In Part 11, found here http://www.dailykos.com/... and here http://www.diatribune.com/... , reporters Andrew Brownstein and Travis Hicks led us from "Reading First" developer Doug Carnine to Ed Kame’enui and Deborah Simmons, two researchers from the University of Oregon who set the revolving door a-spin again, alternating public service and private consulting for companies profiting from No Child Left Behind, thanks to former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress’s re-write of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). So the list of Bush Profiteers continues to grow, featuring presidential brother Neil Bush, presidential family friend Harold McGraw III and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, 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 there’s Kress himself, the architect of NCLB, who blazed the trail from public servant to corporate lobbyist for others to follow, and who now collects significant coin on his own, guiding his corporate masters to the many spigots flowing with federal funds from NCLB.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... ).
Lest we forget exactly who Kress is, and how his stint in the White House became his uber-marketable career move, Alex Knott of Public Integrity reminds us here http://www.publicintegrity.org/... .
Sometimes these new lobbyists work on the same issues and legislation that occupied them during their White House tenure. Consider, for example, Alexander "Sandy" Kress, a former education advisor to President George W. Bush who was the primary architect of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
These days Kress is a lobbyist for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, the powerhouse global law firm. According to his disclosure forms, which must be filed with the House and Senate semiannually, Kress was part of a duo who lobbied the White House on education for some of the companies that have benefited handsomely from the law he helped create. He has lobbied for NCS Pearson Inc., which has received millions from the testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. He also lobbied for Kumon North America—one of the world's largest providers of supplemental education, which has seen greater demand for its services with the passage of this law.
So Kress represents NCS Pearson. Who (or what) is NCS Pearson?
I am reminded of the old tale of the six blind men and the elephant, which illustrates that a single thing may be perceived accurately many different ways, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Ask George W. Bush or Sandy Kress who or what is NCS Pearson, and you might learn of the publishing company’s largesse to children and widows, its altruism and generosity to the less fortunate among us, its pre-eminence among its corporate peers, its business acumen without equal.
Ask someone else, and you might get a different perspective.
Having learned sad lessons from asking anything of Bush, we might do well to ask Soj, a blogger at The Agonist, whose findings are well-articulated and well-documented here http://agonist.org/... . Soj, it seems, had a low view of the Transportation Safety Administration as he wrote in January 2006, which has nothing to do with Sandy Kress’s No Child Left Behind. But Soj’s view of the TSA is colored somewhat by its interactions with NCS Pearson, a company that was given a very important task and a lot of federal funding by the TSA shortly after September 11, 2001.
Soj quoted an article from CNN.com posted the same month: "In the rush to hire airport screeners after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the newly formed Transportation Security Administration spent as much as $143,432 per screener on recruitment in Topeka, Kansas, according to a report released Monday. The TSA hired a company, NCS Pearson, to recruit screeners soon after Congress ordered it to replace private airport screeners with a government work force by November 19, 2002. Lawmakers later criticized the TSA for its spending after they learned the recruiters worked out of lavish resort hotels with golf courses, pools and spas."
(The article which Soj quoted was found here http://www.cnn.com/... but the link is now dead, as are several of the links found in his blog. We’ll include the links here anyway, however, and identify the ones that are still alive and the ones that are now dead.)
While the original contract let to NCS Pearson was worth slightly less than $104 million, Soj reports that the final bill totaled more than $741 million. Is it quibbling over details to wonder why the cost overruns by themselves equaled more than five times the original value of the contract?
But it wasn’t the anticipated (or actual) cost of the contract that set most tongues wagging at the contract; it was the contract announcement itself. Soj found the scoop here http://www.govexec.com/... , and it’s a live link, so I scanned the text myself and found a little more of interest:
On March 4, TSA hired NCS Pearson, a firm based in Eden Prairie, Minn., for an estimated $103 million. The award surprised many contractors and government officials familiar with federal human resources because NCS Pearson had little experience conducting federal HR work. Critics contended that no firm without previous experience would be able to handle the paper trail requirements, rules and the need for extensive demographic data in standard formats required in federal hiring. But TSA's leaders were determined to avoid standard federal procedures, since the aviation law freed them from federal hiring regulations and allowed them to adopt a private sector model.
NCS Pearson leaders were confident. The company had assessment centers across the country. Its officers saw TSA's requirement to hire 30,000 screeners in 32 weeks as daunting, but achievable. As time went on, the company also hired a host of former and retired federal human resources specialists to help get the job done.
To kick off the hiring, TSA officials decided to have NCS Pearson hire a mobile team to train new hires at one airport and then move on to the next, starting in the Northeast and moving to the South, the Southwest, the West and, finally, the Midwest. The first 300 members of what would eventually become a 3,000-person mobile training team arrived for training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City in late March.
As mobile team members were trained in Oklahoma City and then began the first airport setup at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, Transportation executives began to change the scope of the screener project, which delayed full-scale hiring. Because of requirements in the law and lessons about staffing requirements and training learned at BWI, TSA officials doubled the scope of the project between March, when they awarded the contract to NCS Pearson, and June, when the hiring actually got under way. Now, instead of 30,000 screeners, TSA wanted NCS Pearson to hire 60,000 people not only to screen passengers, but checked baggage as well. TSA also wanted NCS Pearson to hire 2,400 field managers and administrative staff, a totally new requirement. And instead of a 25-person call center, TSA now sought one staffed by 2,200 people. The delays meant hiring would be condensed from 32 weeks to 13.
TSA also decided not to use NCS Pearson's assessment centers. Instead, TSA wanted NCS Pearson to set up temporary centers in hotels near each of the airports where screeners would work. That decision proved costly, since NCS Pearson had to set up secure temporary computer networks, hire temporary staff, provide security, rent hotel space and pay the travel costs of a roving band of assessment center managers.
What struck me was the bold decision taken by TSA leadership: "...because NCS Pearson had little experience conducting federal HR work. Critics contended that no firm without previous experience would be able to handle the paper trail requirements, rules and the need for extensive demographic data in standard formats required in federal hiring. But TSA's leaders were determined to avoid standard federal procedures, since the aviation law freed them from federal hiring regulations and allowed them to adopt a private sector model."
It strikes me because of the similar themes in our research of those who have profiteered from Sandy Kress’s NCLB: Under Bush, a federal agency seeks to implement a brand-new set of objectives by contracting with private corporations in order to avoid federal regulation – at a much greater cost, at taxpayer expense, than would be paid if the federal agency merely complied with regulations. I think Soj hit on something significant.
Especially after NCS Pearson was found in 2000 to have made a terrible, costly mistake in the area where it appears to have the greatest expertise: testing and assessment. Soj found the story here http://www.psbpr.com/... and while its crisis management sells the sunny side of its services, these facts remain: "In the spring of 2000, NCS Pearson, a national leader in test administration with a multi-decade history of reliability and integrity, discovered it had incorrectly scored thousands of math tests for Minnesota high school students. Media statewide pounced on the error. [The crisis management firm] advised NCS Pearson to meet the dilemma head-on, to which the company agreed, and follow a four-point remedy to make amends: reimburse graduation costs; offer a tuition credit; repay the state for notification costs; and complete an in-house audit."
It’s nice that NCS Pearson would undertake such bold moves to reimburse thousands of students for their mis-scored tests. Terrible damage had been done. Minnesota Public Radio reported here http://news.minnesota.publicradio.or... , "Nearly 8,000 Minnesota students were told they failed, when they actually passed, and some seniors were wrongly denied diplomas."
"[NCS Pearson] reimbursed CFL and local school districts for costs related to the scoring errors and gave a $1,000 post-secondary tuition reimbursement to about a dozen affected seniors," writes MPR’s Tim Pugmire. "The lawsuit settlement provides up to $7 million for additional compensation to students and their families for actual damages. The payments will range from a minimum of $362.50 up to $16,000 dollars for those students excluded from high school commencement or who dropped out."
Even in announcing the settlement, however, NCS Pearson’s attorney couldn’t help yanking back some of the goodwill: "Lindsay Arthur, a lawyer representing NCS Pearson, says there are few students who'll get $16,000 dollars. ‘Of all of the 7,900 students I think there's only five of six that would even qualify for that amount,’ Arthur said. ‘The vast majority of students, if they qualify for anything, will get the $300 figure that is referenced. And I think a large number of students won't even qualify for that’."
Wow. These reports defy comment, as they speak so loudly for themselves. In the end, Soj reports that the settlement cost NCS Pearson $12 million. And, Pugmire writes, "NCS Pearson is no longer scoring the tests required in all Minnesota schools. State education officials ended the relationship last spring by awarding the test contract to Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation."
Anyone can make a mistake, right? And a company as large as NCS Pearson can certainly be forgiven for making one mistake, though it admittedly caused a lot of pain and headache to thousands of families in Minnesota, right? It’s not like we’re talking about multiple mistakes over a span of several years, right?
Ahem. Consider this note from reporter Kate Randall, posted here http://www.wsws.org/... in 2001: "Over the last three years NCS Pearson, one of the large testing companies, provided a flawed answer key that incorrectly lowered multiple-choice scores for 12,000 Arizona students, produced incorrect essay test scores for Michigan students and was compelled to re-score 204,000 essay tests in Washington state. In one of the largest testing errors, nearly 9,000 New York City students were mistakenly assigned to summer school in 1999. In 1997 in Kentucky, $2 million in achievement awards was denied to schools later deemed designated as deserving of the funds."
No wonder the folks contracted to handle NCS Pearson’s crisis management services sounded so chipper on their webpage. They get a lot of work.
It makes you wonder, with that long record of costly errors, how such a company could continue to win contracts worth untold millions (or billions?) of dollars in federal funding, through state after state, and school district after school district? The answer is apparently simple; NCS Pearson has Sandy Kress, and Sandy Kress has not only the heart of America’s business community in hand, he also has the ear of America’s present federal government, all the way to the tippy-top.
Consider this: When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the embodiment of the nation’s business leadership – wants to lobby Congress on matters relating to education, who does it tap to make its calls for it? The K Street Project tells us here http://www.kstreetproject.org/... in August, 2006, that the U.S. Chamber taps Sandy Kress and his colleagues: "Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld is set to lobby for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on issues such as math and science education and No Child Left Behind. The lobbyists are the following: Former Deputy Director of Education and Human Resources Policy for then-Chairman John Boehner (R-OH), Krisann Pearce; former Senior Advisor to then-Education Secretary Roderick Paige, Beth Ann Bryan; and Sandy Kress, once a senior advisor on No Child Left Behind to President George W. Bush."
In the same month, even the Washington Post caught Sandy Kress’s amazing transition from Bush advisor to rainmaker for the nation’s corporate elite. Reporter Judy Sarasohn found that while the U.S. Chamber wasn’t much involved in passage of Kress’s NCLB in 2001, it suddenly has a big interest in that law.
"And to help it develop a strong position and be a major player on the reauthorization of the law next year, the chamber has turned to Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. Akin Gump is one of the legal and lobbying powerhouses in town, but perhaps more important, it is home to Sandy Kress, a former senior adviser to President Bush who helped craft the president's No Child Left Behind initiative and get Democratic support for it," Sarasohn writes here http://www.washingtonpost.com/... . "Kress, a Democrat and former president of the board of trustees of the Dallas school system -- he works out of Akin Gump's Austin office -- recently registered to lobby on behalf of the chamber on No Child Left Behind and other education issues, such as the math and science initiative pending in Congress."
Arthur J. Rothkopf , senior vice president of the chamber, said the organization chose Akin Gump for its strong education expertise and particularly because of Kress. The chamber generally believes in a rigorous curriculum and more accountability to ensure that the nation has a workforce that is prepared to compete, Rothkopf said.
...
Kress, who is also advising the Business Roundtable on education issues, noted that the reauthorization next year is for the entire Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which includes No Child Left Behind provisions.
At this point, he said the Akin Gump team is advising the chamber on education policies it might consider. "The happy news is we share a lot of views. . . . I believe we see the world the same way," Kress said.
Sounds like a happy band of wayfarers over there at the Akin Gump branch of the U.S. Chamber, no? Akin Gump loves the Chamber, the Chamber loves Akin Gump, and that’s happy news all ‘round. Everyone’s on the same page and... well, what might that page be? Jim Horn, posting here http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/... , surmises that the page reads, "the corporatizing of American schools." Why such a dire interpretation of the Sandy Kress lovefest?
Writing in September, 2006, Horn explained his view, citing a note from a book by Elizabeth Debray on the passage of NCLB as evidence. The complex combination of standards and accountability PLUS testing and assessment PLUS draconian labels and penalties had a purpose, he says: "Guaranteed failure," he writes, "was the designed outcome."
He writes, "Let me give you just one example from Elizabeth Debray's book. In the Spring of 2001, work to find a compromise on the school voucher issue was at a fever pitch, with Sandy Kress working overtime between legislative committees and Rove's inner circle. When it became obvious to conservatives that a continued insistence on the inclusion of vouchers would preclude Democratic support of NCLB, Senator Judd Gregg (the White House's inside man in the Senate) introduced, as a compromise, a plan to require some Title One funds to pay for out-of-school tutoring (supplemental services) for children from schools that failed to make AYP."
"Conservatives were angry and disappointed that school vouchers had once more been stripped out, but Gregg and others remained optimistic that in subsequent reauthorization of NCLB in 2007, vouchers would be an easier sell based on the private tutoring precedent and the anticipated failure rates on state assessments. The failure rates would provide the documentation to soften, and eventually eliminate, public resistance to school vouchers and private management companies. Debray quotes a Senate aide, who preferred to remain anonymous, on Gregg’s selling of the supplemental services compromise in March 2001:
"[Senator] Gregg was explaining why they [other Republican senators] should vote for the bill ... and he said, ‘Well, the supplemental services are a foot under the door for vouchers. They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly, and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing (p. 96)’."
"Now we find, predictably, the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ginning up the rhetoric to hold the line on standards as we move toward the NCLB reauthorization discussion. ‘Standards’ have become code for impossible and racist AYP requirements, which offer the straight and open canal to the corporatizing of American schools--beginning in the urban centers. Never mind that the waters and the banks are strewn with the bodies of America's most vulnerable children, and never mind that the serious drowning is just getting underway, and never mind that the water is still rising."
And, too, we find NCS Pearson, with its colorful record as a producer of testing and assessment products and services, hiring Sandy Kress to carry its water on Capitol Hill.
And we find Sandy Kress, architect of NCLB, happy to carry NCS Pearson’s agenda – and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s agenda – to Capitol Hill, and presumably to the ear of the federal government’s chief executive officer, the decider, the reformer with results.
Is it not the role of the mainstream media in America to dig up these backroom deals, to expose the filthy double-dealing with taxpayer dollars and the vile manipulation of America’s own public institutions for private gain? If so, where are they? If evidence of these machinations is so easily accessible to the lay researcher with no more than basic computer literacy and access to search engines, surely the card-carrying reps of the fourth estate can do at least as much.
While the mainstream media remains on extended coffee break, stay tuned for our Part 13. There’s still more to come.
To review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 2
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 3
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 4
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 5
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 6
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 7
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 8
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 9
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 10
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 11
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
