DeVos Hires Advocate for For-Profit Colleges to Oversee Higher Education

Diane Ravitch's blog

Add this item to the Department of Unbelievable.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has hired an advocate of for-profit colleges to oversee higher education for the federal government. DeVos, of course, is known to have invested in for-profit education.

Depending on whom you ask, Diane Auer Jones has returned to the Education Department with either a mission or a vengeance…

Now, as the chief architect of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s higher education agenda, Ms. Jones is leading the charge to overhaul the accreditation system, and, to critics, revive the fortunes of for-profit organizations that operate low-quality education programs that have a track record of shortchanging students and taxpayers.

Jones is in charge of writing new rules for accrediting agencies that oversee higher education.

The rules would deliver on Ms. DeVos’s promise to deregulate higher education to foster innovation and competition among institutions, particularly for-profit colleges and career-education programs, that…

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Mercedes Schneider: 49% of NOLA Charter “Graduates” Lacked Credits to Graduate

Diane Ravitch's blog

Mercedes Schneider Reports the story of the New Orleans charter school that awarded diplomas to its seniors, but had to revoke 49% of them after a whistleblower pointed out that these students lacked the credits needed to graduate. 

She writes:

Just shy of half of the Class of 2019 at John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Area did not meet graduation requirements and are therefore not eligible to receive the diplomas that they may have expected to receive when they participated in a graduation ceremony on May 17, 2019. (I write “may have expected” because at the time of the ceremony, both students and the general public knew the school was under investigation for grade fixing.)

That’s 87 out of 177 graduates, or 49 percent (which, by the way, indicates a four-year graduation rate that is at best 51 percent.)

Scandals like this do not begin and end…

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Skepticism Grows About High-Stakes, Test Based School Accountability and Privatization

janresseger

Nick Hanauer’s confession that neoliberal, “corporate accountability” school reform doesn’t work is not entirely surprising to me.  After all, No Child Left Behind was left behind several years ago.

And Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on our 25 year experiment with high stakes, test-based accountability, says: “It’s no exaggeration to say that the costs of test-based accountability have been huge. Instruction has been corrupted on a broad scale. Large amounts of instructional time are now siphoned off into test-prep activities that at best waste time and at worst defraud students and their parents… The primary benefit we received in return for all of this was substantial gains in elementary school math that don’t persist until graduation.”(The Testing Charade, p 191)

Nick Hanauer is a smart venture capitalist who has been paying attention, so it isn’t so surprising he has noticed that we still have enormous gaps in…

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