Betsy DeVos: The Midas Touch in Education

In all likelihood, Betsy DeVos will soon be confirmed as U. S. Secretary of Education, meaning she’ll be guiding our nation’s public schools. Typical of most candidates for the job, DeVos never taught a day in her long, privileged life. DeVos never attended public schools and never sent her children to public schools, either. 

We have had clueless Secretaries of Education before, but what separates Ms. DeVos from people like Arne Duncan and Bill Bennett, both singularly clueless, and makes her a million times more dangerous, is her love affair with for-profit charter schools. Consider K12 Inc., a typical for-profit online charter school in which DeVos has invested. K12 operates like any business, a giant pharmaceutical company, a strip mining conglomerate, or a cigarette manufacturer. 

So how does K12 approach the task of helping children? Does the company start by hiring the best teachers! No. The company focuses on hiring the best executives. How does K12 manage to hire the best executives? Call it the pedagogical equivalent of the Midas touch. 

K12 pays big. 

In 2016 Nathaniel A. Davis, Executive Chairman of K12, received $6.91 million in compensation. A little digging shows Davis made $5.33 million in 2015. He made $4.25 million in 2014. He made $9.54 million the year before that. Round it off and he piled up a total of $26 million.

Because K12 is a publicly traded company—with a stock price that rises and falls—they are required to publish salaries. Since 2012 top earners include:

Timothy L. Murray $11.67 million (four years of shedding blood, sweat and tears for kids)

Allison B. Cleveland $2.84 million (three)

Harry T. Hawks $2.01 million (two)

Howard D. Polsky $3.83 million (four)

Joseph P. Zorella $2.11 million (two)

James J. Rhyu $9.24 million (four)

Celia M. Stokes $1.82 million (two; why, this poor public servant is barely making minimum wage)

Stuart J. Udell $4,540,698 (all in 2016)

Ron J. Packard $12.09 million (three).

That total for Mr. Packard may seem weak, covering only 2012-2014. Going back to 2009, we find he earned $23 million.

Of course, all good businesses cut costs where they must. British Petroleum, health insurance companies, car dealers, this is what they do. It’s that “business efficiency” we hear critics of regular public schools talk so much about. That means teachers at K12 Inc. sacrifice for the good of the cause. In a study done in 2014 it was shown the average Ohio public school teacher earned $56,855 per year.

The average K12 teacher earned $34,333.

In addition, for-profits have “business expenses” ordinary public schools do not. To turn a profit a for-profit must advertise. According to an investigative report by USA Today, K12 spent $21.5 million in taxpayer dollars on advertising in the first eight months of 2012 alone. It also helps to donate millions of taxpayer dollars to campaigns of elected officials, who then keep taxpayer dollars flowing in a virtuous circle.

The only fly in the soup is this: Paying megabucks to executives and donating megabucks to politicians doesn’t help children. In the most detailed study done so far on Ohio E-schools, it was estimated that $1 billion in state funding went to on-line schools between 1999 and 2014, including Ohio Virtual Academy, an offshoot of K12.

What did taxpayers get for that pile of cash? On state report cards, grades for charter schools, generally, were poor. 

For E-schools results were grim:

Graduation rates were abysmal. The median statewide four-year graduation rate for high schools was 93.2 percent. Not one of nine statewide E-schools had a graduation rate as high as the lowest school district, Warrensville Heights, at 60.9.

Ohio Connections Academy came in at 55.1.

The Buckeye Online School of Success had success with 45% of all students. 

Greater Ohio Virtual Academy: 43.5.

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (and classroom for next year for many students since few graduate on time): 38.4.

Ohio Virtual Academy, the school that pays executives millions, the school partly owned by Ms. DeVos: 36.6.

Four other on-line for-profits in Ohio did worse, graduating 33.1, 26.7, 20.6 and 17.3% of all students in four years.

And we saved the “best news" for last! According to a Stanford University study of Buckeye State E-schools, students lost the equivalent of 72 days of reading learning yearly, compared to students in regular public schools. In math, it was worse: 180 days of math learning lost annually.

You read that right. 

If you do the math (and for Ohio E-school students this might be difficult) there are:

   180 days of school per year

  -180 days of math learning lost per year

_____

       0 total days of math learning per year in E-schools.

“There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning,” Margaret E. Raymond, project director at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which completed the study, told a stunned reporter last fall, “but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.”

So there you go. Turning students into gold hasn’t worked so far and probably never will. 

Ms. DeVos may have a plan to protect children from grizzlies. Sadly, she shows little interest in protecting them from greedy corporate raiders.

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To get a good sense of how K12 Inc. works read “Fifteen Months in Virtual Charter Hell.”

Also excellent: “K12 Inc. Tries to Pivot from Virtual School Failures to Profit from ‘Non-Managed’ Schools.”

If you happen to have a masochistic streak, and want to see a list of all the politicians to whom Ms. Devos has donated, check out this link.

Betsy DeVos: The Amway Secretary of Education

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The Essense of Corporate Education: Greed and more Greed

Some of America’s greatest “school reformers” today (and by that I mean arrogant *&%$# like Bill Gates) insist that if we turn over the schools to corporations everything will turn out just great.

Color me skeptical, I guess.

As I see it, “corporate” is to “education” as “cigarette manufacturer” is to “public health and well-being.”

Think that sounds harsh? Do a bit of digging and see what evidence you find. The latest comes from the June 15 edition of the Columbus Dispatch. Administrators at General Chappie James Leadership Academy, a pile-up-the-bucks charter school in Dayton, Ohio, are under investigation for inflating student attendance numbers to suck up taxpayers’ dollars.

State Auditor Dave Yost decided last spring that it might be wiseto check attendance numbers for charter schools and see what he could find.

Chappie James was reporting an enrollment of 459 students. So investigators started checking the details. One mother said her child couldn’t have been in attendance because said child had been incarcerated for the last two years. 

Okay: only 458 students to go. 

Another family said, no, our girl hasn’t been attending Chappie James, either. We’ve been living in Georgia for several years.

(Feel free to start singing: “Four hundred, fifty-seven students enrolled in a charter, four hundred fifty-seven enrolled….”)

Yost kept prying up rocks and looking underneath—and it turned out half of purported students had no enrollment documentation at all. Daily attendance at General Chappie James Leadership Academy averaged…um….well …roughly 30.

(Okay, that song went unexpectedly fast: “Thirty students actually, physically enrolled in a charter, thirty students enrolled….”)

In any case, the state auditor’s office did a little adding and subtracting and determined that Kecia Williams, former director of the school, probably owed the State of Ohio a cool $1.2 million.

In the wake of the auditor’s investigation the Department of Education moved to ban “Kids Count of Dayton,” the most ironically named corporate entity one could imagine—which sponsored the offending school—from opening up new facilities anywhere in Ohio.

It would be bad enough if this was an aberration. Sadly, it was not. Typically, charter schools receive $6,000 per pupil from the State of Ohio annually.

So, the more students you say you enroll, the more money you end up stuffing in your ample corporate pockets.

The Dispatch explains:

Last fall, an investigation by Yost’s office found significantly lower attendance in half [emphasis added] of the 30 schools where auditors conducted unannounced head counts than enrollment data the schools had reported to the state…Yost also has complained about a number of charter schools with such poorly-kept records that they cannot be audited.

In other words, with stunning regularity, corporate education boiled down to one simple word. And that word was: Greed.

Why is anyone really surprised?

Many of us have written, for example, about the giant cesspool that is the for-profit college industry. It’s a great gig, after all, when five top executives of Corinthian College can pull down $22 million in salary over a two-year stretch—at the same time saddling students with high-interest loans—providing low-quality course offerings—and finally going bankrupt this spring.

HoHowHow about the five top executives at K-12, Inc., a for-profit chain of elementary and secondary online schools? They divvied up a cool $35.4 million in salaries and bonuses in 2013 and 2014.

For fun, put that in kid-centric terms. 

Those five individuals took home enough cash to hire 354 teachers (at $50,000 each), for two years to actually work with kids in grades K-12.

Greed is good, isn’t that right?

We know that Pearson spent $8 million between 2009 and 2014 to lobby politicians, mainly to ensure that the company might keep selling billions of dollars’ worth of standardized tests every year.

We know, here in Ohio, that David Brennan, operator of White Hat Schools, donated $3.8 million dollars to politicians over the course of eight years—know, in turn, that Brennan rakes in tens of millions of dollars in state aid yearly for his for-profit K-12 chain.

We don’t know how much money sticks to Brennan’s hands, however, because White Hat Schools are a privately held corporation and salaries need not be disclosed.

We do know that many White Hat Schools have attendance rates less than half reported enrollment.

Don’t believe greed serves as foundation in the corporate education world? Google “charter school operator indicted” for fun.

You get Steven Ingersoll, an optometrist, who ran a chain of Michigan charter schools. His federal indictment says he “diverted $934,000…through several channels into his personal bank account.”

You get the Los Angeles charter operator indicted on more than two dozen felony charges. On expense accounts, he managed to bill his school for the $995 cost of a seminar on “how to limit your personal tax bill,” and another $12.99 for a Speedo swimsuit. Not to mention the fact he and his wife took out a ten-year lease on a building to house the school ($18,000 monthly) and then turned around and sublet the property to the charter for…$44,000 a month.

So much cash to grab! 

So little time!

You had the Chicago charter outfit charged with securities fraud.

You had the guilty plea involving a Cleveland, Ohio charter operation, involving $1.8 million in fraud, including $331,000 paid by the school for services rendered to a Dayton, Ohio bar owner.

And then you have my favorite story for now, which carries the headline: F.B.I Tracks Charter Schools.

Go ahead, Google away yourself. You’ll find endless examples to tickle your fancy. But let’s end with perhaps the biggest scam of all. Let’s hear it for the University of Phoenix, a money-making juggernaut, a company so successful at piling up $$$$ it was able to pay the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL $154.5 million for naming rights to their stadium! Good advertising? Sure! Too bad the school had to pay a fine of $67.5 million, plus $11 million in legal fees, for defrauding students! 

Too bad a U. S. Senate investigation showed the school spent a mere $892 per pupil each year to actually educate students.

Hey, not to worry! Company founder John G. Sperling raked in $263.5 million in a little less than a decade in salary, bonuses and stock sales. And his son, Peter, did better still: $574.3 million.

See?

We already know how corporate education is meant to work. We know, in the end, it boils down to greed.

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If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Or contact me at vilejjv@yahoo.com and I can probably send you a copy direct for a little bit cheaper. My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot do.

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

You Can Become a Millionaire if You Go into Education!

Suppose we could say to the young: “You should go into teaching. Someday, you can be a millionaire! You can be the next Nathaniel A. Davis!”

Corporate education. That’s the ticket!

Before we turn to Mr. Davis, however, we need to set the background. This week Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee offered up the latest in a long string of schemes to fix the public schools. Teachers, I imagine, might wonder, “Shouldn’t education in this country already be fixed? How many plans have politicians put forward?”

Ignore that conundrum.

Alexander was Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush.
(At no time in his life did he ever work in education.)
By the way:  the answer to that question was "no."

Here’s the bold new plan—not to be confused with previous bold new plans. Such as: No Child Left Behind. Mr. Alexander wants Congress to free up federal funds for 11,000,000 students from low-income families. Not new funds. No, Alexander is a fiscal hawk. His idea is to take away money the public schools receive. Then he wants to give it to parents to spend so they can enroll their children in schools of their choice. Choice! That’s what makes America great. Well, not counting parents who are gay or lesbian and might want to choose whom they marry.

Ignore that too.

What Senator Alexander wants is to divert $24 billion in funding. That’s 41% of federal dollars spent on K-12 education. Or: $2,100 per child.

Under his plan states might use the money to:

a) Help low-income students attend public schools outside their neighborhoods.
b) Fund individual scholarships to help pay private school tuition.
c) Attend charter schools, including “for profit” institutions.


Choice is cool! Like: would a member of Congress rather go to a fine restaurant with a lobbyist and eat a $150 meal? Or—since the GOP savaged the food stamp program—would a low-income person rather eat stale donuts scrounged from a dumpster?

Anyway, how would this plan work? Suppose a low-income family hopes to send a daughter to Summit Country Day High School here in Cincinnati. Let’s do the math:

Cost of attending Summit Country Day (9th grade): $19,050

Federal money available:                                              2,100

Shortfall:                                                                    $16,950


Oh, so close! Sadly, the aspiring low-income student still can’t get into the elite school and rub elbows with upper crust children. And by the way, could we not raise the minimum wage, which would be communism or something. And damn! Who thinks low-income families should be covered by health insurance!

Not Senator Alexander.

Sure. The GOP loves helping low-income children.

Or could it be that Republicans secretly hope to privatize all schools—and break up teachers’ unions as a bonus? Perhaps Republican hearts don’t pump red. Perhaps they pump green.

Here in Ohio, we know the answer. Meet David Brennan, operator of White Hat, a charter school chain with almost fifty franchises.

No, I mean schools.

Brennan cares about dollars. No, no, I mean kids. That’s why he has a $6 million mansion down in Naples, Florida. Because Brennan cares about living in lux…no, about children. He loves them so much he is willing to go out of his way to host fund-raising dinners in Florida for hard-working Ohio politicians.

Another neat White Hat trick, when franchises fail...ahem, schools...is to close them. Then they reopen with cool new names, in the same buildings, with much the same staff, so that profits for Mr. Brennan are impossible to kill. Kind of like zombies.

How does Brennan prove his love for Ohio kids? According to the Akron Beacon Journal he and his wife Ann contributed $3.8 million to fifty-one politicians between 2004 and 2012. Almost every cent went to GOP lawmakers.

Really? Why would anyone be surprised? Where education and profit clash education loses. Read up on the shyster tactics used by major for-profit colleges. Or consider the shady operations of for-profit charter school chains in Pennsylvania.

At least you’ll get a laugh for your tax dollars.

Today, however, let’s follow the money under Alexander’s plan and see where it ends. Let’s look at how K-12 Inc., a for-profit virtual education company does business. K-12 was started in 1999. Its founders were two giants in education. Okay, I’m messing with you. Founders were Michael Milken, one-time junk bond king, and Ronald Packard, a hedge fund banker.

The first chairman of the K-12 board was Bill Bennett. Like Senator Alexander, Bennett was a former U. S. Secretary of Education. But he was forced to resign in 2005 after suggesting that if you wanted to lower the U. S. crime rate you could abort every black baby. He quickly added that this would be reprehensible. Still, “your crime rate would go down.”

In other words, these are the kind of people you know are going to devote themselves to helping low-income families. In 2013, K-12 took in $848 million. And 86% ($731 million) came out of the pockets of taxpayers.

Helping children is hard. Every teacher knows. So you have to pay to keep quality employees. You have to pay Packard $19,489,223 for five years if you want to be sure he keeps helping. You have to pay his chief financial officer $3.3 million in 2013.

You need an executive chairman—a man who would never enter the field unless he was sure he could help children. And get paid $9.5 million in 2013. So let’s hear it for Nathaniel A. Davis. There’s no educator who cares more about young people than Davis does! In fact, the top eight educators at K-12 needed $21.4 million to get by just last year.

What’s the moral of this story? Obviously, Congress should listen to Senator Alexander. Federal dollars must be shoveled in this direction. We need to support the efforts of these heroes in education.

Do some math for fun:

Figure the first 1,810 children who use federal money ($2,100) will help Brennan provide fresh campaign donations to GOP politicians.

The next 2,857 will use grant money to ensure that Brennan can live in a mansion in Florida.

The next 4,524 will use their funds so that Davis can be fairly compensated in 2014.

Finally, 9,281 low-income children will use their grant money to make sure that Ronald Packard sticks around for another five years and keeps doing what he does so well.

In other words, let’s make sure Packard keeps helping kids get the best education our tax dollars can buy.

An Education Expert Goes to the Doctor...

IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE A TEACHER you’ve probably noticed something strange about education reformers these days.

You could pile up their combined experience in teaching and add a stack of baloney sandwiches and still not have the equivalent of one thirty-year veteran in a first grade, or middle school science, or high school Latin classroom.

So, whenever we hear Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg or Michelle Rhee or various governors talking about what they would do to fix schools, if they were doing the fixing, it’s like asking me or my father to talk about what we would have done if we had ever been in combat. My father was an officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II; but he did duty as a weatherman and never left the States.

In keeping with family tradition, I enlisted in the Marines in December 1968. After boot camp I wasn’t sent to Vietnam. I was sent to supply school and did my “fighting” behind a desk in California. I was more likely to get sunburned at the beach on weekends or die inhaling “White Out” while correcting typos than to be hit by bullets or step on a booby trap.

It would be the height of arrogance to style myself a “hero.”

Unfortunately, humility never stops the non-combatant types in U. S. education from portraying themselves as Medal of Honor winners. They don’t do any fighting but love to tell the combat veterans what they ought to do to win the war to fix the schools.

Just imagine what might happen if these bold reformers lived in a world that operated on similar principles. It would be a world where no experience was required to qualify an individual as an expert, in education, heart surgery, or airplane maintenance.

First, let’s send Mayor Bloomberg to the doctor. He’s having heart trouble. So he drops in on John Sears, the plumber. John taps his chest a few times with a pipe wrench and says the mayor needs a valve replaced. “We’ll run 1/2 galvanized piping while we’re at it,” Sears explains.

“My god,” replies the billionaire businessman, “do you know anything about heart surgery?”

“As much as you know about teaching,” Sears retorts.

Meanwhile, Michelle Rhee heads for the auto repair shop because her “check engine” light is blinking. She’s driving a Ferrari, purchased with a few of the fat speaker’s fees she earns by talking about fixing schools. She pulls into a McDonald’s and asks the acne-faced young lady at the drive-thru to step outside and consider the problem. The teen rolls her eyes; but when Rhee offers $100 merit pay agrees to do what she can. The teen studies the matter briefly then tells Rhee she needs oil and pours two gallons of used deep fry fat into her gas tank.

“This is going to be great,” Rhee says as she speeds away.

Finally, several governors and members of state legislatures board a 747 bound for Tahiti. A company that runs for-profit charter schools and another company that designs standardized tests are paying all expenses and sending everyone to a conference on education reform and a week’s vacation in that Pacific paradise.

Ohio Governor John Kasich is nervous before he flies and asks about pilot experience. “Don’t worry,” a flight attendant tells him. “U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is at the controls. He hasn’t ever flown a plane before but he has watched planes take off. Besides, he went to Harvard.”

Suddenly, Kasich feels better.

His seatmate, Chris Christie, isn’t quite convinced. The governor of New Jersey is kind of wedged in his seat, anyway. “Uh, who’s the co-pilot, just in case?” he wonders.

“Not to worry, sir,” the attendant smiles reassuringly. “Our co-pilot is Snooki, of Jersey Shore fame.”

“Ah, a solid citizen and a constituent,” Christie replies. He feels better and asks the attendant for an extra bag of peanuts.

Sitting across the aisle, the majority leader of the Wisconsin Senate is hard at work. He’s wearing one of those Cheeseheads, which he thinks might come in handy as a flotation device should the plane go down over water. Obviously, he knows just about as much when it comes to airplanes as all the passengers aboard, combined, know about teaching. But he’s drafting new legislation on his laptop—actually, he’s cutting and pasting language provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council—which will fundamentally alter public education in his state.

“May I ask,” he says, “who did the pre-flight safety check? I hope they knew what they were doing.”

“Only the most knowledgeable mechanics are allowed to work on our planes,” the attendant assures him. “Glenn Beck, who knows everything, signed off on engine maintenance. And that new kid, from Teach for America, checked flight controls.”

“Does the new kid actually know how to do a safety check?” the senator wonders.

“Of course not,” the attendant admits. “But she’s really smart. Besides, what do any of you know about how schools really work? Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll exit before takeoff and go back to my real job. Trust me. You’ll be fine.”

“What do you normally do for a living?” asks Governor Christie. His words sound a little garbled because his mouth is full of half-chewed legumes.

“I’m a special education teacher from Newark, your home state. Twenty-four years in the classroom, if you care, devoted to helping kids with serious problems. Well, gentlemen, have a safe trip. You’re in the same good hands as American education reform today. And if there’s any trouble, don’t worry, there are plenty of parachutes.”

“You might need two,” Kasich says, poking a bit of fun at the chunky chief executive from Jersey. “Who did you say packed those parachutes?” Mr. Kasich asks more seriously.

“We hire out that job to the Vile Anvil Company of Lima, Ohio, sir. Remember? Non-union workers. People earning minimum wage. You gave the owners a huge tax break to bring anvil-making jobs to Ohio and promised they wouldn’t have to worry about a lot of government safety inspections. What can possibly go wrong? You’re in the hands of anvil-making experts.”

The special education teacher smiles knowingly as she gathers personal items and heads back to the boarding gate.

The only fighting I did in the Marines was against germs.