Kaplan Fraud

The Washington Post is a big ed deform paper.

The editorial board cheers when Michelle Rhee fires teachers.

Their "education columnist" Jay Matthews is a charter school shill who once told me in an email that he thought teachers were burnt out after five years and needed to move on after that. If they didn't want to do it voluntarily, they had to be helped by education officials.

And of course the Washington Post still owns Newsweek, the magazine that ran the infamous "Fire Bad Teachers" story back in March.

Yeah, the Washington Post is at the epicenter of the ed deform/blame teachers movement.

But few people know that the Washington Post is owned by for-profit education management organization Kaplan - a company that was found to engage in fraudulent activity by the GAO:

As part of the expanding Congressional scrutiny of for-profit colleges, Senator Tom Harkin announced at a hearing on Wednesday that he plans to examine their accreditation process.

The hearing featured a report by the Government Accountability Office, whose investigators found deceptive practices or fraud atthe 15 for-profit colleges they visited, including two University of Phoenix campuses, two Kaplan Colleges, and a Corinthian Colleges institution.

At some colleges, investigators posing as prospective students were encouraged to list fake dependents or hide their savings. At others, admissions officials refused to let them consult financial aid officers until they signed an enrollment agreement.

“Contrary to what we’ve heard from the industry, these practices seem to be standard,” said David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “They do not appear to be isolated acts of bad actors.”

Mr. Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, who said he would request documents from 30 colleges, also questioned whether, rather than containing a few bad apples, “the entire orchard” was “contaminated by a business model that churns students — provokes the kind of recruitment and unethical conduct we saw through the G.A.O., because of the need to increase profits and answer to Wall Street.”

Gotta like that the same assholes who cheer the firing of D.C. teachers work at a paper owned by a company that steals money from taxpayers, recruits students who aren't ready for college without remediation and loads them up with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, then discards them as easily as Mayor Bloomberg avoids accountability for test scores when they can't do college-level work.

The hypocrisy of the ed deform movement - from Obama and Duncan claiming they're "for the kids" when they cut $11.9 billion from food stamps so that they can continue to pay off their ed deform cronies to Bloomberg and Klein declaring an education miracle and standing by that "miracle" even when the stats are proven phony to a newspaper that regularly lectures from the op-ed page about "bad teachers" while another part of the same company steals money from students and taxpayers - is beyond the pale.

Seriously.

And I'd like to say we should shame these bad actors into better behavior but it is clear when Obama can lecture teachers about accepting test score results as sacrosanct the day after the NY scores were shown to be phony or Bloomberg can shrug off the real test scores by issuing Clintonian statements about the shifting meaning of the word "proficiency," they are beyond shame.