Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Corbett Frees $45M Philly School Funds He Held Hostage
Another replay another city school closes because no schools helps children.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Saturday, August 4, 2012
This is from friend of blog Jerry: For-profit schools need better oversight and more empowered students - The Hill's Congress Blog
For-profit schools need better oversight and more empowered students - The Hill's Congress Blog
LP - Just waiting for them to dig their teeth into for profit high school and grade schools. Or at least to make the price gouging that goes on there more mainstream.
An eye-opening congressional report released this week paints a picture of a too-familiar scenario in which unvarnished greed and lack of oversight grips an industry, exploits consumers and squanders billions in taxpayer funds. It is yet another situation that calls for increased oversight to stop abusive business practices.
The report, issued this week by the Senate Health Education and Pensions Committee chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), shows that for-profit colleges, once viewed as a viable option for adults to learn skills and improve their job prospects, have become profit centers focused on the bottom line instead of on providing students with a quality education.
But more oversight is just one needed remedy. We also must strengthen rights for consumers to pursue legal remedies when they suffer harm.
That’s because the fine print of many school enrollment contracts and loan promissory notes make it difficult for aggrieved students to seek redress.
The contracts contain a non-negotiable provision that denies students the ability to pursue claims against for-profit colleges in court. Instead, they must resolve disputes in individual arbitration, a private system governed by corporate-written rules. Students’ lack of access to justice is compounded by a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, which also permits companies to insert prohibitions on class actions alongside the forced arbitration clauses.
Distressed students and other consumers already have felt the impact of Concepcion.
Consider a case last year involving two students who enrolled in the fashion merchandising and criminal justice programs at Westwood College in Colorado. They attempted to bring a class action on behalf of other students. Among other claims, they alleged that Westwood misrepresented key facts about its operations and employed deceptive sales tactics to increase enrollment, and violated Colorado consumer protection laws.
However, the Westwood enrollment documents contained an arbitration clause and banned students from joining together in class actions. The students attempted to show the futility of individual arbitration versus public court. They contended that the secretive and individual nature of arbitration would force the key witnesses to testify more than 800 times. But ultimately the college was successful in forcing arbitration, requiring each student to pursue his or her case on an individual basis.
Although the Colorado District Court required arbitration in keeping with Concepcion, the court was “sympathetic” to the students’ argument. It observed that Concepcion was a “serious blow … and likely foreclosed the possibility of any recovery for many wronged individuals.”
Indeed, operators of for-profit colleges have practically boasted in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they direct students’ legal claims, even similar ones that potentially could be decided collectively, into individual arbitration.
The alarming detail provided in the congressional report shows just why students need better access to the courts: industry investments in recruitment which are many times more than investments in actual school resources, such as student service representatives and career placement services; poor retention rates and job prospects for students; and costly tuition which end up saddling students with tens of thousands of dollars each in student loan debt. Indeed, the industry has found reliable investment returns in federal student loans
According to the report, the industry received $32 billion in one year alone in federal taxpayer handouts.
For-profit colleges, which were once independent trade and skill schools, are now primarily owned by private equity firms and publicly traded companies. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns 40 percent of for-profit college operator Education Management Corporation. The sector soon became a revenue-generating tool with little to no oversight or accountability.
Consumer advocates and bankruptcy attorneys seeking to assist financially strapped student loan borrowers have long called for more scrutiny and supervision in the for-profit college sector and appropriate bankruptcy relief for student loan debt. Meanwhile state attorneys general, including Illinois and Kentucky, recently have opened investigations of school operators to enforce compliance with state consumer protection laws.
The evidence is clear that without transparency, stronger regulation and legal accountability, the harm caused to students may remain hidden to the public and the questionable business practices of the industry and its Wall Street owners will endure.
LP - Just waiting for them to dig their teeth into for profit high school and grade schools. Or at least to make the price gouging that goes on there more mainstream.
An eye-opening congressional report released this week paints a picture of a too-familiar scenario in which unvarnished greed and lack of oversight grips an industry, exploits consumers and squanders billions in taxpayer funds. It is yet another situation that calls for increased oversight to stop abusive business practices.
But more oversight is just one needed remedy. We also must strengthen rights for consumers to pursue legal remedies when they suffer harm.
That’s because the fine print of many school enrollment contracts and loan promissory notes make it difficult for aggrieved students to seek redress.
The contracts contain a non-negotiable provision that denies students the ability to pursue claims against for-profit colleges in court. Instead, they must resolve disputes in individual arbitration, a private system governed by corporate-written rules. Students’ lack of access to justice is compounded by a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, which also permits companies to insert prohibitions on class actions alongside the forced arbitration clauses.
Distressed students and other consumers already have felt the impact of Concepcion.
Consider a case last year involving two students who enrolled in the fashion merchandising and criminal justice programs at Westwood College in Colorado. They attempted to bring a class action on behalf of other students. Among other claims, they alleged that Westwood misrepresented key facts about its operations and employed deceptive sales tactics to increase enrollment, and violated Colorado consumer protection laws.
However, the Westwood enrollment documents contained an arbitration clause and banned students from joining together in class actions. The students attempted to show the futility of individual arbitration versus public court. They contended that the secretive and individual nature of arbitration would force the key witnesses to testify more than 800 times. But ultimately the college was successful in forcing arbitration, requiring each student to pursue his or her case on an individual basis.
Although the Colorado District Court required arbitration in keeping with Concepcion, the court was “sympathetic” to the students’ argument. It observed that Concepcion was a “serious blow … and likely foreclosed the possibility of any recovery for many wronged individuals.”
Indeed, operators of for-profit colleges have practically boasted in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they direct students’ legal claims, even similar ones that potentially could be decided collectively, into individual arbitration.
The alarming detail provided in the congressional report shows just why students need better access to the courts: industry investments in recruitment which are many times more than investments in actual school resources, such as student service representatives and career placement services; poor retention rates and job prospects for students; and costly tuition which end up saddling students with tens of thousands of dollars each in student loan debt. Indeed, the industry has found reliable investment returns in federal student loans
According to the report, the industry received $32 billion in one year alone in federal taxpayer handouts.
For-profit colleges, which were once independent trade and skill schools, are now primarily owned by private equity firms and publicly traded companies. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns 40 percent of for-profit college operator Education Management Corporation. The sector soon became a revenue-generating tool with little to no oversight or accountability.
Consumer advocates and bankruptcy attorneys seeking to assist financially strapped student loan borrowers have long called for more scrutiny and supervision in the for-profit college sector and appropriate bankruptcy relief for student loan debt. Meanwhile state attorneys general, including Illinois and Kentucky, recently have opened investigations of school operators to enforce compliance with state consumer protection laws.
The evidence is clear that without transparency, stronger regulation and legal accountability, the harm caused to students may remain hidden to the public and the questionable business practices of the industry and its Wall Street owners will endure.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Obama's radical idea teachers matter when it comes to education. Shocking
For more on the GOP's war on knowing things. http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2011/08/americas-love-affair-with-ignorance.html
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
This also could be called the looting of America the education edition: How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars | Common Dreams
How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars | Common Dreams:
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.
Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.
First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.
Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent, experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.
Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential astronomical.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Texas Dentist Who Gets To Determine What Most KIds Learn About in Subjects He Knows Nothing of
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Friday, March 2, 2012
Rick Santorum Knocks Government Role For Schools But Took Tax Dollars For His Kids' Home Schooling
Rick Santorum Knocks Government Role For Schools But Took Tax Dollars For His Kids' Home Schooling
Santorum and his wife, Karen, now own a home in Great Falls, Va., an affluent Washington suburb. They moved there after Santorum's 2006 Senate loss.
Acknowledging that its own rules were confusing, the Pennsylvania Education Department in 2006 agreed to settle the dispute by repaying the district. The state Education Department said the money was not a reimbursement but an acknowledgment that the department gave conflicting rules about when a district can challenge the state's decision to withhold cyberschool tuition fees from the district.
On the campaign trail, Santorum's candidacy has been boosted by Christian home-school advocates, evangelical pastors and tightly knit networks of conservative activists who helped him win Iowa's leadoff caucuses and a three-state sweep of contests on Feb. 7. Limited government has been a big part of his pitch.
Santorum now says he regrets voting for the sweeping No Child Left Behind education overhaul. He's
called for a significantly smaller Education Department but would not eliminate it. He's also criticized early childhood education programs as an attempt by government to "indoctrinate your children."
Santorum and his wife, Karen, now own a home in Great Falls, Va., an affluent Washington suburb. They moved there after Santorum's 2006 Senate loss.
Acknowledging that its own rules were confusing, the Pennsylvania Education Department in 2006 agreed to settle the dispute by repaying the district. The state Education Department said the money was not a reimbursement but an acknowledgment that the department gave conflicting rules about when a district can challenge the state's decision to withhold cyberschool tuition fees from the district.
On the campaign trail, Santorum's candidacy has been boosted by Christian home-school advocates, evangelical pastors and tightly knit networks of conservative activists who helped him win Iowa's leadoff caucuses and a three-state sweep of contests on Feb. 7. Limited government has been a big part of his pitch.
Santorum now says he regrets voting for the sweeping No Child Left Behind education overhaul. He's
called for a significantly smaller Education Department but would not eliminate it. He's also criticized early childhood education programs as an attempt by government to "indoctrinate your children."
The teachers killing America
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Sunday, February 26, 2012
You wonder what's wrong with education in America here's hint: it can't be tested
Santorum embraces ignorance. It's a shame he ever went to college and was indoctrinated by liberal professors who helped him get to the US congress rather than if he had gone right into a steel mill where he could be unemployed and indoctrinated by Fox.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Labor Beat: We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools
The assault on public schools and the search for public dollars.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Rick Santorum Confronted Over His Children's Education in Virginia
But Santorum wasn't always so opposed to government-run schools—especially one Pennsylvania cyber charter school that offered students free computers, internet service, and online classes. Between 2001 and 2004, that online school allowed the Santorum family to live in Virginia, while sticking Pennsylvania taxpayers with a $100,000 bill.
In 2004, Santorum spawned a minor scandal when news broke that he was no longer residing in the state that sent him to Congress and was living instead outside the Beltway in Leesburg, Virginia. Santorum owned, and still does, a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, next door to his in-laws. The Santorums bought the three-bedroom house in 1997 for $87,800. But after Santorum got elected to the Senate in 1994, he bought a much larger home in Virginia that would accommodate his ever-growing family. Some relatives moved into the Penn Hills house, but Santorum continued to use it to claim residency in Pennsylvania, where he voted by absentee ballot.
Despite moving his family to Virginia, Santorum didn't enroll his children in a local public school. Nor did the Santorums simply home-school the kids. Instead, in 2001, they enrolled five of their kids in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, based out of tiny Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The school was founded by Nick Trombetta, a former wrestling coach who set up an online charter school in a depopulated part of the state and turned it into a financial powerhouse that rakes in millions annually in public education funds. (In 2007, Trombetta, a major Republican donor in the state, was the subject of a state grand jury investigation into his use of millions in public funds to build a performing arts center near the school's headquarters, among other things. No charges have been brought.)
Considered a public school, the online charter's students are required to take state-mandated assessments and meet other formal requirements not demanded of traditional home-schoolers. But it offers home-schoolers lots of advantages, notably free computers and internet connections. When Santorum enrolled his kids there, the local school district in Penn Hills was forced to pick up the tab for the cyber school, which cost the district $38,000 a year for the Santorum children.
Full Story here: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/rick-santorums-school-scandal
LP - Thank God Santorum doesn't believe in taking things for nothing like those damn blaaaas
New Hampshire's New Scopes Trial | Truthout
New Hampshire's New Scopes Trial Truthout
State Representative Jerry Bergevin, who introduced HB 1149, believes such legislation is necessary because he thinks evolution is tied to Nazis, communists, and the shooters in the 1999 Columbine massacre. According to Bergevin, the political and ideological views of Darwin and other believers and evolutionary scientists, along with their positions on atheism, must be taught to students as well. The New Hampshire Republican told the Concord Monitor:
“I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.
”He added “As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it. . . . Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.”
State Representative Jerry Bergevin, who introduced HB 1149, believes such legislation is necessary because he thinks evolution is tied to Nazis, communists, and the shooters in the 1999 Columbine massacre. According to Bergevin, the political and ideological views of Darwin and other believers and evolutionary scientists, along with their positions on atheism, must be taught to students as well. The New Hampshire Republican told the Concord Monitor:
“I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.
”He added “As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it. . . . Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.”
New Hampshire the next battle in the theory of evolution
No Child Left Behind Anniversary: Education Law's Promise Falls Short After 10 Years
No Child Left Behind Anniversary: Education Law's Promise Falls Short After 10 Years
WASHINGTON — The No Child Left Behind education law was cast as a symbol of possibility, offering the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better prepared students in a competitive world.
Yet after a decade on the books, President George W. Bush's most hyped domestic accomplishment has become a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress' inability to fix something that's clearly flawed.
The law forced schools to confront the uncomfortable reality that many kids simply weren't learning, but it's primarily known for its emphasis on standardized tests and the labeling of thousands of schools as "failures."
LP - Who could figure? Maybe those of us who have been saying this for years.
WASHINGTON — The No Child Left Behind education law was cast as a symbol of possibility, offering the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better prepared students in a competitive world.
Yet after a decade on the books, President George W. Bush's most hyped domestic accomplishment has become a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress' inability to fix something that's clearly flawed.
The law forced schools to confront the uncomfortable reality that many kids simply weren't learning, but it's primarily known for its emphasis on standardized tests and the labeling of thousands of schools as "failures."
LP - Who could figure? Maybe those of us who have been saying this for years.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
I guess the new New Hampshire model is live free and be stupid
New Hampshire GOP Has Gone Completely Off The Deep End Crooks and Liars
With attention turning toward the New Hampshire primary, it seems like an opportune time to share some of the activities of New Hampshire Republican state legislators, who must be drinking something like water tainted with LSD.
In New Hampshire, Republican state legislators seem to believe education is no longer something they should require. Via ThinkProgress:
Today the GOP-controlled Senate passed HB 542, which effectively ends compulsory education for New Hampshire students. Their House colleagues approved the measure earlier last year.
No, seriously. It ends compulsory education, and it's been passed by both houses of the Legislature? Really? Really.
With attention turning toward the New Hampshire primary, it seems like an opportune time to share some of the activities of New Hampshire Republican state legislators, who must be drinking something like water tainted with LSD.
In New Hampshire, Republican state legislators seem to believe education is no longer something they should require. Via ThinkProgress:
Today the GOP-controlled Senate passed HB 542, which effectively ends compulsory education for New Hampshire students. Their House colleagues approved the measure earlier last year.
No, seriously. It ends compulsory education, and it's been passed by both houses of the Legislature? Really? Really.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
In flood-stricken Vermont town, teachers keep school open without a building
In flood-stricken Vermont town, teachers keep school open without a building
Teachers teaching outside in the rain because they have no school because it was washed away by Hurricane Irene. Those leaches camping out in the middle of a school year, unlike the job creators.
Teachers teaching outside in the rain because they have no school because it was washed away by Hurricane Irene. Those leaches camping out in the middle of a school year, unlike the job creators.
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