what seem to be poor judgment. So far, the accreditors have been silent.

As far as we know, they are still silent.


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This article is written from the view of business so it does not mention the fact that union apprenticeships have always had the best system of skill development throughout US history.  If you look below you see these public job training programs started to grow with Reagan and skyrocketed with Clinton and Obama.  This is the same time neo-liberals worked with republicans to union-bust.  NAFTA sent the jobs away and these public job training programs worked to replace union apprenticeships.  IT IS DELIBERATE!!!!

When I graduated from college with a degree in science I took that degree and pursued careers in any number of directions in any number of fields.  When a union apprentice finished he had a paid job while he apprenticed and signed up for several years after that.  His finishing that apprenticeship gave great assurance he could get a job anywhere in the country.

These career college formats have regional recognition of most 'degrees' and hold very little status of completion.


States like Maryland are trying to make these second and third rate education platforms legitimate while the entire academic and business community say NO!


August 11, 2010

The Job-Training Charade

By Steven Malanga
Even as the ranks of the unemployed and of those no longer looking for a job grow, the media are suddenly discovering more and more businesses which say they want to hire workers but can't find enough qualified people. The Wall Street Journal earlier this week featured the stories of manufacturing companies having a tough time getting applicants with the right expertise to fill skilled jobs. A few weeks ago a technology headhunter from Silicon Valley created a stir when he said he couldn't fill some job searches despite the still growing ranks of the unemployed. Economists, meanwhile, point out that the number of unfilled job openings in the economy has been rising for most of the last 13 months, but even so unemployment stays high.

While labor market research suggests at least some of this disparity is attributable to successive extensions of unemployment benefits, which keep at least some workers from taking new jobs, the bigger problem may be the mismatch between the skills of those seeking jobs and the jobs themselves. And that mismatch, which only appears to be growing wider, is a reminder of the continuing failure of government-sponsored job training and retraining programs, which are a signature part of labor policy in Washington these days.

It's not as if the disparity between jobs and skills suddenly arose out of nowhere and surprised us. It's been building for decades, and federal and state government have rolled out an alphabet-soup of training and retraining programs under legislation ranging from the Manpower Development and Training Act, to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, to the Job Training Partnership Act, to the current Workforce Initiative Act. Congress passed a number of these programs specifically because what preceded them was ineffective, and the new programs were supposed to replace them with something better. No such luck.

Although worker training is as fashionable as mom and apple pie among politicians, these programs consistently fail because they bear all the weaknesses typical of government social programs. They are frequently handed to politically connected groups to run without regard to expertise. The programs often focus on retraining for jobs in industries that politicians and bureaucrats favor now, not necessarily for industries that are most in need of workers. Meanwhile, journalists and policy makers often make the mistake of touting small programs (often run with private money) that do seem to succeed, assuming the model can work nationally, even though upsizing small, successful programs often fails.

In the 1980s, research on programs run under the Job Training Partnership Act, the key training vehicle for government programs at the time, found that they had virtually no impact on employment or wage levels among those who completed them. This was not surprising considering that the programs placed people in training for jobs with companies that were rapidly expanding at the time, like McDonald's, which freely admitted they would have hired the workers even without the federally sponsored training. Money also went to train workers who were being hired by companies that had shut down plants in one location and reopened them somewhere else, providing a neat relocation subsidy to firms but no job gains. One commission looking at agencies running job training under the partnership legislation in New York City noted that they "do not consistently teach the right skills and overall are not of sufficient quality.''

Still, convinced it could do the job, Congress moved on in 1998 to a new program, the WIA, which was supposed to focus on training for higher skill jobs and to deliver better services to training applicants. But old patterns are hard to break in Washington. The feds designated some $900 million to design the new system and then, according to a Government Accountability Office study, let out contracts to reshape the system largely through a no-bid, no-competition system of handing out grants. Seven years after Washington set up the system, the GAO reported, the feds had little idea of whether it had achieved what they hoped for, namely to "shift the focus of the public workforce system toward the training and employment needs of high-growth, in-demand industries."

As a candidate, President Obama made renewing WIA a centerpiece of his labor agenda, though the GAO reported that some 60 percent of funding for a key WIA program to retrain workers never made it to the workers themselves but was eaten up in program administrative costs. Such utter lack of apparent concern for results perhaps explains why, as a GAO official testified before Congress, "We have little information at a national level about what the workforce investment system under WIA achieves." Later he declared that the government doesn't know "what works for whom" in the program.

Naturally, these failures didn't prevent the government from including job training and retraining money in the 2009 federal stimulus package (an effort to include the money in the previous 2008 stimulus failed). A big chunk of the money went to retrain workers to work in ‘green' industries. In other words the government spent tax dollars to prepare workers for jobs in industries that are only growing because they are subsidized by tax dollars. Somewhere in all of that is something called the private sector, but it's hard to find.

An ineffective job training program is worse than nothing. Beyond the tax dollars it wastes, such a program misleads the unemployed and ultimately demoralizes them. Today, for instance, many of those without a college degree who go to government retraining programs are routinely told by counselors that they need to "upgrade their skills" via government-financed classes that teach skills such as how to use basic word-processing or spreadsheet programs. But the unemployed soon find out these new skills make little difference in landing a job in today's market.

About the most that these job training programs are accomplishing is to give jobs to politically connected insiders who otherwise might be out on the street with the rest of the unemployed.

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We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business.

So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today.  OH, REALLY??????


Community Colleges Call Job Training An 'Underfunded Mandate'
Posted: 08/30/2012 3:25 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 3:28 pm  Huffington Post

  President Obama talks to students at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. Community colleges are more than ever being tasked with the critical role of putting unemployed Americans back to work -- but they are being asked to do it with scarce funding and unrealistic expectations, according to a new report released Wednesday by the University of Alabama's Education Policy Center.

The study, called "Workforce Training in a Recovering Economy," included numbers that leaders of community colleges and job training have observed for years. Of the 49 state community college leaders who responded, 45 said that business leaders are now relying on them for workforce training -- up from 34 last year.


But the problem, the survey found, was that those same schools need more state and federal support. About 35 percent of community college leaders said that training dollars had "increasingly been exhausted" in their state, as opposed to 12 percent who disagreed with that statement.

"The community colleges that were emerging from recession, we still see a lot of states have exhausted their Workforce Investment Act funds," said Stephen Katsinas, a professor at the University of Alabama who co-authored the report. Those funds, provided by the federal government, are supposed to be used in conjunction with local unemployment centers to get people back on their feet. Currently, 12.8 million people in the United States are looking for work.

Even though the money isn't there -- and the additional billions once provided by the stimulus and a change the Obama administration made to the Pell Grant system are gone, too -- community colleges are still being called upon to fill an expanded role in their communities.

Politicians love to name-check community colleges (they've been mentioned in every State of the Union, save one, since 1996), but they also have some high hopes for them. Thirty of the 49 community colleges polled said that they were being pushed "to offer or expand 'quick' job training programs in noncredit areas" in their states.

"There's a great focus on the short term and not enough focus on investing in long term, in terms of more expensive technical training, that in turn will lead to the much higher wage jobs," said Katsinas. "The issue then is they don't have the funding to do the high-tech training that would produce the wage level we want for our workforce."


There is an emerging consensus among community colleges that they should focus their efforts on "sectoral training" in quick-growing, high-wage industries. But to teach students mechatronics, nursing or information, technology requires well-payed instructors and expensive equipment.

One way to help, said Katsinas, would be to make sure that the federal Pell Grants supporting community colleges are maintained at their current levels. House Republicans have taken aim at Pell in their budget, but Katsinas said that would harm efforts to fill the so-called "skills gap" some employers have complained about, between the skills and education levels they need in workers and what the labor force has to offer.

Or, as he put it, "you can do more with more, or you can do less with less, but you can't do more with less."



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September 05th, 2013

9/5/2013

0 Comments

 
PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES BE MADE INTO CORPORATE PROPAGANDA TOOLS.  THEY ARE KILLING OUR DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION!  STOP ELECTING NEO-LIBERAS AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN PRIMARIES.

I want to spend another day on MOOCs because it is critical to see how bad all this is.  Remember, this is a republican dream come true being pushed by neo-liberals and Maryland pols are  all neo-liberal
.


MOOCs are ALEC-written corporate education with Bill Gates pushing it at university level just as he is pushing charters and K-12 privatization.  STOP ALLOWING WALL STREET TO TAKE ALL THAT IS PUBLIC!


Regarding Maryland and MOOCs as higher education:

We have two good examples of how MOOCs is intended to lower education standards for 90% of Americans right here in Baltimore.  Basu of WYPR and Schaller, professor at UMBC and columnist for the Baltimore Sun.  Both represent the neo-liberal/neo-con global empire building economy and politics and represent why the public cannot get informed discussion.  MOOC is an extension of that.  Remember, the 1% have said that education is wasted on 90% of the American people so we do not need strong democratic education for all.

ALL OF MARYLAND DEMOCRATS ARE NEO-LIBERAL AND ARE WORKING HARD FOR THESE PRIVATIZATION POLICIES.

WHO ARE YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR AND STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL?

I'm listening to Basu give the same rundown of unemployment figures that have no basis in reality.  Unemployment figures simply represent how many people are receiving unemployment benefits and not how many people are unemployed.  If Basu wants to keep using that 7.6% number he needs to define that.  His intent though is deception and that is why we only hear and read this 7.6% figure with no explanation.  The unemployment is 25% and rising with the rate being 40% and rising for those only working part time.  Indeed, the baby boomers Basu described fall into the part time category.  Remember, the Fed policy of feeding free money to corporations was designed to allow corporations to make tons of money on the market so they could spend it in overseas expansion and not have to actually work (hire) here in the US.  This deliberate stagnation of the domestic economy has had hiring rates so low as to move unemployment deeper and deeper over these 5 years.  What was 10-11% in 2008 is now 25%....we are worse than most developed countries.  Neo-liberals need to hide that figure and the reasons because people would be acting like Europeans and hitting the streets if they knew the objective is to keep unemployment high.....and then there is the green card need to have relatively low unemployment to bring in foreign labor.  Reporting the real 25%/40% figures would not allow higher green card ratios!

Now, I'm a scientist and educator who would not know economics if not for the broad course requirements of degrees in America over the last century.  Economics 101 allows me to understand all that jibberish.  What these classes did as well is teach the subject over historical and futuristic modeling...you were taught to know what was and how to determine what might come and given choices as to what you thought best.  YOU WERE GIVEN THE TOOLS TO FORM OPINIONS AND FORMULATE POLICY THAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU.  THAT IS DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION!

MOOCs do the opposite.  They are designed to be the cheapest tool for distributing education; they are meant to isolate the student from professors with views and opinions different from the cabal at the top; and they are meant to package canned lectures that will be distributed to universities all across the country making all students privy to selected points of view.....and they do not include questioning or forming your own opinion.  That is where Basu comes in.  As Basu likes to state, he is a Gen Y person meaning he was taught in a system that rewards getting along and not questioning.  He has no problem telling you whatever he is told to repeat and may not even consider if what he is saying is right or wrong.  BASU SIMPLY FOLLOWS DIRECTION AND DOES NOT MIND MAKING YOU DO THE SAME.....THIS IS GEN Y.  I'd like to tell Basu that while Baby Boomers have deliberately been attacked financially because of their politics.....having our savings and investments stolen and having the economy tanked with high unemployment to eat away at the rest of our savings....THAT GIVES BABY BOOMERS THE TIME TO TEACH ACTIVISM TO GEN X AND GEN Y.......AND GEN Z.  WE'LL TAKE THE PART TIME OR NO TIME WORK SO AS TO BUILD THE REVOLUTION!

The second media figure that highlights what MOOCs will do is the column written in the Baltimore Sun by UMBC professor Schaller......the neo-liberal opinion page writer who has a heart for labor and justice but has no intent to tell them what is really happening and what the real problems are.  Schaller says 'It is terrible what wealth inequity has done and it is unjust and all, but there is nothing to be done.....we aren't going to reverse it.  We just have to accept that .05% of the population have all the money'.  LOL

We know of course that simply reinstating Rule Of Law and bringing back tens of trillions of dollars stolen in corporate fraud this past decade and suck out of the economy and off into offshore accounts will reverse wealth inequity.  EASY-PEASY.  Remember, when a government suspends Rule of Law it suspends Statutes of Limitation and politicians knowing crime has been committed and turning their heads are Aiding and Abetting.  See, I learned all this in political science classes in high school!  That is why they are eliminating all of that now.  So we know that what Schaller is telling us is not true.  It is simply what neo-liberals want you to believe because they have no intent of giving the money back.  So in Maryland, and raging neo-liberal state, the public hears only this kind of information and media outlets are filled with people capable of sharing that kind information.  You see why these two people work in higher education!  Shame, shame, shame on Schaller for making people think they have no recourse!

What MOOC will do if we do not send it packing is capture lesson plans built by people like Basu and Schaller giving only this perverted point of view.  Students will not get real information.....balanced and fair.....and they will not be forced to question and think outside of the box.  As we saw with Common Core and its 'thinking deeply and not broadly' theme.....children may not even know what a box is!  

WE DON'T NEED THE MASSES KNOWING ALL THAT ANALYTICAL STUFF THEY SAY!
 
Do you hear your politician and/or labor justice leaders telling you this?  If not, they are working for corporate profit and wealth and not you and me!  SHAKE THE BUGS FROM THE RUG.....ELECTING LABOR AND JUSTICE WILL REVERSE THE VOICE IN MEDIA!


Below you see that all of the elite universities are telling us we are lucky to have access to their higher education.  Only, these campuses do not subject their own students to this junk.  What better way to control the global corporation/wealth inequity created by these elite institutions and Wall Street then to market and place their selected lectures in all university degree programs.
 

As I showed last blog on MOOCs.....they are now being sold to universities and the cost to universities to expose to their students is pennies on the tuition dollar.  EDUCATION MADE A BUSINESS.


MOOCs: Top 10 Sites for Free Education With Elite Universities  

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses.  Although there has been access to free online courses on the Internet for years, the quality and quantity of courses has changed. Access to free courses has allowed students to obtain a level of education that many only could dream of in the past.  This has changed the face of education.  In The New York Times article Instruction for Masses Knocked Down Campus Walls, author Tamar Lewin stated, “in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree.”

Although MOOCs are the latest trend, not everyone agrees that schools should offer them.  Joshua Kim Insight Higher Ed article Why Every University Does Not Need a MOOC noted that offering free material may not make sense for the individual university.  It may be more important to stand out in other ways.

There may also be some issues for students who lack motivation.  Since a MOOC is voluntary and there is no penalty for dropping the program or lagging behind, there may be issues with course completion.  Although a student may have received an excellent education, there will not be a corresponding diploma.

For those who desire a free education and have the motivation, the following includes the:  Top 10 Sites for Information about MOOCs:

  1. Udemy Free Courses – Udemy is an example of a site allows anyone to build or take online courses.  Udemy’s site exclaims, “Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts.” The New York Times reported that Udemy, “recently announced a new Faculty Project, in which award-winning professors from universities like Dartmouth, the University of Virginia and Northwestern offer free online courses. Its co-founder, Gagen Biyani, said the site has more than 100,000 students enrolled in its courses, including several, outside the Faculty Project, that charge fees.”
  2. ITunesU Free Courses – Apple’s free app “gives students access to all the materials for courses in a single place. Right in the app, they can play video or audio lectures. Read books and view presentations.”
  3. Stanford Free Courses -  From Quantum Mechanics to The Future of the Internet, Stanford offers a variety of free courses.  Stanford’s – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence was highly successful. According to Pontydysgu.org, “160000 students from 190 countries signed up to Stanford’s Introduction to AI” course, with 23000 reportedly completing.”  Check out Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere link.
  4. UC Berkeley Free Courses – From General Biology to Human Emotion, Berkley offers a variety of courses.  Check out:  Berkeley Webcasts and Berkeley RSS Feeds.
  5. MIT Free Courses – Check out MIT’s RSS MOOC feed.  Also see:  MIT’s Open Courseware.
  6. Duke Free Courses – Duke offers a variety of courses on ITunesU.
  7. Harvard Free Courses – From Computer Science to Shakespeare, students may now get a free Harvard education. “Take a class for professional development, enrichment, and degree credit. Courses run in the fall, spring, or intensive January session. No application is required.”
  8. UCLA Free Courses – Check out free courses such as their writing program that offers over 220 online writing courses each year.
  9. Yale Free Courses – At Open Yale, the school offers “free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.”
  10. Carnegie Mellon Free Courses – Carnegie Mellon boosts “No instructors, no credits, no charge.”
 What is MOOC Video

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The answer to 'Will MOOCs give rise to two separate university systems'...the answer is YES.  Elite institutions say education is wasted on 90% of people....they are the ones who will be stuck with MOOCs if allowed to be instated.  Gov O'Malley, always the Wall Street shill, is making U of M one of the first to allow credit to this junk just to pave the way to making it legitimate. 

The use of online instruction is useful in blended classroom uses and as an aid for parents and students at home doing homework......there is value.  WHAT WE ARE SEEING AS USUAL WITH ALL THAT IS MARKET-DRIVEN IS THAT THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE TURNS TO PROFIT-MAKING AND POOR QUALITY.



Massive online courses draw more backlash from college professors

By Ki Mae Heussner May. 2, 2013 - 10:09 AM PDT 
San Jose State University, one of the biggest academic supporters of the growing MOOC (massive open online course) movement, apparently has some vocal dissenters in its ranks.

In the past year, the university has welcomed MOOC providers like edX and Udacity with open arms — in addition to launching a first-of-its kind program with Udacity to award college credit for courses taken on its platform. The school has a growing partnership with edX and plans to create a dedicated resource center for California State University faculty statewide who are interested in online content.

But discord seems to brewing among some faculty.  This week, professors in the Philosophy department said they refuse to teach an edX course on “justice” developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to their university.

In an open letter (first published by the Chronicle of Higher Education) to the Harvard professor behind the course, the San Jose State faculty members argued that while they believe that technology can be used to improve education (by enabling instructors to record lectures so students can replay them, for example), they believe MOOCs could “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Will MOOCs lead to two classes of universities? Not only do they worry about a future in which fewer perspectives are offered by universities (“the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel,” they say), the professors argue that the MOOC model will lead to two classes of universities.

“One, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant,” the letter says.

In the past year, MOOCs have picked up considerable momentum – Coursera, for example, says more than 3 million students have enrolled in a course and 62 top universities from around the world have signed on as partners. And they’re starting to show their effectiveness in blended learning classrooms. In a pilot program at San Jose State, a professor leading an introductory course on electrical engineering incorporated content from the edX course “Circuits and Electronics,” assigning students videos and problem sets to review outside of class. According to edX and San Jose State, the pass rate in that blended class was much higher than the pass rates in conventional classes.

More faculty members show resistance But as MOOC providers carve out a bigger presence for themselves in higher education, university faculty members are beginning to raise compelling concerns. Last month, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the long-term impacts of MOOCs on the U.S. university system. Namely, they argued that they would perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching and lead to a centralized system of higher education that weakens middle- and lower-tier schools.

The San Jose example shows that just because university administrators are willing to embrace the MOOC format, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t deep resistance from their faculty. And, given that some believe that the MOOCs’ honeymoon period is winding down, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more examples like this emerge.




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We know that blended learning from online classes can be and is a useful tool in education. What we have is the same Wall Street crowd drive by profit and no social values pushing what will be an inferior level of education on middle/lower class families.

MARYLAND IS GROUND ZERO FOR CORPORATIZATION OF K-COLLEGE WITH O'MALLEY IN THE LEAD.


Where's the Real Learning?

June 11, 2013 By Karen Symms Gallagher

I admit it – from kindergarten on, I was teacher’s pet.  I got an assignment. I labored over it, made it perfect, turned it in early, got the A.

Until now.  Let me confess: I am a MOOC noncompleter. I had heard the hype that massive open online courses (MOOCs) are transforming higher education, and I wanted to see for myself.

I enrolled in the University of Edinburgh’s MOOC on e-learning and digital cultures, offered through Coursera. With enthusiasm I joined my 260,000 fellow students, whom I assumed shared my interest in a rigorous and rich college experience online.

On day one, I got a form e-mail welcoming me. I was to watch a few videos each week, do a few readings, and do my homework – maybe: "There are no weekly 'assignments,' although we do recommend trying at least two of the suggested activities. These are not assessed, but will help you to prepare for the final assignment."

I started out eagerly, watching the videos, skimming the readings, and participating in the online discussion forum. I could do this late at night at home or while traveling for my day job. But after two sessions, my interest waned. Maybe it was the lack of real-time interaction with classmates or professors. Maybe it was the lack of accountability. I soon wasn’t watching all the videos, and I certainly wasn’t doing the practice homework that no one would ever grade. Honestly, I felt more like an audience member than a student.

The final assignment would determine if I passed or failed, but I didn’t feel connected enough to the class to complete the project. And what would have been my reward? A noncredit statement of completion of truly questionable value.

My MOOC experience is pretty typical. Passing is about showing up, not doing the kind of quality work that meets any standards of academic rigor. Even with bare minimum standards for passing, classes have huge rates of attrition.


At the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, we pride ourselves on delivering high-quality master's-level programs online. I don’t think the problem is with online learning. Rather, we should see MOOCs for what they are so far: an easy way to dabble in a subject, maybe learn new material, maybe not, and sometimes with highly respected faculty. In my MOOC,  I never saw my professor live online.

We must do more than put a camera in a lecture hall and put professors in a loosely moderated discussion forum. We must offer real-time interaction between professors and students, and between classmates. There must be learning objectives, not just topics to be covered, so students know where they’re headed academically. We must require students to be accountable and expect them to show a mastery of a subject beyond a "showing up" standard.

Those of us who deliver a real college experience online for credit are happy to share the many lessons we’ve learned. Because nobody wants to be a noncompleter.



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Increasingly Amherst seems to be fighting to remain a progressive humanities university that regards students as citizens and shouts out for labor and justice more than most.  We thank this university.  Meanwhile, in Maryland we have U of M being one of the first to give MOOCs credit-worthiness.

NO ONE THINKS MOOCS ARE CREDIT-WORTHY.  CORPORATIONS SIMPLY NEED THAT DESIGNATION TO MOVE FORWARD AND O'MALLEY......ALWAYS THE READY WALL STREET SHILL.....WILL THROW OUR UNIVERSITY SYSTEM INTO THE ROLE.


Faculty members said that participating in edX would not only be ineffective in improving the classroom experience, but it would also disrupt the institution of higher education.


Rejecting edX, Amherst Doubts Benefits of MOOC Revolution


By Amna H. Hashmi and Cynthia W. Shih, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS April 26, 2013

By rejecting Amherst College’s participation in edX, professors at the liberal arts school expressed doubt in the benefits of Massive Open Online Courses for its faculty, students, and reputation. For the more than 60 percent of Amherst professors who voted against partnering with edX, reaching hundreds of thousands of students around the world does not align with the college’s mission to be “a purposefully small residential community.”

“Ultimately, we’re trying to help our residential students, and [it] wasn’t clear exactly what the MOOCs would allow us to do which we couldn’t do in other ways,” said Stephen A. George, a professor of life sciences at Amherst who introduced the motion against participating in edX. “It was really the massive, synchronous MOOC that did not seem to fit with our goals and values.”

Amherst Chair of Classics Rebecca H. Sinos, who is currently taking Harvard professor Gregory Nagy’s CB22x: “The Ancient Greek Hero” on the edX platform, said she does not believe that teaching online courses would provide her with the opportunity to reconfigure the curriculum for the benefit of her students.

Faculty members said that participating in edX would not only be ineffective in improving the classroom experience, but it would also disrupt the institution of higher education.


“Any MOOC course that I have seen so far is a poor substitute for a real academic course,” said Thomas L. Dumm, an Amherst political science professor. “But if we go the route of having these standardized courses by academic superstars, such as your own Michael Sandel, what’s going to happen to the rest of the professoriate?”

David W. Wills, an American studies professor at Amherst, said that the excitement about online education and MOOCs and the zeal with which they are being promoted makes it harder for schools and professors to refuse jumping on board.

“I think my colleagues...were trying to resist the hype and stay true to their deepest commitments as educators. Our hope is that we can make our way in the world of online education without abandoning those commitments,” Wills said.
“If that proves impossible for us, that’s not just bad news for Amherst. It’s bad news for higher education.”

A 21-page unofficial memo written by an ad hoc group of concerned faculty in December 2012 lays out 10 questions about edX participation, questioning whether edX would enhance Amherst teaching.

“If our relation to EdX is an experiment, what is our hypothesis, and why are we testing this rather than another hypothesis?” the memo asked.

“Will Amherst’s voice be influential when confronted with the massive weight and reputations of Harvard, MIT, Yale, Berkeley, and the University of Texas, not to mention the influence of funders like
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which works closely with EdX?)”


In lieu of joining edX, Amherst faculty members voted to move more courses and class materials online and to find additional ways to incorporate technology in the classroom.

George said that there are other ways to increase the virtual visibility of the college, and that Amherst pursuing online education on its own would allow more freedom to its professors.

The decision was far from unanimous, with approximately 70 out of 110 faculty members voting against creating AmherstX. Political science professor Austin D. Sarat, who presented the pro-edX motion, declined to comment for this story.

Amherst administrators and professors praised edX’s goals to increase access to education, and emphasized that the decision to reject AmherstX was not indicative of a general disapproval of the interface.

“We are disappointed that Amherst College will not be joining edX,” edX said in a statement. “Amherst is a wonderful institution and we would have been delighted to have them join. We acknowledge that online educational platforms are not the appropriate solution for all courses or all faculty.”

As edX approaches its one-year anniversary, it has expanded to include 12 institutional partners in its X Consortium. Only one of those institutions, Wellesley College, is comparable in size and mission to Amherst’s small, private liberal arts focus that prides itself on faculty-student engagement.

“My best guess is that because Wellesley is geographically closer to Harvard and MIT, they’ve got the advantage of a larger number of faculty collaborating with people who are participating in edX and are perhaps more certain about what they’re getting into,” said Amherst computer science professor Scott F. H. Kaplan.

“I think edX is being very selective, maybe too selective. One of the points that was made in the discussion was that edX seems quite proud to turn down a lot of institutions that might like to join,” said George.
“They seem to be looking more towards the prestige of the name of the institution than really looking at which would be the best courses in many different institutions.”




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Below is a clip of a good assessment of what MOOCs are and what they are meant to do.  It is all market-driven and capturing education for monetization and financialization.

This is what Obama, O'Malley, and Rawlings-Blake is doing to your schools along with the pols at Maryland Assembly and City Hall.  THESE ARE VERY, VERY, VERY BAD PEOPLE WHO ARE WORKING TO KILL DEMOCRACY AND HAND ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO THESE GLOBAL 1%.


GET RID OF NEO-LIBERAL POLITICIANS BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!

One does not have to be a rocket scientist to know that people who make lying, cheating, and stealing the central ethos of their actions are not trying to provide Open Access to information....they are just using this premise to expand and capture higher education. 


Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come

Saturday, 17 August 2013 10:30 By Michael A Peters, Truthout | News

The other major issue with MOOCs is whether it will be responsible for the further monetization and financialization of higher education. It is clear that what are now free courses could easily become monetized in the future through a variety of business models. MOOCs are increasingly the result of venture capital partnerships and for-profit arrangements among big publishers, universities and providers of video content. As the UK Universities' Report "MOOCs: Higher Education's Digital Moment?" puts it:

MOOCs may also be emblematic of a broader shift in attitudes towards online education that reflects changing patterns of online activity in wider society. MOOCs and other open and online learning technologies may reshape the core work of institutions, from pedagogical models to business models, and the relationship between institutions, academics, students and technology providers.

I found Ian Bogost's discussion very helpful in this regard. In "MOOCs and the Future of the Humanities (Part One): A roundtable at the LA Review of Books," Bogost provides an approach from political economy that provides an overall context within which to view some of the central features of MOOCs. I summarize Bogost's points in abridged form:

MOOCs are a type of marketing. They allow academic institutions to signal that they are with-it and progressive, in tune with the contemporary technological climate.

MOOCs are a financial policy for higher education. They exemplify what Naomi Klein has called "disaster capitalism": policy guilefully initiated in the wake of upheaval.

MOOCs are an academic labor policy. As a consequence of the financial policy just described, MOOCs are amplifying the precarity long experienced by adjuncts and graduate student assistants and helping to extend that precarity to the professoriate. MOOCs encourage an ad-hoc "freelancing" work regime among tenured faculty, many of whom will find the financial incentives for MOOC creation and deployment difficult to resist.

MOOCs are speculative financial instruments. The purpose of an educational institution is to educate, but the purpose of a start-up is to convert itself into a financial instrument. The two major MOOC providers, Udacity and Coursera, are venture-capital-funded start-ups, and therefore they are beholden to high-leverage, rapid growth with an interest in a fast flip to a larger technology company or the financial market.

MOOCs are an expression of Silicon Valley values. Today's business practices privilege the accrual of value in the hands of a small number of network operators.

MOOCs are a kind of entertainment media. We are living in an age of para-educationalism: TED Talks, "big idea" books and the professional lecture circuit have reconfigured the place of ideas (of a certain kind) in the media mainstream.

Bogost voices some concerns that academics and institutions should take seriously. The UK Universities' Report provides a more sober analysis, suggesting that the long-term impact on higher education is not clear. The report also questions the sustainability of MOOCs and their relevance to the core work of higher education institutions. The report provides a useful framework for assessing MOOCs based on a couple of questions: What are the aims of engaging with massive open online courses in terms of mission, recruitment and innovation? What organizational changes do new online models of education require in terms of sustainability, pedagogy, credit and capacity?

These questions frame institutional evaluations of MOOCs. Additional questions concerning the future of academic labor, the nature of global competition and the adoption of national policy approaches are also important. And there is also the central question involving the perspective of the learner.

MOOCs emerged from the open-education movement with an emphasis on "openness" and scale in online education. Ultimately the philosophy of MOOCs will be determined by the interpretation of "openness."

With the advent of the Internet, Web 2.0 technologies and user-generated cultures, new principles of radical openness have become the basis of innovative institutional forms that decentralize and democratize power relationships, promote access to knowledge and encourage symmetrical, horizontal peer learning relationships. In this context radical openness is a complex code word that represents a change of philosophy and ethos, a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets, the mode of production and consumption, and the underlying logic of our institutions. How well do and will MOOCs advance these values?

I would like to suggest that "peer philosophies" are at the heart of a radical notion of "openness" and would advocate the significance of peer governance, peer review, peer learning and peer collaboration as a collection of values that form the basis for open institutions and open management philosophies. This form of openness has been theorized in different ways by John Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce and Karl Popper as a "community of inquiry" – a set of values and philosophy committed to the ethic of criticism that offers means for transforming our institutions in what Antonio Negri and others call the age of cognitive capitalism. Expressive and aesthetic labor ("creative labor") demands institutional structures for developing "knowledge cultures" as "flat hierarchies" that permit reciprocal academic exchanges as a new basis for public institutions.

The reinvention of the university as a public institution allows an embrace of a diverse philosophical heritage based on the notions of "public”: "the public sphere," "publics" (in the plural), "civil society" and "global public sphere" - all concepts that hold open the prospect of addressing the local and the global - both the community, the regional as well as the national and the global. This is a philosophy out of which values can be forged and orientations adopted that reflect this heritage, which squares with an institutional identity as a part of a historical public system of higher education and which contributes to a global civic agenda of common world problems. MOOCs have a significant role to play in this situation.

The notion of the university as a public knowledge institution needs to reinvent a language and to initiate a new discourse that reexamines the notions of "public" and "institution" in a digital global economy characterized by increasing intercultural and international interconnectedness. This discourse needs to begin by understanding the historical and material conditions of its own future possibilities, including threats of the monopolization of knowledge and privatization of higher education together with the prospects and promise of forms of openness (open source, open access, open education, open science, open management) that promote the organization of digital creative labor and the democratization of access to knowledge.


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August 30th, 2013

8/30/2013

0 Comments

 
 RESEARCH AND LOTS OF PARENT AND TEACHERS VOICES ARE SAYING NO TO THIS REFORM,.....LOOK CLOSELY AS CORPORATE POLS TRY TO PUSH REFORMS FORWARD WITH SKEWED DATA!

Regarding education reform policies:

I support the rigor brought by stronger standards because the education reform of the Reagan/Clinton years did indeed gut rigor in education.  The balance lies in both old school and new school.  What I wanted Maryland citizens to see in this article is that well-prepared states think Common Core holds less rigor.  Meanwhile, we are hearing media in Maryland using Common Core as the reason Maryland achievement stats are falling.  THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING......SO WHY ARE YOUR MEDIA OUTLETS ALLOWING O'MALLEY TO LIE?

Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success.

The problem in this reform is that the political powers emphasis on performance in classrooms states a goal of more resources and funding.  What we are seeing is most funds being spent on consultants and education businesses.  It will take time to bring older students up to par....but the fact that the youngest students in Maryland...the ones with these few years of reform are still failing shows the people doing the reforming do not know what they are doing.  THEIR GOALS ARE DIFFERENT FROM THEIR STATED MISSIONS!  We do want achievement levels raised but we recognize that to correct the past will take time and as the Baltimore Teachers Union and most teacher's unions across the country are saying....

THERE HAS NOT BEEN ENOUGH TIME TO IMPLEMENT CHANGES IN CURRICULA, RESOURCE APPLICATION, AND DEVELOPING LEARNING SKILLS.  THERE ARE NOT PROPER MODELS FOR ASSESSING TESTING/EVALUATIONS OF TEACHERS AND STUDENTS.

Why are Maryland officials pushing these policies on public schools when everyone knows they are not ready to implement and often are not the best policy for achievement?  The goal is to hand education over to corporations as a market so building the structure for markets trumps what is good for people or achievement.  THAT IS FROM WHERE YOUR MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS IS WORKING.



August 15, 2013

Why states are backing out on common standards and tests
By Charles Chieppo and Jamie Gass

The bloom is surely off the rose of Common Core, the new English and math standards pushed by Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and the Obama administration. In the last few months, a number of states have paused or de-funded implementation of the standards; others have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them.

Charles Chieppo, left, and Jamie Gass.

In recent years, the Obama administration has made a number of federal goodies, such as Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, contingent on states’ adoption of Common Core standards and assessments. But now that Race to the Top money has been spent, states are belatedly taking a clear-eyed look at Common Core. High-performing states in particular won’t like what they see.

In a recent Boston Globe op-ed marking the 20th anniversary of the Massachusetts education reform law that triggered dramatic improvements in the performance of Bay State students, Tom Birmingham, one of the law’s principal authors, wrote: “the political vectors will all tend to push the new standards to a race to the middle … In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards.”

Birmingham, a Rhodes Scholar and former president of the Massachusetts Senate, may well be among the least calculating or self-serving people ever to have attained high elective office, but it doesn’t take Machiavelli to know how these politics are likely to play out.

Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success.

Compared to Massachusetts’ previous standards, Common Core reduces the amount of classic literature, poetry and drama taught in English classes by 60 percent. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

In math, the new common standards delay the progression to all-important Algebra I—the gateway to higher math study—by two years. Stanford University emeritus mathematics professor James Milgram, the only academic mathematician on Common Core’s validation committee, refused to sign off on the final draft. Milgram described the standards as having “extremely serious failings” and reflecting “very low expectations.”

The scores of U.S. students are already mediocre at best compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations. It is a condition that could become permanent if scores in the highest-performing states revert to the mean. In contrast with their peers in other states, Massachusetts’ eighth-graders tied for best in the world in science in the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study.

Common Core poses a different problem for lower-performing states. In his Globe op-ed, Birmingham wrote that “for all its complexity, the Education Reform Act can be reduced, in essence, to two propositions: We will make a massive infusion of progressively distributed dollars into our public schools, and in return, we demand high standards and accountability from all education stakeholders.”

The massive infusion of new money is proving to be the Achilles’ heel for an increasing number of low-performing states that have adopted Common Core. A 2012 Pioneer Institute study estimated that transitioning to the new standards will cost states about $16 billion over seven years. Technology upgrades, new textbooks and instructional materials, and teacher training and support account for most of the expense.

The costs of implementing the standards, or costs associated with the two consortia of states developing assessments tied to Common Core, have caused a number of states to drop out. Within the last year, Alabama and Utah pulled out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. In recent weeks, Georgia and Oklahoma dropped out of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium.

Meanwhile, state legislative leaders in Florida asked Tony Bennett, former state education commissioner, to withdraw from PARCC last month after determining that the new exams would double per-pupil testing costs. And Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania have put Common Core standards and testing on “pause” or frozen state funding for implementation.

When 45 states and the District of Columbia quickly adopted Common Core in their pursuit of federal largesse, it seemed the common standards and tests would take the country by storm. Fast-forward three years, and the nation is split between higher-performing states chafing at the prospect of less rigorous standards leading to declining student performance, and their lower-performing counterparts that are unwilling or unable to fund the transition to Common Core tests.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow, and Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform, at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based public policy think tank.


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I include Chicago's parents organization here because Baltimore has no education advocates for education. All of Baltimore organizations are created to support charters, school choice, and tests/evaluations.
Remember, we do need some reform but the reforms we are getting are not about quality ....they are about cheapening and tracking students and privatizing public education.



What you can do about some of the hot issues in public education


Downloadable pdf version here. Also, see companion piece, “How They’ve Been Taking the Public and Education out of Public Education.”

  • Track federal ESEA reauthorization (PURE and PAA have news services to help you – see below). The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) expired in 2007 but Congress has yet to agree on how to fix it. Unfortunately, the “bipartisan” take on education looks a lot like the corporate reform version – charter schools, parent “choice,” testing. Please see PAA’s charts comparing the Republican House and Senate Democratic proposals (attached). Experts we listen to do not think an agreement is possible in the next year or two, but it is still important to inform and influence your representatives. Proposals or parts of proposals that are in the works now can end up as federal law.
  • Watch out in your own state for some of the following (PAA news lists will help with this – see below):
    • Parent trigger and other “parent empowerment” laws
    • Voucher bills
    • Final mandates for test-based teacher evaluation
    • State boards of education agreeing to share confidential student data without parental consent
    • Other testing mandates related to the Common Core
  • Join PURE’s news list: http://pureparents.org/?page_id=40 or just use the link at the top of our web site home page, www.pureparents.org. You will receive regular posts – news, opinion, and a weekly action alert for Chicago and/or the nation.
  • Join Parents Across America’s newsletter list: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/sign-up/ or click on “Take Action” at the top of our home page, www.parentsacrossamerica.org. You will receive a weekly newsletter with updates about PAA and our chapters and affiliates, and a weekly action alert. Join the PAA News listfor regular news and updates on education: Send an e-mail to PAAnews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
  • Consider starting a PAA chapter. Chapter leaders should be current or former public school parents. Details here: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/join-us/
  • Why would anyone who cares about public schools shop at WalMart? When you shop at WalMart and other businesses, your money ends up paying Michelle Rhee, Teach for America, and fat cat charter school operators. Boycott them and spread the word!
  • Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing (http://timeoutfromtesting.org/nationalresolution/). If you belong to a group, have them endorse it, too.
- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=20803#sthash.EydxeAbd.qingp4JS.dpuf
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PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ THIS LONG ARTICLE.


This article was written by a conservative think tank that would support some stereotypes I do not and I might point out that this article does not tell us that career education used to be union apprenticeships having nothing to do with public education.  We had some of the strongest trades education in the world that allowed high school grads a course to hiring right out of school with on-the-job payment as the corporation and the union paid for this apprenticeship.  It is the killing of the union membership that continues with these career colleges.  The question for me is not college for all or career education.  It is college-for-all that want it and trade apprenticeships with on-the job-training.

The article does well pointing to the differing schools of thought.  WHAT OVERRULES THOSE THOUGHTS IS THAT CHARTERS ARE PRIVATIZING SCHOOLS AND THEREFOR WILL OFFER NO CHOICE FOR CITIZENS.


What people are not allowed to discuss because labor unions are on the neo-liberal hit list.....redesigning democratic education that prepares students to be citizens works just fine when you have a union apprenticeship available for students graduating and wanting to go into the trades.  It does not involve taxpayer money needed for schools....it allows for people to graduate from school and start a job....and it allows schools to graduate students ready for college.....ALL OF WHICH VOCATIONAL K-12 WILL NOT!
  THIS WORKED LIKE A CHARM FOR DECADES!

August 19, 2013

College-for-all vs. career education? Moving beyond a false debate

By Sarah Carr This piece was originally published in the Wilson Quarterly.

At New Orleans charter schools, even students in the primary grades sometimes start the day with rousing chants professing their commitment to college. “This is the way, hey!/ We start the day, hey!/ We get the knowledge, hey!/To go to college!” kids shout. During several years writing about the remaking of the school system since Hurricane Katrina, I have heard high school teachers remind students to wash their hands before leaving the restroom because otherwise they might get sick, which might cause them to miss class, which would leave them less prepared for college. College flags and banners coat the walls and ceilings of schools across the city. College talk infuses the lessons of even the youngest learners. College trips expose older kids to campuses around the country.

While particularly strong in New Orleans, the “college-for-all” movement has swept the nation over the past decade, with education reformers in different cities embracing the notion that sending more low-income students to and through college should be America’s primary antipoverty strategy. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama echoed that theme when he asked every American to pledge to attend at least one year of college. “We will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
OBAMA IS COUNTING WHAT IS CAREER COLLEGE JOB TRAINING AS COLLEGE

Students study at Akili Academy, one of dozens of charter schools in New Orleans. (Photo: Sarah Garland)

At schools that have embraced the college-for-all aspiration, career and technical education is seen as being as outdated as chalkboards and cursive handwriting. Instead, the (mostly poor and mostly minority) students are endlessly drilled and prepped in the core humanities and sciences—lessons their (mostly middle- or upper-income and mostly white) teachers hope will enable the teenagers to rack up high scores on the ACT, SAT, and Advanced Placement exams and go on to attend the four-year college of their dreams (although it’s not always clear whose dreams we’re talking about). On the surface, the tension between college-for-all and career and technical education pits egalitarianism against pragmatism. What could be more egalitarian, after all, than sending the nation’s most disadvantaged secondary students off to the vaunted halls of institutions once reserved for the most privileged? Only eight percent of low-income children in America earn a bachelor’s degree by their mid-twenties, compared to more than 80 percent of students from the top income quartile.

Yet what could be more pragmatic than acknowledging that in cities where more than half of students fail tests of basic academic skills, imposing purely academic aspirations might be a fool’s errand? Some studies have shown that only about one-third of low-income students who start college earn bachelor’s degrees by their mid-twenties; the large majority who drop out are left, in many cases, with thousands of dollars in debt. At some institutions, including the historically black Southern University at New Orleans, the graduation rate is less than 10 percent.

Understanding grassroots realities

The neat dichotomy between egalitarianism and pragmatism breaks down when we consider the players and grassroots realities, however. The desire to send impoverished students to the best four-year colleges undoubtedly stems from worthy motives. In New Orleans, only about five percent of African-American public school children graduated from college in the years before Hurricane Katrina—a statistic that everyone with common sense and a conscience would agree needs to change. But while the reformers’ big-picture goal of sending the other 95 percent to and through college might be egalitarian in theory, the means to that end are often quite paternalistic.

In their efforts to set poor children of color on the path to college, the idealistic young educators attempt to inculcate middle-class aspirations in their students through a form of body and mind control: instructing them in everything from how to take notes to how to sit, talk, walk, and move; embracing the goals of “re-acculturating” and “re-calibrating” them; and calling them “scholars,” in honor of the new pursuit. One veteran principal refers to it as “lockstepping.” In a not atypical scene inside a New Orleans charter school, a kindergarten teacher told her young charges, “We have a lot to do this year—a lot if we want to go to the first grade. The first graders already have read this book and moved on to other books. I know all of you want to go to first grade because all of you want to go to college. But you need to show discipline over your bodies to do that.”



“The idea that career and technical education is high quality and somehow rooted in the real world is just bunk.” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust


Many parents (and even some “scholars”) welcome this structure and the intense focus on college. But some would like to see the new charters incorporate more trade and technical training in addition to their heavy college-prep emphasis. And others see a disconnect between the reformers’ goals and their methods. New Orleans grandfather Ronald McCoy shook his head during a 2010 interview with NPR when he thought about some college-prep charter schools that force their students to walk a straight line—marked out with tape—in the hallway between classes. “This walking the line?” he said. “I have been incarcerated, and that’s where I learned about walking behind those lines and staying on the right-hand side of the wall.” Applying the college-for-all ethos in a top-down fashion in low-income communities of color creates the risk of being more imperialistic than egalitarian. But emphasizing career and technical education can do another kind of harm, simply because of the dismal state of many programs. “The idea that career and technical education is high quality and somehow rooted in the real world is just bunk,” says Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization that works to improve student academic achievement.

Even advocates of career and technical education acknowledge that the programs are often divorced from economic and industry needs. Many of them were designed not out of a desire to prepare students for high-wage jobs in growing technical fields, but on the basis of classist, racist assumptions that low-income students and children of color cannot learn at high levels. To the extent that these programs fill an economic need, it’s to create a permanent underclass of workers destined for minimum-wage jobs. In New Orleans, before Katrina, that meant the schools produced an endless supply of graduates to serve as housekeepers and dishwashers working for less than $20,000 a year in the city’s tourist-based economy, but very few who could repair air conditioning units, a job that pays more than twice as much.

The origins of college-for-all

A confluence of forces has fueled the college-for-all push of the last couple of decades. Apart from the well-publicized hollowing out of the economy, a raft of reports have shown the differential benefits of college and graduate school education in terms of earnings, job stability, and health. In 2010, for instance, the median wage for a male high school graduate between the ages of 25 and 34 was $32,800, compared to $49,800 for one with a bachelor’s degree.

At the same time, the standards movement—with its emphasis on disaggregated data, high-stakes testing, and school accountability—exposed huge failures in the schooling of low-income and minority children. “This very good idea that all kids need a strong academic underpinning morphed into the idea that all kids need to be prepared to attend a four-year college,” says Robert Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He doesn’t think the two ideas are necessarily the same.

“We have a class snobbism that the only jobs that matter are the jobs we do: white-collar jobs in offices.” Robert Schwartz, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

The 1990s and 2000s also saw the rapid growth of programs such as Teach For America, which sends recent graduates of elite colleges into poor communities in New Orleans and other places for missionary-style stints. TFA members and recent alums founded several of the charter schools and charter networks, such as KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program), that dominate in post-Katrina New Orleans and are the most strident, best-known backers of the college-for-all—or at least college for far more—movement.

Some prominent educators have pushed back against the movement in the last two years, citing its lack of pragmatism. In 2011, for instance, Schwartz coauthored an influential paper, Pathways to Prosperity, which reported burgeoning demand for “middle-skill” workers, including  electricians, construction managers, and dental hygienists. The report focused on fields where the average wage is above $50,000 ($53,030 for electricians, $70,700 for dental hygienists, and $90,960 for construction managers, according to 2012 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics); workers in other traditional vocational fields, including health aides and short-order cooks, make far less.

The “middle-skill” fields described in the report typically require an associate’s degree or occupational certificate, but not a four-year bachelor’s degree. “The ‘college-for-all’ rhetoric . . . needs to be significantly broadened to become a ‘post high-school credential for all,’” Schwartz and his colleagues argued.


The Harvard report stressed that schools and officials should not downplay efforts to improve traditional academic instruction. But it concluded that secondary school career training should be significantly upgraded and expanded by introducing more opportunities for work experience, extensive employer involvement in shaping programs, and enhanced hands-on (as opposed to classroom-based) learning. (THIS IS THE UNION APPRENTICESHIP...INDEED, THESE CAREER COLLEGE JOB TRAININGS ARE INFERIOR TO WHAT ALREADY EXISTS IN UNION WORKSHOPS.  BUT THESE CONSERVATIVES WRITING THIS ARTICLE WILL NOT TALK ABOUT THE PUBLIC COSTS OF TRYING TO END UNION APPRENTICESHIPS!)

Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution published a report that dissected the college payoff by school selectivity, major, and occupation. “While the average return to obtaining a college degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally so,” the authors wrote. They cited the low, or negative, “return on investment” for less selective, yet pricey, private universities and for majors such as art and psychology. “By telling all young people that they should go to college no matter what, we are actually doing some of them a disservice.”

Many of the most thoughtful backers of college-for-all and expanded career education agree on more than they disagree on: They all hope to boost the percentage of Americans with some form of postsecondary degree or training and thereby increase social mobility. And they all believe that the high school curriculum could be improved. But they part ways on the best means to their shared ends.

“If we’re talking about earning enough to support a family, the smartest choice is a four-year degree,” Haycock says. “It is the only sure route out of poverty.”

Schwartz maintains that there needs to be more emphasis on alternate pathways to well-paying jobs. “We have a class snobbism that the only jobs that matter are the jobs we do: white-collar jobs in offices.”
THAT IS BECAUSE JOBS WITHOUT COLLEGE HAVE BEEN SLASHED TO POVERTY WAGES!

The best way to address this divergence is not to give up on college-for-all, or on expanded career and technical education. We need to look at the debate in a different way, incorporating individual experience as well as data, and humanistic as well as economic perspectives. Using this lens, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of how to make our education system both more pragmatic and more egalitarian.

Too much focus on elites


As with most social issues in America, the debate over college-for-all and career education has taken place mostly at an elite level, with little understanding of the desires and needs of low-income students and their parents. During several years of close observation of New Orleans charter schools, I saw how hard it is to prescribe a set of educational aspirations to a group of people, no matter how convincing the data and experts might be.

Two teenage students I interviewed provided a case in point. Both were poor, smart, creative, and intense, but that’s where the similarities ended. Brice was talkative, clever, mischievous, and, despite his kindness and generosity, constantly in trouble. One of his teachers described him this way: “Brice’s mouth is his weapon. But if you don’t understand Brice, you would think his weapon is more than his mouth.”

By contrast, Anthony (whose name has been changed) was soft spoken and reserved, and avoided conflict at all costs. Yet he occasionally burst forth with statements that revealed how much he saw and knew, such as his description of the topics covered in an elective philosophy class: “How come people come in different races and what’s the difference? Why is everything this way? How do we know what’s ethically right or wrong? Who are we? Why do we speak to each other and why do we have five fingers and five toes? How can we make the things we make? How do we know what matter is, and why can we feel things?”

Anthony, whose mother scraped by as a hotel housekeeper, desperately wanted to go to college, while Brice preferred the military. (He only somewhat facetiously declared that guns and violence were what he knew.) But in a twist of fate, Brice enrolled in a KIPP high school whose principal endlessly recited the school’s mantra: “One thousand first-generation college graduates by 2022.” Meanwhile, Anthony attended a long-struggling and less ambitious non-charter New Orleans high school where, in 2010, the year before he enrolled, only 14 of 44 graduating seniors continued on to college. Among those 14 graduates, 10 needed to take remedial courses and the average ACT score was 13.9. (The ACT is scored on a scale of 1 to 36, with a national average of about 21.) Anthony earned a 12 when he took the test in the spring of his junior year.

The education system failed Anthony and Brice in different ways. Anthony suffered from a failure of training: He had more than enough desire and ambition, but his schools did not provide him with the skills and tools to make college graduation an easy (or even likely) prospect. Brice, on the other hand, suffered from a failure of imagination: He attended a school hell-bent on giving him the skills and tools he needed to thrive in college. Yet he retained a limited view of his own potential in spite of all the college banners, slogans, chants, and ambitions that surrounded him.

Anthony graduated from high school in the spring of 2012 and entered Southeastern Louisiana University at the start of 2013, where he struggled academically during his first semester but remained determined to persist. Brice was arrested for second-degree attempted murder during the spring of his freshman year at KIPP. He spent more than a year in jail before his lawyer negotiated a plea deal during the summer of 2012. Brice has not returned to a traditional high school, although he hopes to earn a GED.

Most of the new college-for-all charter schools in New Orleans are just graduating their first cohorts of students, so only time will tell if they succeed in their mission. (A national study of KIPP’s earliest graduates found that 33 percent had received a degree from a four-year college within 10 years—four times the national rate for students with similar backgrounds, yet a far cry from the organization’s stated goal of 75 percent.) But it struck me as sadly ironic that a restructured school system so focused on getting students through college could fail so utterly to give both Brice and Anthony what they most needed to get there.

Stop treating academic and vocational education as ‘silos’

There are changes we could make to our schools and way of thinking that would help students like Anthony and Brice—changes that would, however, complicate our understanding of what’s pragmatic and what’s egalitarian.

To more pragmatic ends, we should stop treating academic and vocational education as curricular silos and develop more strategies for boosting college completion rates among low-income students. There’s little point in expanding technical education or four-year college matriculation rates if both pathways are, by design or default, bridges to nowhere. And replicable small-scale efforts aimed at shoring up career education and improving college graduation rates already exist.

For instance, nine school districts participating in a California-based initiative called the Linked Learning Alliance agreed to expand their career and technical education courses while also integrating them with academic classes. Students might study both algebra and computer-aided design (a modernized vocational subject) in the same class and no longer choose (or get nudged toward) an early college-prep track or a career track. It was assumed that all students would have access to both a rigorous academic curriculum and work experience, such as an internship or employment at a school-based business. “We are trying to overcome the mindset that career and technical education is ‘just shop,’” said Olivine Roberts, the chief academic officer at the Sacramento City Unified School District, one of the participating districts, in an interview with School Administrator magazine.

Operating in large cities such as New York and Chicago (as well as New Orleans), the Posse Foundation sends cohorts of 10 low-income children from the same urban community off to elite colleges as a group. The theory is that the students will feel more comfortable, and will be more likely to stay in college, if surrounded with peers who have similar backgrounds and culture. Neither Linked Learning nor Posse is, on its own, a solution to educational or economic inequity in America. But they are both much-needed practical approaches in an area that’s been dominated by abstract, and at times ideological, arguments and approaches.

To a more egalitarian end, we should stop viewing low-income children of color as a form of “other” in the debate over secondary and college education, a bias both sides can be guilty of at times. Children growing up in poverty are not incapable of higher-level thinking and learning, as many backers of vocational tracks have explicitly or implicitly maintained for generations. But neither are they empty vessels who need to be filled with mainstream middle-class ambitions and values at super speed. One extreme discredits and undervalues poor children of color through the end it envisions for them (uniformly working-class jobs), the other through the means it employs (a form of cultural indoctrination). Both fail to fully conceive of these children as talented and aspirational in their own right.


Before we redesign our education system to better meet the needs of the most disempowered, we must acknowledge how this idea of otherness has fostered the most simplistic (and least constructive) positions in this debate. In the long run, social policies and programs that deny the overwhelming power of individual agency are destined to fail.




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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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