Randi Weingarten: It's Time To Play Along To Get Along

Just like current UFT President Mike Mulgrew, former UFT President Randi Weingarten is now revealing her true feelings about what her members should be rallying for....and it's not what the rank and file say they want.

UFT "President" Mike Mulgrew

For years here in New York City, the UFT has been the willing partner with the New York City Department of Education in removing teachers from their assignments, keeping hands off while so-called "investigators" lie about members who are alleged to be either incompetent or guilty of various acts of misconduct, and not representing members in good faith in the grievance procedure.

Randi Weingarten on tenure, 2010

Now  Randi, who just won a third term as AFT President with 98% of the vote,  says its ok to compromise and go along with the Plan of education reformers, as she is quoted by Reuters:

Weingarten rebuffed her critics in the union for mistaking collaboration with surrender and said her overwhelming victory in the election showed rank-and-file members supported the move.

But critics say,

"Concessions don't lead to more prestige with the public. Concessions don't win more credibility at the bargaining table. They lead to more concessions."

Critics say Weingarten's willingness to see traditional job protections like tenure disappear and to accept charter schools, merit pay and other changes is a retreat from core principles and plays into the hands of those who want to eliminate public education, privatize government services and curb the ability of workers to unionize."

Source: U.S. teacher union boss bends to school reform winds

Let's remember 2009:

Randi Weingarten and Mayor Mike Bloomberg

 

OCTOBER 29, 2009, 10:28 AM

The Teachers’ Contract Up Close

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

LINK

Think textbooks are long and dense? Try reading the 165-page contract that spells out the pay and perks for New York City's 79,000 public school teachers.

At the moment, it is a document of some interest for teachers, their union and city officials since it expires on Saturday, just as the mayor's race crawls to a finish.

Does the "education mayor" really need teachers screaming for his head as voters go to the polls?

Since he took office in 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has had a pretty good relationship with the United Federation of Teachers and its bosses, like its former president, Randi Weingarten, in the above photo. Her successor, Michael Mulgrew, said he has a pretty good relationship with the mayor, too, though they have never kissed.

As a document, available here, the union contract is long on boilerplate and speckled with anachronism. (Schools must have pay phones per the contract.) But studded here and there are the kind of nuggets that illuminate the internal workings of the school system.

Appendix A lists teacher salaries, currently anywhere from $43,530 to $100,049. Not stagehand money at Carnegie Hall, but still 43 percent higher across the board than what teachers were making when Mr. Bloomberg came into office.

Page 148 reports that there is a 10 percent premium for teaching agriculture. Who knew?

Teachers in middle school on up cannot be asked to teach more than three classes in a row. Pages 17 and 22.

Junior high school teachers and below are assured five periods of preparation time each week. Teachers who are consistently pressed into teaching during their prep time earn an additional $5,660 per semester.

No elementary school teacher has to collect milk money. Page 29.

And teachers are exempt from copying schoolwide documents, scoring standardized tests or preparing college transcripts. Pages 19, 25, and 29.

Mr. Mulgrew said the work rules were for the good of the system. "Nobody enters this profession without wanting to change children's lives for the better,'' he said, and "we protect things we feel might hurt that process.''

Maybe, dear readers, there are other clauses that catch your fancy. Or maybe you feel the contract is not nearly the kind of benefit-bulging giveaway that some critics have suggested. Either way, if we have missed a point, or are missing the point, share.

Current betting is that the teachers' union will hold out for 4 percent raises, in line with what other local unions have won for their workers. Almost no one expects an announcement until the election is in the books.

The Assailed Teacher: A Turn of Fortune

A Turn of Fortune LINK by The Assailed Teacher     In the last post, I explained how Save Our Schools put the kibosh on showing the film about Mary Thorson because of the accusations made against the filmmaker, Myra Richardson, some 10 years ago. By allowing an unsubstantiated accusation to determine how they treat a fellow teacher, I explained that that SOS was feeding into the culture of teacher bullying for which Mary died. God sometimes works small miracles because SOS did allow the film to be shown at the opening day of their conference yesterday. The catch was that I would present the film. It was also shown at the very end of the day, after the keynote address and after many people had spent the day traveling long distances to get to the conference here in Washington, D.C. Needless to say that the turnout was not great and there were many sleepy eyes in the audience of those that remained. Hopefully, the movie had an impact on those that saw it and they will go out and screen the film for their colleagues back home. This is the only way any important idea or film is promulgated among he national teaching force. Here is the text of the speech. Hopefully, it had an impact on those who were there that night: Presentation Speech - The Killing of Mary Thorson (8/3/12) Thank you for having me here tonight. My name is xxxxxxx from New York City. I am 33 years old and have been teaching history in the city's public high schools for the past 12 years. Public schools have been a major part of my life from the age of 5. Every single year since then, I have had a first day of school and always feel the trepidation that comes with i Whether as a kindergartener, a high-schooler or a teacher, my trepidation stems from the same anxious question, which is: will I be accepted? We want to be accepted because we know the ramifications if we are not, which could be isolation, harassment or bullying. We do not want to be judged unfairly by others and have that erroneous judgment follow us for the rest of the school year. We know if that happens, that judgment becomes a label. There are going to be people that know of us exclusively through that label. When they see us they will not say "Hey, there is Dave" or "Hiya Susan!" They will merely say there is that weird person or stupid person or ugly person. Labels objectify us, turn us into memes and dehumanize. Dehumanizing leads to harm like teasing and violence. This is the anatomy of "bullying" that has become such a popular watchword in recent months. While the anti-bullying campaign certainly has an admirable goal, and those who have participated in it certainly are genuine in their efforts to combat bullying, I wonder if all of this new-found vigilance against schoolyard bullying is being used as a subterfuge by certain interests to downplay another type of bullying no less epidemic in our country today: the bullying of teachers. To contrast it with the schoolyard bullying that our children face, I'd like to refer to the bullying of teachers as schoolhouse bullying for two reasons: one, the worst of it takes place within the confines of the schoolhouse and, two, the word house connotes opacity, since the bullying of teachers is a secret from the public. On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, a 32-year-old middle school physical education teacher from Illinois named Mary Eve Thorson put herself in the path of an oncoming semi on an Indiana interstate. In her suicide note, she referred to her students as her “babies". Her babies were suffering from a school climate that repressed teachers through abuse and harassment. Towards the end of her note she asked a question that more and more teachers are asking: why isn't anyone stopping this? The origins of Mary's nightmare can be traced back to the familiar culprits: No Child Left Behind, the high-stakes testing regime, the rise of convoluted education data, Race to the Top…. the bludgeons of the ed reform movement. Teachers like Mary Thorson, teachers like us, are required to comply with the conversion of their children into numbers no more valid than the numbers Wall Street dealt in before and after the financial meltdown of 2008. Teachers have a front row seat to this corporate education show. There is a chance that a good many of us are horrified by the dehumanizing of our students as numbers. It is imperative that teachers keep that horror to themselves. To ensure this, the teachers who have civil service job protections, mistakenly dubbed "tenure", have been the targets of a nasty media campaign to garner public support for tenure’s erosion. The media dutifully does the bidding of local leaders like Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York. They run stories daily about teachers accused of horrible things, or how teachers are to blame for sub-par test scores, and how tough it is to fire "bad" teachers. They have used the very word “teacher” as an insult. It connotes an old, burned out mossback who reads the paper all day while eager young minds cry out for an education. The United States is losing ground to other countries, countries producing the next generation of nuclear scientists. Furthermore, bloated teacher pensions are bankrupting state governments during this time of economic recession. Condoleeza Rice and Joel Klein inferred that teachers were threatening national security, so teachers joined the ranks of Alger Hiss and Osama Bin Laden. These labels and judgments create the environment that supports the bullying of teachers. The public does not know us as Dr. Ravitch or Mr. Kozol anymore. They know as those lazy hacks, union bums and public enemies. This gives local politicians, beholden to the billionaire boys’ club, the popular mandate to railroad unions in contract negotiations, which has led to the denuding of workplace conditions and job protections for teachers. This means that those above the teachers in the education bureaucracy: principals, superintendents, chancellors and mayors, are given ever widening latitude over our careers. The bureaucracy now rewards those administrators who are the most effective at entrenching the worship of data in public school buildings. A good administrator is one whose data looks good. The easiest and most surefire way to get the data to look good is to pressure teachers to make it look good through dishonest means like scrubbing. Those teachers who refuse to do so have no protection from any harassment the administration might unleash. This is where the next step of the bullying process, direct harm, comes into play. Any teacher with a conscience and a sense of ownership of their profession is a target. The system rewards good data. Children are the numbers they attain on high-stakes exams. Teachers are the numbers their students attain on high-stakes exams. A new generation of educators, both teachers and administrators, are being trained in this philosophy. The idea of humanistic education is becoming foreign, in favor of a worship of numbers that dehumanizes the entire learning process. Inhuman systems breed inhuman behaviors. Teachers who don't play ball in the new regime risk facing fake and embellished charges from their administrators. Pushing a teacher out of their career, depriving them of their livelihood through harassment and intimidation, is easy in a system where humans are numbers. It is classic bullying: first dehumanize, then harm. And so, in 2010, Rigoberto Ruelas jumped off a bridge when the Los Angeles Times published data portraying him as a bad teacher. In 2011, Mary Thorson stepped into the path of an oncoming semi. As a union leader, I have worked with many harassed teachers whose only crime was questioning the worship of data and speaking up in defense of their students. They faced termination because of it, faced living on the streets and being stripped of their identities as teachers, unable to provide for themselves or their families. I have sat with too many teachers who have cried and talked of suicide. Every time I do, I have to stop myself from crying. Why isn't anyone stopping this? That's Mary Thorson's question. Her suicide note is a primal scream of frustration over what it means to be a teacher today. The things that worried her about the profession are the same ones that worry us. Not once in her note did she mention her own horror story of bullying. Instead, she was gravely concerned for her babies and her colleagues. She was concerned that tremendous harm was being done to them and nobody cared. She was locked in an educational fiefdom where harassment and extortion from above were the norms. Why isn't anyone stopping this? Does anybody care? As you will see in this film, Mary did what she did for us. She wanted to draw attention to the anonymous suffering that goes on in our schools by sacrificing her very existence, which was the only thing she had left after being methodically and systematically bullied for so long.By making this film, Myra Richardson has taken the first step towards redeeming Mary's sacrifice. With nothing but a simple camera and a laptop, she interviewed those closest to Mary Thorson and the bullying she faced. The film is a series of in-depth interviews, each of which peel back the onion of Mary Thorson's story. By showing this film, Save Our Schools is taking the next step towards redeeming Mary's sacrifice. This is the first time SOS is showing a film. By being here right now, all of us share in a very important moment for the teaching profession in the United States. I thank Myra Richardson, Save Our Schools and all of you for being here for this moment. It is my honor to introduce to you Dying to Teach: The Killing of Mary Eve Thorson, Educators Who Bully

Principals Do Not Encourage Teachers To Stay In Their Jobs

Principals Drop Ball on Teacher Retention, Study Says

By Stephen Sawchuk, ED WEEK

LINK

 

• 
  

Policymakers, administrators, and advocacy groups have correctly diagnosed a major problem plaguing the teaching profession—high rates of teacher attrition—but have missed the mark in their prescriptions for fixing it, concludes a new report released this morning by the New York City-based TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project.

In essence, it contends, most school leaders fail to identify and encourage the very best teachers to stay in schools. In part, it says, that’s because of the K-12 field’s tendency to uncouple decisions about retention from discussions of teacher quality.

The consequences of these practices, according to the report, has particularly affected low-performing schools, where a revolving door gradually makes it harder to develop a critical mass of effective teachers to sustain improvements. In such schools, the report estimates, a high-performing teacher who leaves will be replaced by an equally effective peer less than a tenth of the time.

Officials at the 3 million-member National Education Association largely seconded the report’s main thrust, despite some reservations about its accompanying recommendations.

“It’s a common sense idea many of us who have been involved in education felt was true. Now we have some evidence that there’s a difference between good retention and bad retention,” said Segun C. Eubanks, the director of teacher quality for the NEA. “I think that’s an important contribution to the field.”

Studying Retention

Rates of teacher attrition estimated at anywhere from a quarter to half of new teachers in their first five years on the job have been the cause of much concern among policymakers, and spawned a raft of mentoring and induction programs over the past decade. ("Oft-Cited Statistic Likely Inaccurate," June 13, 2007).

They have also been the focus of intense study, with retention rates being linked in separate research to teachers’ working conditions and performance.

The TNTP report delves more deeply into the connections among those three threads. For the study, TNTP officials examined the personnel records of some 90,000 teachers across four unnamed urban school districts. It gathered available individual teacher “value-added” data for a subset of 20,000 teachers. (Value-added is a statistical methodology that uses student test scores to generate an estimate of a teacher’s impact on the academic progress of his or her pupils.)

They coupled this data with information from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with the teachers.

Of the teachers studied, the group identified a subset of about 20 percent of the teachers as “irreplaceables” because their students made two to three more months’ worth of academic progress compared to those taught by the average teacher in the district.

Among the report’s findings:

• The school districts lost their most successful teachers at a rate comparable to the attrition of the least successful teachers.

• “Irreplaceable” teachers who experienced two or more of eight different recruitment strategies—including advancement opportunities, regular performance feedback, and public recognition—said they planned to stay at their schools nearly twice as long as other teachers.

• In one of the districts studied, only a fifth of the lowest-performing teachers were encouraged to leave, while more than a third were given incentives to stay.

• “Irreplaceable” teachers were much more likely to stay at schools with a strong instructional culture in which principals set strong performance expectations for them.

The report reserves particularly strong criticism for principals, who it contends have misjudged the retention issue by turning a blind eye to quality in retention decisions.

“Principals tell themselves low-performers are going to improve, and therefore they don’t have to address it; and they say there’s nothing they can do to retain high-performing teachers,” said Timothy Daly, the president of TNTP. “Both of those things we see as largely untrue.”

Recommendations Offered

The report makes policy recommendations for more-strategic retention of teachers, several of which touch on hotly debated policy issues. They include paying the best teachers six-figure salaries; requiring principals to set goals for retaining “irreplaceable” teachers; monitoring working conditions; and dismissing teachers who, after remediation, cannot teach as well as the average novice. Together, the report suggests, these strategies could also raise the rigor of the profession.

Mr. Eubanks of the NEA added that he’d have liked to have seen the report draw a stronger connection between teacher preparation and retention. Newer training programs that focus on beefed-up apprenticeships for novices often have the improved retention of effective teachers as a goal, he noted.

“The first part of good retention is that you’re hiring and training the right folks, so they’re ready from day one in the first place,” he said. “A question we’d have is what impact a much more thoughtful recruitment and preparation system would have on this whole retention issue.”

Scholars, meanwhile, struggled to fit some of the findings into the context of the increasingly complex body of research on the issue of teacher retention.

For one, the relative harmfulness of turnover remains a subject of some debate. Economists, including Erik A. Hanushek of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, have found that it’s the weaker teachers who tend to leave low-achieving schools, a phenomenon that theoretically should improve student achievement.

But a recent working paper by three scholars, published by the Washington-based National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, added a new wrinkle to the debate: It showed that high levels of teacher attrition can depress levels of student achievement even among students whose teachers stayed put.

Such mixed findings continue to leave educators guessing at the right balance to strike with retention, said Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a number of frequently cited studies on teacher retention.

“I’m often asked, ‘What’s the optimum amount of teacher turnover? We don’t want too much, we don’t want too little’,” Mr. Ingersoll said. “It’s a really hard issue. I don’t know the answer.”

NYS Governor Cuomo Vetoes Special Ed Placement Bill

LINK

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has vetoed a bill that may have increased the number of special education students eligible for private school placement.

The bill called for school officials to consider “home environment and family background,” such as religion, when approving taxpayer-funded tuition for private schools. But the governor said the bill “unfairly places the burden on taxpayers to support the provision of a private education.”

Advocates for the bill, including religious organizations, argued that the bill would help provide more “appropriate” placements for children with special needs and streamline reimbursement to families.

Lawmakers from both chambers passed the legislation in June. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who opposed the measure, praised the governor for blocking the bill’s passage.

“The proposed legislation would have imposed another unfunded mandate on taxpayers across New York. With his veto, Governor Cuomo has once again shown his commitment to fiscal responsibility and to protecting both the City and State from unsustainable financial burdens,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal reports the governor said in his veto message “that the bill ran contrary to his commitment to reducing the expensive mandates Albany places on local governments. School districts, which lobbied strongly against the bill, have been dealing with an increase in the number of students who win the right to go to private schools on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein of Brooklyn said she was disappointed by the veto, claiming there was “a lot of misunderstanding” about the bill’s impact.

“For the sake of clarity, it should be known that this measure is all about putting children first. It is about removing barriers to education for one of our most vulnerable populations, children with special needs,” she said. “It is about giving these children an equal opportunity to succeed.”

Patricia Willens is an editor at WNYC. Follow her on Twitter @pwillens

The For-Profit College Scam is Exposed In A New Report

July 30, 2012

False Promises

LINK

It has long been clear that an oily subgroup of for-profit schools were doing very well for themselves by recruiting students who had no real chance of graduating, pocketing their federal financial aid and leaving the students with valueless credentials — or none at all — and crippling debt.

A dismaying study released this week by Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat of Iowa, suggests that this predatory behavior — which costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year — may extend well beyond the unscrupulous few to the industry as a whole. The study reveals a disturbing pattern in which companies use misleading tactics to lure poorly informed students into certificate and associate degree programs that average about four times the cost of similar programs in comparable community colleges.

According to the study, taxpayers poured about $32 billion into for-profit colleges in the most recent year — much of it spent on marketing or pocketed as profit. Meanwhile, 96 percent of their students were forced to take out loans, as opposed to about 13 percent in community colleges and 48 percent in four-year public colleges. A majority leave without degrees. And while the for-profit sector accounts for only about 13 percent of enrollment nationally, it accounts for nearly half the loan defaults.

The companies are clearly doing far better than the students. Publicly traded companies that operate for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of 19.7 percent, while paying an average of $7.3 million to their chief executives in 2009, the report says.

This is a politically charged issue, with the Democrats generally favoring tougher regulation and the Republicans favoring the for-profits as a useful alternative to overcrowded community colleges and important sources of vocational education. The good ones may be both. But too many of them look like nothing more than profit centers. Congress, which has largely been looking the other way on this issue, needs to rouse itself.

July 29, 2012

Senate Committee Report on For-Profit Colleges Condemns Costs and Practices

By TAMAR LEWIN, NY TIMES

LINK

Wrapping up a two-year investigation of for-profit colleges, Senator Tom Harkin will issue a final report on Monday — a voluminous, hard-hitting indictment of almost every aspect of the industry, filled with troubling statistics and anecdotes drawn from internal documents of the 30 companies investigated.

According to the report, which was posted online in advance, taxpayers spent $32 billion in the most recent year on companies that operate for-profit colleges, but the majority of students they enroll leave without a degree, half of those within four months.

“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation,” Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “These practices are not the exception — they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions.”

In a statement on Sunday, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the leading trade group of for-profit colleges, called the report “the result of a flawed process that has unfairly targeted private-sector schools and their students.”

For-profit higher education has long been a politically divisive issue, with Democrats generally arguing that greater regulation is needed to prevent huge publicly traded colleges from plundering the Treasury for student financial aid while leaving students with crippling debt and credentials that are worthless in the job market. Many Republicans see such colleges as a healthy free-market alternative to overcrowded community colleges, offering useful vocational training and education to working adults who will not attend more traditional institutions.

The Republicans on the Senate committee criticized the Democrats’ investigation for including testimony from Steve Eisman, the hedge fund manager who was one of the first to compare for-profit colleges to the subprime mortgage industry; for making public the internal company documents that the committee gathered; for refusing to broaden the investigation to include abuses by nonprofit colleges; and for being what they said was a hostile partisan effort.

Over the last 15 years, enrollment and profits have skyrocketed in the industry. Until the 1990s, the sector was made up of small independent schools offering training in fields like air-conditioning repair and cosmetology. But from 1998 to 2008, enrollment more than tripled, to about 2.4 million students. Three-quarters are at colleges owned by huge publicly traded companies — and, more recently, private equity firms — offering a wide variety of programs.

Enrolling students, and getting their federal financial aid, is the heart of the business, and in 2010, the report found, the colleges studied had a total of 32,496 recruiters, compared with 3,512 career-services staff members.

Among the 30 companies, an average of 22.4 percent of revenue went to marketing and recruiting, 19.4 percent to profits and 17.7 percent to instruction.

Their chief executive officers were paid an average of $7.3 million, although Robert S. Silberman, the chief executive of Strayer Education, made $41 million in 2009, including stock options.

With the Department of Education seeking new regulations to ensure that for-profit programs provide training for “gainful employment,” the companies examined spent $8 million on lobbying in 2010, and another $8 million in the first nine months of 2011.

The bulk of the for-profit colleges’ revenue, more than 80 percent in most cases, comes from taxpayers. The report found that many for-profit colleges are working desperately to find new strategies to comply with the federal regulation that at least 10 percent of revenue must come from sources other than the Department of Education. Because veterans’ benefits count toward that 10 percent even though they come from the federal government, aggressive recruiting of students from the military has become the norm.

The amount of available federal student aid is large and growing. The Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit college, got $1.2 billion in Pell grants in 2010-11, up from $24 million a decade earlier. Apollo got $210 million more in benefits under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. And yet two-thirds of Apollo’s associate-degree students leave before earning their degree.

On Sunday, William Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix, sent its 350,000 students a long e-mail warning of the criticism, and extolling the value of a Phoenix education.

On average, the Harkin report found, associate-degree and certificate programs at for-profit colleges cost about four times as much as those at community colleges and public universities.

And tuition decisions seem to be driven more by profit-seeking than instructional costs. An internal memo from the finance director of a Kaplan nursing program in Sacramento, for example, recommended an 8 percent increase in fees, saying that “with the new pricing, we can lose two students and still make the same profit.” Similarly, the chief financial officer at National American University wrote in an e-mail to executives that the university had not met its profit expectation for the summer quarter, so “as a result” it would need a midyear tuition increase.

Many of the for-profit colleges, the report found, set tuition at almost exactly what a student could expect in maximum federal aid, including Pell grants and Stafford loans. According to a Bridgepoint Education document, when a new $400 “digital materials fee” would make students pay more than would be available from federal aid, the chief executive frantically wrote an e-mail to the finance officer to complain that the change was going to cause a “shortfall.” And documents from Alta Colleges mention restructuring schedules “so we can grab more of the students’ Stafford.”

Furthermore, the report found, recruiters are often encouraged to avoid directly answering questions about costs and instead emphasize that with federal aid, student will pay little out of pocket. And costs are not easy for students to determine. A former Westwood College recruiter explained that prospective students were told that the cost was $4,800 per term, but not that there were five or six terms a year rather than the usual two or three.

At many schools, students learned only after the fact that their credits would not transfer to another college or university or qualify them for the professional licensing they sought.

Students at for-profit colleges make up 13 percent of the nation’s college enrollment, but account for about 47 percent of the defaults on loans. About 96 percent of students at for-profit schools take out loans, compared with about 13 percent at community colleges and 48 percent at four-year public universities.

Colleges with very high loan default rates in the two years after graduation (now changing to three years) lose their eligibility for federal student aid. As a result, the report found, many of the for-profit colleges try to move students having trouble with repayment into deferral or forbearance until they are past the years the government monitors.

For-Profit Colleges Only a Con Man Could Love

Barbarians in the Ivory Tower

By Chris Parker Wednesday, Aug 1 2012

LINK

 

Bobby Ruffin Jr. was only 14 when a recruiter from Ashford University called. TheBirmingham, Michigan, boy thought he'd clicked on a link promising help finding money for college. It was actually just a lead generator for the for-profit, online school's sales staff.

Courtesy Barmak Nassirian

Barmak Nassirian, former official with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers: “Overadvertise, oversell, overcharge, and underdeliver. They found a system where the pitch goes to one guy and the bill to someone else.”

Courtesy Chris Pantzke

Iraq-war veteran Chris Pantzke ran up $26,000 in debt and burned through an additional $65,000 of his GI Bill benefits with almost nothing to show for it at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

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More About

• Todd Nelson
• Suzanne Lawrence
• Kathleen Bittel
• Higher Education
• For-Profit Education

At the time, Bobby was an A student. Hoping that homeschooling would deliver something better for their son, his parents had pulled him from the troubled Detroit schools. He told the recruiter that he wanted to be a doctor. She assured him that Ashford could be a stepping-stone to that dream.

Never mind that he was only in the eighth grade. "She said, 'You'll be working toward a degree as a medical doctor, so when you do graduate high school, you're almost there,'" Bobby says today. "I'm like: 'This is great. I'm going to talk to my mom.' And she's like: 'No, I wouldn't tell your parents because that would take away from the shock when it happens. If I were you, I'd complete the program, and when graduation comes around, let them know. Mom and Dad will be super excited.'"

Admission to Ashford requires a high school diploma or equivalency. So when it came time to fill out the financial-aid forms, the recruiter told Bobby to claim that he'd already graduated. He objected, but she insisted "the loan-processing company will go back and correct everything." Still, he left the graduation date blank. Someone filled it in, because Ashford was soon receiving federal-student-loan money on his behalf.

Of course, it's illegal for kids Bobby's age to receive financial aid. But for-profit colleges haven't always been scrupulous when it comes to raiding the federal treasury. Between student-aid and GI Bill programs, most schools receive 90 percent of their revenue from the American taxpayer. And the recruiters—often little more than salesmen paid largely by how many people they enroll—are driven mercilessly to keep those cash registers ringing.

Students don't get much in return. Although tuition rates can run as high as those at America's most esteemed universities, the education is generally substandard. In the end, most kids wind up walking away with a questionable degree bought at top dollar—and a mountain of debt to accompany it.

Bobby took online classes for almost a year. But when he wouldn't endorse Ashford's lying on his financial-aid forms, administrators miraculously discovered that he was under 18. Since this left him ineligible for federal aid, Ashford was forced to return his loan money to the feds.

The school wouldn't be eating those costs. Bobby would. Ashford, which declined interview requests for this story, sent him a bill for $13,000.

Last fall, Bobby was finally able to enroll at a real university, Eastern Michigan, where he was named a national collegiate scholar. Yet he still owes Ashford. Because that's a private debt, he isn't eligible for deferments while he's in school, and any future wages could be garnished.

Unfortunately, this isn't a scam that only targets the young and naive. The for-profit industry is so rife with deceit, it has been billed as the second coming of the mortgage-loan debacle. And the same people are behind it. Three-quarters of all for-profit students are enrolled at schools owned by Wall Street banks and private-equity firms.

All told, they soak $30 billion a year from American taxpayers. But even in the age of slash-and-burn government, Congress has shown no interest in stopping it.

"The problem with the subprime [housing] scam was that it got so big, it almost brought down the entire world's economy," says Barmak Nassirian, a former official with theAmerican Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "This one's wisely limited to $30 billion a year, which is highly sustainable. In the context of a multitrillion federal budget, that's not even a rounding error."

Consumer Fraud As a Business Model

You might not know it, but you're sitting on $117,000. That's basically how much every American is potentially worth in government student aid. Want to attend grad school? Throw in another $114,000.

And as for-profit colleges have discovered, an 18-year-old with 100 large makes for a very easy mark.

In order to get in on the gravy train, a school only needs accreditation from some supposedly neutral body. But Congress neglected to say who should do that accrediting, resulting in a system loaded with charlatans. Some agencies have built sturdy reputations over decades. Others are little more than rubber-stamp factories, more geared toward gobbling up members' dues than safeguarding kids.

"It never occurred to [Congress] that as billions of dollars get attached to the recognition process, the process would get corrupted," Nassirian says. "When you say yes, you gain membership dues. After all, you're living off these dues."

Yet even bargain-bin accreditation takes several years. So the titans of Wall Street found a way around this by purchasing small, failing schools to snatch up preowned accreditation.

Take Bridgepoint Education. Its majority stockholder is Warburg Pincus, a New York private-equity firm. When it needed accreditation for Ashford University, it bought the 87-year-old Franciscan University of the Prairies, a struggling, 300-student religious college in Clinton, Iowa. Overnight, it was transformed into the online powerhouse Ashford.