In Part 8, found here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we took a brief look at how former Education Secretary Bill Bennett’s perspective on the role of computer technology as a teaching and learning tool changed once he learned how the company he co-founded could thrive under No Child Left Behind, the private-sector profit engine drafted and pushed into law by former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress. Bennett’s not the only profiteer; billions of dollars in public school funding is being funneled to corporate interests, thanks to Kress’s re-write of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and Kress himself is collecting significant coin after turning from public servant to corporate lobbyist. In his new life, Kress guides his corporate masters to the many spigots flowing with federal funds from his crowning achievement in lawmaking.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.dailykos.com/... )
We know the names of some of NCLB’s most successful profiteers; in addition to Bennett, the list includes presidential brother Neil Bush (click here for reference http://www.dailykos.com/... ) and presidential family friend Harold McGraw III (click here too http://www.dailykos.com/... ). In 2005, renowned education researcher and analyst Gerald Bracey attempted to catalog more of them and ran into a number of well-placed brick walls. "Thanks to Mark Felt’s emergence, we all got reminded that Deep Throat supposedly told Woodward and Bernstein, ‘Follow the money’," Bracey writes here http://www.america-tomorrow.com/... . "Good advice, but when I tried it on No Child Left Behind, it didn’t work too well. A documented money trail is not there."
Bracey began by looking at which "supplemental educational services" providers – how effective they were in general, and which ones were effective versus which ones weren’t. Funny thing: no one seems to know either answer, least of all the U.S. Department of Education, cutter of the mega-checks to America’s pass-through school districts.
He found that "nationally, there are over 1,800 approved providers, but the states have tiny staffs to monitor what is going on. Illinois, for example, has 75 approved providers and one person to oversee them; Michigan has 98 approved providers and a staff of 200 for all state department functions."
And he found that the Department of Education wasn’t much interested in applying any scrutiny to the business. He quotes one Michael Petrilli, formerly of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, then an official at the Department, then returning to the Fordham Foundation as the revolving door continues revolving, saying, "We want as little regulation as possible so the market can be as vibrant as possible."
Notice that this man-about-Washington DIDN’T say, "We want as little regulation as possible so that more children and more teachers will find greater success as their teaching and learning environments are improved, strengthened and enhanced." No, he said he wanted the least regulation possible "so that market can be as vibrant as possible." Vibrant markets spell profits for someone, losses for someone else. May we celebrate the vibrancy of Brother Neil’s bank accounts as we pencil "America’s students" in the "losses for someone else" column?
I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed reading Bracey’s studies in recent days – Google the man’s name and you find his annual reports skewering the skewerable on every side of the table for the past many years. It’s his slips of humor and bits of color that make an otherwise depressing and hateful topic manageable to report. He writes here, noticing the discrepancy between the Department of Education’s requirements of actual school districts and its requirements of Bush’s profiteers, "ED is holding schools’ feet to the fire of accountability, requiring scientifically based evidence for program adoption, but it is inviting providers of supplemental services to sit by that fire with a glass of cognac. NCLB is about the care and feeding of markets, not the education of children."
Wonder if Brother Neil enjoys his cognac by the fire?
But Bracey knows his stuff, and that’s the bottom line. Under NCLB, "supplemental educational services" is a $2 billion (with a B) annual enterprise. Someone’s collecting loot by the truckload, and Bracey tries to track the drivers. He finds some of them carting money overseas, and these have their fans in the Bush orbit, but they’re not necessarily the fat cats.
He explains, "As with a number of jobs, some tutoring has been out-sourced to India, although so far none of it seems to have been specific to NCLB. [Former Education Secretary and "A Nation at Risk" co-author Chester] Finn favors it: ‘If a Bangalore call center can help you troubleshoot your computer or toaster oven, why can’t an English-speaking, Bangalore-based tutor help your child learn the parts of speech or principles of multiplication?’"
No matter that privatization, while we’re on the topic, has been weighed, measured and found wanting by some of the very folks who’d love to see privatization take root: Clive Belfield and Chad d’Entremont of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. Bracey shares these fellows’ determinations that with privatization, "there are no easy administrative savings; for-profit providers do not offer instruction that is demonstrably superior to that of public schools; there are additional costs in marketing, establishing brand equity, politicking, and community building; and few economies of scale exist, making it difficult to franchise the operations." So, they conclude, "Disadvantaged students may not benefit from a free market of choice."
Stymied at tracking funds flowing to "supplemental education services" providers, Bracey turns his attention to the OTHER racket designed by Kress’s NCLB. He writes, "It’s easier to track the money going into new testing than into the coffers of the providers of supplemental services, although no one has even done this yet on a state-by-state basis."
And here’s where dollars lead right back to some familiar names.
It’s a bumpy ride, so I’ll break up the biggest chunks:
The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), noting that prior to NCLB few states had sufficiently large testing programs to meet its provisions, estimated that NCLB testing would cost between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion over a six-year period from 2002 to 2008, depending on what type of tests states settled on.
NCLB provided sufficient funds to cover only the $1.9-billion figure.
Of course, the $1.9-billion figure underestimated costs significantly. To begin with, the GAO calculated only how much it would cost to meet the NCLB provision for the 46% of schools that receive Title I funds. But most districts test all schools. If universally true, this would roughly double even the lowest figure. The GAO figures also didn’t include "test-prep" spending. The GAO might have foreseen the amount of test-prep materials that would be used and estimated that cost, but neither it nor Eduventures, an education industry research and marketing firm, could have seen some future developments.
For instance, in May 2005 Harcourt Assessment and McGraw-Hill both rolled out new, online testing programs that conduct so-called formative assessments. These are weekly "mini-tests" that teachers can use to see if the kids are progressing toward the Big Test that will determine their school’s fate.
While a vice president at ETS, Sharon Robinson reportedly called NCLB the "Test Publishers Full Employment Act." And that was before ETS landed a $55-million-a-year testing contract with California.
An April 2005 examination of "Job Openings" at the ETS Career Center web-site found 98 professional positions available, prima facie evidence that Robinson was right.
In 2003 Eduventures estimated that spending on testing and test prep would rise from $1.81 billion in 2003 to $2.29 billion in 2006. If one extends the projection to cover the same six-year period as the GAO’s study, then states will spend $5.4 billion for testing and test prep between 2002 and 2008. (The extrapolation is reasonable because Eduventures’ projections are linear.)
There is lots of money to go around, but FOGs — Friends of George — seem to benefit especially.
The President signed NCLB into law on 8 January 2002. On 1 May 2002, NCLB architect and Bush advisor B. Alexander "Sandy" Kress registered as a D.C. lobbyist. His lobbying efforts have garnered $4 million — with NCS Pearson, which has the $57-million-a-year testing contract in Texas, being the most generous contributor.
The $4-million sum does not include money Kress received as a Texas lobbyist from McGraw-Hill, Kaplan Learning Centers, Kumon North America, Bill Bennett’s K-12, Inc., and The Teaching Commission, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner’s latest venture.
Four years ago, Stephen Metcalf documented the tight ties between the Bush and McGraw families — they vacationed together; Harold McGraw, Jr., was on the board of Barbara Bush’s foundation and received an award from George H. W. Bush; and Harold McGraw III served on the George W. Bush transition team and visited the President in the White House the first day he occupied it.
A New York Times profile of McGraw III, who now heads the publishing empire, mentioned in passing that he had lobbied for NCLB. What a surprise. McGraw-Hill and CTB/McGraw-Hill have benefited mightily from the connection. When Bush was governor of Texas, most reading contracts landed in McGraw-Hill’s lap. Most of the consultants brought in to advise on his reforms were McGraw-Hill authors.
A small coterie of mostly McGraw-Hill authors also seem to control the $1 billion a year that flows from the Reading First provisions of NCLB; Education Week has referred to them as both a "select group" and an "in group."
That’s a lot to digest, but here’s what I took from it:
(1) Companies that previously produced testing materials for public schools began to produce more and different kinds of testing materials in order to bulk up their contracts and profit margins.
(2) After turning from public servant to lobbyist, Sandy Kress, presidential tutor and the architect of NCLB, signed on to represent the very corporate interests who benefit most from the law he wrote – INCLUDING former Ed Secretary Bill Bennett AND Harold McGraw III – and he collected AT LEAST $4 million (between its adoption in 2002 and the publication of Bracey’s report in 2005) for leading them and others to the watering trough.
(3) Harold McGraw III is more than just a fellow whose company happened to be doing the right thing at the right time.
(4) A program called Reading First collects $1 billion annually BY ITSELF.
(5) While the money that has already been funneled to corporate interests through NCLB already totals several billion dollars, the potential funding stream could be multiplied by a factor of two or three in the coming years, depending on if and how Congress re-authorizes Kress’s NCLB this year.
With the help of a fellow researcher, Bracey introduces someone new to the roster of profiteers, a name I’d never heard before, Edward Kame’enui:
Elaine Garan of California State University, Fresno, once tried to connect the dots to link the members of this group:
For one of my presentations, I made an overhead transparency of some of the vested financial interests of the scientific researchers and their connections to government policy. I tried color-coding to make the links easier to follow. When I came to Edward Kame’enui, I ran out of colors. He has financial links at so many levels, I can’t list them all here. . . . The bottom line is that we have a handful of researchers with financial links to their own research. They do the research
that supports their programs,
that supports their own professional development enterprises,
that matches the assessments they designed,
that supports their own learning programs,
that align with government mandates,
that are based on their own research.
But Bracey himself offers some context to Kame’enui’s amazing good luck as an education businessman-turned-administration official.
Kame’enui co-authored a "Consumer’s Guide" to evaluating reading programs, a guide used in virtually all Reading First applications. He is now the commissioner of special education at ED.
Ask Cindy Cupp of Savannah how tough it is to break into the inner circle. On retiring as the reading director for the Georgia Department of Education, Cupp started publishing K-1 beginning reading texts. Several Georgia districts included her materials in their Reading First applications. All were rejected. The Georgia Department of Education has admitted that reviewers of the applications were supposed to simply review the application, not evaluate the programs the applicants planned to use, but evaluate they did. One reviewer who gave Cupp’s materials a negative evaluation admitted later that she had not actually seen them.
Or ask Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, who in May filed a complaint with the inspector general of ED asking for an investigation of Reading First mismanagement. The number of schools using Slavin’s Success for All has slipped by several hundred since Reading First appeared, and the Success for All Foundation has had to layoff over 300 employees. "We believe that the federal government enabled a small group of individuals to direct significant federal resources to a small group of companies, thus both restricting our ability to trade and subverting the explicit intent and language of the Reading First statute," read the complaint.
In late June, the Success for All Foundation filed a second complaint, this time with the Ethics Division of ED, asserting conflicts of interest at the Reading First technical assistance centers (TACs) because people staffing those centers have ties to products sold by SRA/McGraw-Hill, Voyager, and Pearson. The complaint then specifies eight conflicts existing at the Western Regional TAC at the University of Oregon — Kame’enui’s university — four at the Central TAC at the University of Texas, and similar conflicts at the Eastern TAC at Florida State University. On August 4, the Reading Recovery Council of North America, also excluded from the Reading First programs, filed a complaint with ED’s inspector general. Its complaint alleges that the implementation of Reading First restricted state and local control in the selection of materials, in violation of a section of the NCLB law; that ED has excluded one-on-one instruction in the program, contradicting the statute, congressional intent, and research findings; that the application of "scientific research" findings has been selective; and that ED has supported a campaign against Reading Recovery. On August 7, the USA Today website reported that the inspector general had opened "a preliminary investigation into possible mismanagement" of the program.
But Kame’enui has a hand in a second program, one called the Voyager Expanded Learning Series, as its co-developer. The U.S. Department of Education – whose Commissioner of Special Education is Kame-enui, remember – told the New York City School District that the beginner’s-level reading program it had adopted didn’t include "enough phonics," Bracey writes. That program was called, ahem, "Phonics Month by Month," and it was developed by educators at Wake Forest University. The New York City School District was satisfied with "Phonics Month by Month," but "eventually caved in and, in order to secure the $34 million at risk, selected the Voyager Expanded Learning series, developed, in part, by Kame’enui."
Does anyone else wonder who this guy is?
By the way, does anyone know who founded Voyager? Guy’s name is Randy Best, and he’s known inside the Bush orbit as a "Pioneer," someone who raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s first presidential campaign in 2000. Best’s previous experience in education, Bracey tells us, was as a "purveyor of cheerleading equipment."
Don’t laugh. Cheerleading is a big deal in Texas. People can get killed because of cheerleading in Texas (http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Love-Deadly-Cheerleader-Murder/dp/1559721375 ).
And Voyager’s senior vice president? It’s only Jim Nelson, Bush’s pick to run the Texas Education Agency during the 1990s. But wait: Nelson himself LEFT Voyager in 2004 to become superintendent of the Richardson, Texas, School District, Bracey tells us, but all was not lost – Voyager hired his wife, Karen Nelson, to be a vice president.
But wait again! Bracey writes, "A month after Nelson’s appointment in Richardson, the district began purchasing large quantities of Voyager materials. Total expenditures exceeded $400,000, but no single purchase order ever exceeded $250,000. Purchases under $250,000 do not need the approval of the school board. An earlier Richardson superintendent, Vernon Johnson, also purchased Voyager curriculum materials for the district before taking a new job as Voyager’s CEO."
The wonders never cease. All that’s necessary is to travel in the orbits of Sandy Kress and George W. Bush, and you, too, can become exceedingly wealthy thanks to federal funding through NCLB.
Before you call your own Congressman and ask how to join the gravy train, read one more note from Bracey: "Outside of Texas, Voyager has also rewarded friends. It contributed $56,750 to Georgia State Superintendent Linda Schrenko’s failed gubernatorial campaign. The gift came shortly after Schrenko had awarded Voyager a $1.1-million contract, apparently without apprising the state board of education. In 2004, the federal government charged Schrenko with 18 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and the theft of over $500,000, $9,300 of which was allegedly used for a face lift. As of mid-August 2005, no trial date had been set."
Lesson to be learned: When using your state’s share of federal funding to pad the profit margins of corporate interests close to Bush and Sandy Kress, tell your state board of education ahead of time. It’ll save a lot of litigation and headache.
This is not the end of the Voyager story.
Writes Bracey:
The widespread use of Voyager would be one thing if Voyager stood head and shoulders above the crowd as an effective reading program, but it does not. In a letter to New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum observed that Voyager had been called "the best example of the worst reading programs for children." Gotbaum had four questions for Klein:
- During your selection process, did you see re-search that indicated Voyager’s success? If so, I would like to have a copy.
- Did you consult any reading experts when choosing Voyager?
- There are many successful reading programs across the country. Which programs did you evaluate and why did you select Voyager?
- Why did you decide to implement Voyager city-wide instead of testing the program in a small number of schools?
Klein never responded.
No matter. In late 2004, Best sold Voyager to ProQuest for $380 million. Soon thereafter, Reid Lyon, Bush’s "reading czar," announced that he would leave the National Institutes of Health and join with Best to develop a private teacher preparation program. Lyon, it will be recalled, once said, "If there was any piece of legislation I could pass, it would be to blow up the colleges of education." (A video of Lyon expounding on the role of terror in education reform can be viewed at www.excelgov.org/displaycontent.asp?keyword-prppcevidence&NewsItemID=6261. Search on "Lyon," then click on "Policy Forum — November 2002.")
If nothing else, we now have a few more profiteers to add to our list, thanks to the dogged determination of Gerald Bracey. They are U.S. Commissioner of Special Education Edward Kame’enui, former Voyager President Randy Best, former Voyager Senior Vice President Jim Nelson, and Voyager Vice President Karen Nelson. And we have a new program to research, one called "Reading First," which collects a billion dollars a year thanks to Sandy Kress’s NCLB.
Stay tuned, then, for Part 10.
To review our progress, click these links:
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 2
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 3
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 4
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 5
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 6
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 7
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 8
http://www.dailykos.com/...