CA: K12 Caught Lying and Cheating, Again

K12, one of the giants of the cyber-charter biz, has reached a settlement in California after being slapped for lying about student enrollment and student achievement. K12 and California Virtual Academies collected about $310 million in money from the state over the last twelve years (and those are largely Californis tax dollars diverted to the Virginia HQ of K12); the settlement will cost K12 $168.5 million-- sort of.

K12, a for profit company, provides the curriculum and programming for CAVA, a non-profit cyber charter in California. As part of the settlement, K12 must cancel $160 million in "credits" that CAVA "owed" it and which represented part of the crushing debt that K12 saddled CAVA with. In addition, it must pay $8.5 million to the state.

In April, the Bay Area News Group published some serious investigative reporting that examined just how badly K12 was soaking the taxpayers of California. Soon thereafter, K12 was under investigation by the California Attorney General's office, which found that the company and its affiliated schools submitted inflated student enrollment figures (or, as we say in the regular world, lied) in order to collect more money from the state. The investigation also found that the parent company leaned on the schools and pushed them to get themselves in deep debt. And then there was the matter of advertising:


"K12 and its schools misled parents and the State of California by claiming taxpayer dollars for questionable student attendance, misstating student success and parent satisfaction and loading nonprofit charities with debt," [Attorney General Kamala] Harris said in a statement. "This settlement ensures K12 and its schools are held accountable and make much-needed improvements."

For its part, K12 continues its history of stonewalling and denying all misbehavior. K12 CEO Stuart Udell said that K12 didn't misbehave, was totally already going to take some of the corrective actions required by the state, and furthermore, the AG was "overstating" the cost of the settlement. Udell is a longtime player in the charter biz-- he holds business degrees from Bucknell and Columbia and has run Kaplan K12, Renaissance Learning, and Catapult Learning before taking the head spot at K12. In other words, no experience in education, but lots of experience in making money from education.

Those sixty corrective actions include doing away with giving recruiters incentive pay for each student enrolled and making sure that its advertisements aren't filled with lies.

And in keeping with recent trends in the charter industry, the California Charter School Association spoke up-- on the side of the state. CCSA spokeswoman Emily Bertelli called the settlement "a good start."  

None of these sorts of shenanigans are new for K12. Back in 2012, Florida (a state not exactly known for its aggressive regulation of charters) was investigating K12 for using uncertified teachers and for grossly inflating its student numbers (in one case, a K12 manager told a teacher to sign off on a list of 100 students-- the teacher only recognized seven names on the list). 

In Pennsylvania, Agora cyber charters were, like CAVA, cyber-schools that hired K12 to provide programs and management, and K12 almost lost them their charter all the way back in 2009 by mismanaging tax dollars. By 2014 the parent company had become so toxic in PA that Agora took the unusual step of threatening to cut ties to K12. It tells you something about the nature of the charter biz that the news of Agora's proposed defection was widely covered in the investment world. Never mind the educational implications-- what will this do to the stock price?

When North Carolina was looking at allowing K12 into the state, a dozen CAVA teachers wrote to list the various misbehaviors, including failure to provide services for students with special needs.

In recent years, K12 has lost its management contract with Colorado Virtual Academy and was shut down for low performance in Tennessee. And remember back in 2014 when the NCAA said it would no longer accept coursework from the K12 cyber charters?

K12 has been around so long that it's easy to slip into thinking that any such long-lived operation must be basically legit, but year after year, the evidence rolls in that K12 is a scam, a business devoted not to educating anybody, but to using an education-flavored product as a means of hoovering up as many public education tax dollars as they can get their grubby hands on-- without much regard for what means they use to get it. The California legislature is reportedly considering some law changes to tighten the reins, but at this stage of the game, why is anybody allowing cyber charters at all? They have repeatedly failed to produce real educational results, and while there are a handful of students out there who can benefit from cybers, allowing for-profit chains into the field has simply made it ripe for lying, cheating, and general scamming of taxpayers.

ICYMI: Stock Up on Edureads

ICYMI will be off for the next two Sundays while I am on the road. Use the blogroll in the right column to track down some of the best eduwriting going on while I'm gone. Meanwhile, let me stock you up.


Where Will All the Boys Go

Julia Sass Rubin with charts and actual data to help explain why we can say that the charters of New Jersey are running a big fat scam.

The Kids Can't Read, But They Can Read You

If you are like me, you never miss anything that Jose Vilson reads. But if you missed this, read it now.

A Shortage of Respect

Rob Miller reminds us, once again, what contributes to the ongoing teacher shortage.

My Final Evaluation, or If I Werern't Retiring, Bot Would I Be Pissed

Just an awesome first person account of being on the receiving end of one more bad evaluation process.

Dear Michigan Public School Teachers

An open letter that starts out mildly enough, but builds up a good, hot head of steam.

The Greening of American Education

Looking at the big-picture narrative of how reformsters have gone after the 650 billion dollar pile of education money.

So Who Says Competition in the Classroom Is Inevitable?

Easy to miss this because it comes under the heading of Australian education, but it's really for everyone, and hits particularly hard at US education because it addresses the assumption that competition is natural and normal and belongs in our clasrooms.

ALEC's Resolution for Big Brother

ALEC, you may recall, is the fun club for conservative elected officials and conservative corporate folks. They get together, cook up some "sample" legislation, and send those out as templates for various state legislatures to turn into laws. Not only are they not open to ordinary citizens, but they're pretty adamant about keeping away reporters.

ALEC is interested in many, many aspects of government, but they occasionally take a whack at education, and they have a fun new "resolution" apparently on deck for later this month. If you think that some folks are just a little too paranoid about the whole data mining thing, just have a seat as I walk you through this. Those of you who actually are fully paranoid about data mining may want to strap yourselves in.

It's called the "Resolution in Support of Student-Centered Accountability Systems." Remember when you were a child and some adult would threaten you with how a bit of misbehavior would stay on your permanent record and follow you for the rest of your life? Well, as it turns out, they had no idea how right they were.

Every good resolution starts with some "whereas" business, a list of premises that are supposed to lead us to the "resolved" part. ALEC has a full thirteen piece of wherassing for us. So let's see what our premises are here:

Whereas

1) ESSA put states back in the driver's seat for public ed accountability. Okay, there are some folks still arguing about that one, but you're technically correct.

2) ALEC supports federalism and likes having states in the driver's seat for accountability. I'm wondering what ALEC means, exactly, by "federalism," but okay again.

3) The purpose of education accountability is to insure "the best possible education for every individual child."  Admirable, if vague and weaselly ("possible"?)

4) Too many accountability systems depend on averaged and aggregated data and are really set up to meet the needs of the system not "maximizing success at the individual student level." ALEC has said another true thing here.

5) While this general data can be useful for policy-makers and parents for trend-spotting, it is not better than and "should not be utilized to circumvent, the individualized assessment of a parent on the unique educational situation and needs of their child." Wrong on the first part. For second, it's become evident that ALEC does not know the difference between an accountability system and a student assessment system.

6) An accountability system based on aggregates and averages will not help struggling students at the bottom or under-served students at the top. Which, again, is why schools actually assess students. ALEC appears to be talking about an imaginary system where the school administers Big Standardized Tests but in which no measures of student achievement are ever made.

7) Average and aggregate accountability systems could be wonky because of mobile students. But, no, they probably won't be, as "mobile" students represent a fairly small group.

8) BS Tests have given schools a serious focus problem. Also, they aren't very accurate, and they don't provide teachers much help in tweaking instruction. And if you've been paying attention for the past year, you know what it means when reformsters start attacking the BS Test.

9) Since the BS Tests aren't doing students any damn good, parents are rejecting the whole BS Test mess.

10) ALEC loves parental choice among a bunch of schools. Yay, choice, says ALEC.

11) ALEC wants that big fat giant chunk of money spent on schools to be clearly linked to individual student results.

12) Accountability should be determined state by state, as long as they can do it without "undermining parental choice, the availability of options, or harming some students through over reliance on aggregate and average data"

13) This resolution will affirm things ALEC loves, including federalism, limited government, lots of choiciness, and the awesomeness of market forces.

So let's see what resolutions ALEC thinks these thirteen whereasses lead us to.

Resolved:

ALEC thinks states should set up student-centered accountability systems, and they should be designed around the following principles:

• Timely Provision of Student-Level Data
• Measure Student-Specific Progress and Restore the Focus of “High-Stakes” Testing to be on Advancing Individual Student Instruction and Growth
• Develop Important Individualized Measures Beyond Sole Reliance on “High-Stakes” Tests, Including Engagement, Teacher Input and Assessments, and Satisfaction
• Account for Mobility in Graduation Calculations and any other Aggregate Data Indicators
• Recognize and Respect Parental Intent
• Do Not Devalue Parental Choice by Treating Schools of Choice Differently
• Support and Protect Students Succeeding in Schools of Choice

What Does That Get Us?

There area some obvious goals here, and at least one less obvious one.

One obvious one is to swing support toward competency based education, with every student getting a supposedly individualized and constantly-assessed program delivered by computer. Of course, student-specific measures, timely return on student-level data, individualized measures-- these are all features that real live teachers already provide in millions of classrooms across the country. But since we aren't recognizing that here, I'm going to guess that ALEC wants the computer-driven, software-centered CBE treatment.

And since we're centering all of that around the student-- even if the student moves-- we are back to the idea of the data backpack, in which a cyber-record of the student is accumulated over the years, to be used for God-knows-what. ALEC seems to forget that one of the points of averages and aggregates was to protect the individual data of individual students; they would like to reverse that and make all the data specific to the student who generated it-- your child's entire school career somewhere in the cloud for the use of future schools, future employers, future insurers, future marketers, and future government officials who just get interested.

I'm not sure what recognition of parental intent means. "I intended to have Chris do homework last night, so please give Chris credit for that even though it didn't actually get done"?

The resolution also reaffirms ALEC's belief that there should be a gazillion charter schools and all manner of choicy delights. And infinite opportunity to scoop up some of those sweet, sweet education tax dollars.

The less obvious object here is to shift an argument that charters have been losing. "Look," said charters. "Let us open a school in this poor neighborhood, and we will get better school results than the old crappy public school." But then if and when they get those better school level results, a bunch of killjoys pop up to point out that those better school results are the result of selecting students who will score higher on the BS Test. But if we are determining the success of the school based on individual students rather than on the school's overall performance, then that argument doesn't even happen. The charter doesn't have to do better, as a school, than the public school-- just so long as the students enrolled in that school do well. Did the charters have individual students who did well? Yes? Well, then, they have done their job and all y'all critics can just shut up. Of course, this will also turn perennially low-performing students into educational hot potatoes, but, hey, that's what a few public schools are for, right?

I do wonder-- in ALEC's Brave New World, how big a market would there be for Off The Grid schools? You know, a school where you could send your child and the school would keep absolutely no computerized record of their progress. That may be the next big charter investment to make.

FL: Rep. Brown Indicted in $800K Scam

That's the old page from the One Door for Education website, a site that isn't so active these days. The scholarship foundation was supposed to be funding education and student scholarships. But since the beginning of 2016, it has been operating under the adjective 'beleagured"

That's because it turns out to be a huge scam. Back in January, the Florida Times-News has worked out some of the details that gave the charity the smell of fraud. The charity was headquartered in a single-family dwelling in the suburbs NW of DC. The charity's neighbors-- and several of the charities it supposedly supported-- had never heard of One Door. And it had never filed any of the paperwork that usually goes with being a non-profit charitable foundation.

Today, the US Attorney's Office in Florida's Middle District lowered the boom on the folks behind the scam-- Congresswoman Corrine Brown and her chief of staff, Elias "Ronnie" Simmons.

The indictment alleges that between late 2012 and early 2016, Brown and Simmons participated in a conspiracy and fraud scheme involving One Door for Education – Amy Anderson Scholarship Fund (One Door) in which the defendants and others acting on their behalf solicited more than $800,000 in charitable donations based on false representations that the donations would be used for college scholarships and school computer drives, among other things.  According to the indictment, Brown and Simmons allegedly solicited donations from individuals and corporate entities that Brown knew by virtue of her position in the U.S. House of Representatives, many of whom the defendants led to believe that One Door was a properly-registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, when, in fact, it was not. 

Florida Politics has also been following the story of the fake charity and the Jacksonville, Florida, representative. The scope and audacity are impressive-- the scam managed to raise about $800,000, only about $1,200 of which actually made it to any students. The rest was treated as Brown's slush fund to do everything from pay her taxes to sponsoring events in her honor.

There's no apparent reason (yet) to believe that the many contributors knew they were contributing to Brown's personally giant pile of money, but Brown worked her contacts hard for contributions, going as far as sending fancy fund-raising letters to raise money for a youth trip.

It's an impressively audacious scam, and a reminder that people are always happy to fork over money if it's For The Children, even if they aren't very careful about paying attention to where that money went. 

Not Okay

What do you say when you need to say something and there is nothing to say.

Well, there's lots to say, but literally everything that could be said has been said, and at this point is has been said over and over. It turns out that when you have too much exposure to the banality of evil, you start having trouble with banality in the response to evil.

I can't promise that this will be clear or cogent or organized. But I can say this much.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that black lives are repeatedly taken for no good reason. It's not okay that they are taken so often that the seemingly endless series of killing seems to take on a narrative shape of its own, as if we're being presented with a series of hypothetical variations on a scenario-- "so, if it's okay to kill a black man who has priors, is it okay if he doesn't?" We get suckered into discussing exactly which black people can be legitimately killed. It is heartbreaking to read (I cannot watch it-- I just can't) Diamond Reynolds crying that her boyfriend was not a gang member, had no prior arrests-- as if any of these would have justified the shooting of Philando Castile.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that several Dallas policemen are dead, shot down while showing how police departments can have a positive relationship with protestors, shot down while keeping those protestors safe and secure. That's how tense and angry our nation is, that this happened at a peaceful protest, in a city that is in many ways a model for positive police relationships with the community.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that the line of murdered black citizens runs so far back that people, searching for something to say, just pull up and repost essays from a year ago.

It's not okay.

It's not okay that we are so confused and muddled in our relationship with guns that we read that folks would be safer if everyone carried a gun, except for these black men  who shouldn't have been carrying guns. Should we all be armed, or not?

It is not okay.

It is not okay that there is apparently no death that is upsetting enough in this country to actually stir up the political will to do anything at all. Groups of small children. Cops. Innocent black men on a daily basis. We are like a drunk who wrecks a new car every single day, and never once thinks, "Maybe I have some sort of problem."

It is not okay.

It is not okay that I keep seeing articles about how if folks don't want to have trouble with the police, they should just comply and be cooperative. Yesterday there was literally less than an hour between the moment that I read a repost of a piece by a black man talking about how he had been stopped by police and he politely told the policeman about his legal concealed carry weapon and everything went just fine-- literally less than an hour between reading that and reading about Philando Castile, shot dead after a traffic stop and informing the officer that he had a legal concealed carry.

So it's not okay that the advice clearly does not work for some folks. It just doesn't.

But beyond that, why should it have to? "Comply or die" is unacceptable to me.

Listen, I am not a raving anarchist. As a teacher, I exercise government-issued authority on a daily basis. But it is so not ok to say that in our country, if you don't respond to authorities with the proper respectful compliance, they may execute you on the spot. That's not okay. That is so not okay.

It is not okay.

I don't have clever answers to the resurgence of racism in our country. I don't have new thoughts about the omnipresence of deadly violence. I don't know a quick and easy way to bring us to a place where we can look at each other and see individual human beings with individual stories and histories and hopes and dreams. I am particularly frustrated because in my life I aspire to and lean on empathy and understanding, but there is simply no way for me as a small town middle-aged white guy to really feel what I must be like to live in a situation where my family and I must learn a whole set of ways to behave just to avoid being shot dead. How does someone live like that? Nobody should have to.

It is not okay.

It is not okay that this is our current normal, that we can expect news of a new death or murder or execution every day, and simply fade into a routine. We decide how much outrage is required. We argue about whether it is more or less worthy of outrage than this other killing. We try to find something to say. We quietly take a pass because we're just so tired of the endless parade of unnecessary death.

And we try to understand, or we give up trying to understand, or we actively resist trying to understand, how this is still a nation where how safe you are depends on your race.

It is not okay.

There's a lesson to be learned from the Trump campaign. Trump has lots of ways to communicate racism and ignorance, but his simplest technique is silence. A person in his crowd says something awful, and Trump says nothing. Say what you want about John McCain, but I will always remember how he shut down a person at one of his rallies and made it absolutely clear that certain attacks on Barack Obama were not okay. Trump just smirks and shrugs and with his silence makes it clear that he thinks that's okay.

I think of how that would translate to my classroom, if one student attacked another and I did nothing. My silence would send a message, and the attacks would continue because my silent message was, "That's okay."

We want novelty and newness from our media, but I think of my childhood, when the network news hammered away at the fighting and death in Vietnam every night, night after night telling the American people, "This is happening, and as you can see, it's not okay." It was monotonous, but it was the truth. These days, we want something new. Give me death and carnage on Game of Thrones, but give me new carnage every week.

It is not okay.

As I said, I have nothing new to say, nothing really to ad to this conversation that we've been having for far too long. But I can't just stay silent, as if I neither know nor care. If I say nothing to the news of the death of the Dallas police, of Philando Castile, or Alton Sterling, or Michael Brown, or all the other people on the list too long to include here-- if I say nothing, it might leave the impression that I think it's all okay.

It is not okay.

I don't want black men shot at traffic stops. I don't want cops shot by snipers. I don't want kids shot at school. I don't want any of this.

— EM Simpson (@charlie_simpson) July 8, 2016

Amazon Inspire Off To Rocky Start with Piracy Problems

Amazon Inspire is intended to be Amazon's entry into the teacher resource market, a place where teachers could find "tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional material," all accessed through the familiar Amazon interface, complete with searches and starred reviews. As laid out by the NYT, this venture is meant to be the point of the spear for Amazon, driving straight for the heart of the ed tech industry (plus one more great way to collect lots of user data).

Teachers can already get in on the Beta ground floor and reap the many benefits, including one more opportunity to give teacher plans away to a for-profit company. It's a business model that is all over the place-- as a teacher I'm supposed to give away my self-developed teaching materials and ideas while making use of other teachers' materials and some company makes money off the both of us, either through selling advertising, collecting data and selling that, or in the ballsiest approach, charging me for the materials that another teacher handed over for free. The Amazon model (like the Microsoft and Google and Apple models) is also about developing brand loyalty and getting you used to shopping at one particular outlet where you become accustomed to meeting all your teacher needs.

The foundation here is the foundation of most internet business models-- if you can get a bunch of people to work for you for free and create content for you for free, you can make a ton of money (and yes, I fully recognize that by blogging on a google-owned platform as well as contributing to Huffington Post, I contribute to that model-- we all make our own compromises in this world). 

But Amazon is in trouble already.

As reported last week at EdSurge and the New York Times, it became immediately apparent that some of the materials on the site were not so much donated as stolen:

One day after Amazon announced that it would introduce Amazon Inspire, a free instructional resources site where teachers could share lesson plans, the company said it had removed three items from the site after educators complained that the products were copyrighted materials

From Edsurge:

One educator, Laura Driscoll of the Social Emotional Learning Workshop, left a comment on our story about Amazon Inspire expressing strong feelings about the theft of materials:

"There a number of resources available on the site which are clear copyright infringement not uploaded by the owners of the material. Rather than open source, it strikes me as a pirated material market that Amazon collects ad revenue and buyer habits on."

To add to the embarrassment, two of the pirated sets of materials apparently came from teacherspayteachers.com, another site competing for the same market.

 I'm going to let Amazon contribute their logo to this blog









And all of that was basically within the first twenty-four hours. What are the odds that more pirated material is going to turn up?

Users of Amazon Inspire upload materials to the site, so Amazon is somewhat at the mercy of users' A) good will and honest intentions and B) users' ability to know the difference between open source and copyrighted materials. That means that Amazon is also at the mercy of its own ability to monitor and screen the Inspire site. They may have wanted to create a teachers' Youtube, but ended up with the teachers' Napster instead.

My Election Position : The Trump Clinton Yardstick.

So today's Sign of the Presidential Apocalypse was coming across a facebook argument about whether Trump or Clinton is the more racist. That's where we are-- we're ready to elect a racist as President and all that's left is to quibble over how much of which style of racism.

I am fifty-nine years old, and have read and studied history most of my adult life. I'm prepared to call this as the worst pair of Presidential candidates in the nation's history. The worst. Mind you, I don't really care about Clinton's e-mail misbehavior, and I really don't care about the manufactured Benghazi anguish. But I do care that she is so completely bought and paid for by Big Money. I really care that she represents the Democrats' continued abandonment of any and all traditional constituencies. And Trump is an astonishing dumpster fire, a fraud and scam artist who appeals strictly to the basest and worst in humanity. Our country is uglier because of his candidacy.

Neither is an acceptable choice for President, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the vast amount of campaigning based on slamming the opposition. The weird irony of these two terrible candidates is that neither one would have a hope in hell against any other candidate.

This is beyond "hold your nose and vote." I held my nose and voted for Obama II vs. Romney. This is way, way worse. It's trying to figure out which apocalypse would be more survivable.

There are so many things at stake here, but one is the survival of each party. A Clinton victory will mean the end of the Democratic Party. It will be read as "proof" that they should go all in on neo-liberalism, that the only party constituents who matter are the ones who can write big fat checks. A Trump victory will mean the death of the GOP as anything but a slobbering rant-fest for racist constitution-rejecting dopes. Yes-- as I read it, if you want your party to survive this election, you should vote for the other party's candidate.

In the education world, we have to have to have to come to grips with the fact that whatever happens, we are screwed (again). There is not a speck, not a sliced-thin scintilla of evidence to suggest that Clinton will do anything except continue straight down the same road that Bush and Obama took us. And there's no telling what Trump will do about education, but it's a safe bet that it will be huge, it will be business oriented, and that it will involve blustery hair-brained ignorance.

It is probably time for education advocates to just drop out of this race. Maybe if Clinton agrees to meet with Diane Ravitch and listen I might perk up for a second or two, but mostly I think it's time for us to step back from this clusterfarfle of an lection and start working on how to continue fighting for public education under the next destructive administration.

We can lay some of that groundwork by paying attention downticket, and this is where the Clinton and Trump candidacies can be marginally useful as yardsticks. If you are supporting Trump, making claims for his business acumen, his tell-it-like-it-is-ness, then I absolutely will not vote for you. If you endorse Trump for any responsible position at all, you are either an opportunist or a fool, and either way I don't want you in elected office. Ditto for Clinton. If you are trying to ride her coattails or applaud her judgment or, God help me, claiming she's for the little people in this country, then you also have some sort of impairment that disqualifies you for public office.

Clinton and Trump are trainwrecks as Presidential candidates, but that makes them a good measure of other politicians' judgment. Too many people from both parties have made it clear that they would vote for a paper bag full of dog poop if it just had the "right" party designation stamped on the outside. That's not okay. Especially not now.

I don't know what's going to happen ion November, but whatever it is, the result will be a White House occupied by the most-despised, least-acceptable President we have ever elected. That means we had better have some functional grownups in Congress. I can't stand to pay attention to the Presidential race, but I can't afford to ignore the other races going on.