Kaplan/Washington Post Continue To Try And Extract Money From The Education Sector

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Call up Sallie Mae and take out some non-dischargable loans, because Newt University is in session! Gingrich, in partnership with the Republican National Committee, is hosting a series of “policy classes” for Republican Convention delegates in Tampa this week. (Today’s classes feature guest-lecturer Larry Kudlow, in what is I am guessing involved a creative application of NBC News’ ethics policies.) Oh, and “Newt U” will also be available online, thanks to “a new learning technology platform pioneered by Kaplan Inc called KAPx.”

According to a Kaplan press release, KAPx (which seems to be just Google+ Hangouts meant to be sold to learning institutions at a high markup)

“The KAPx™ platform is designed to help schools, organizations, businesses, and individuals who want to share information and knowledge in an exciting, interactive, and highly participatory manner that is aligned with the best instructional practices,” said Edward Hanapole, Kaplan Inc.’s Chief Information Officer. “We will continue to refine the platform to reflect our leadership in learning science and how to marry technological innovation with educational achievement.”

And of course Kaplan is the money-marking test-prep and for-profit school arm of the Washington Post Company, and its many innovations in the field of extracting money from the education sector are what keep the Washington Post’s printing presses running in this unhappy time for newspapers.

And right here on the Washington Post Company’s KAPx website is a big plug for Newt U and a link to register ” for exclusive content access to Newt University courses and discussions.” Today’s theme is “We Can Do Better” and tomorrow’s is “We Built It.”

I just registered and it’s a live YouTube stream and a comment section. Thanks, Washington Post Company, for yet another exciting innovation!

You know that if Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation were hawking this crap, the NYCDOE would be happy to sign on to it today.

And in fact, Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein and News Corporation will be hawking systems quite like this very soon.

We'll see how quickly the NYCDOE buys this crap up and how long it last before it's tossed on the junk heap.

As for the the Kaplan/Post venture, if it is as bad as Pareene says it is, I think this particular "exciting technological innovation in education to improve student achievement" will be tossed on the junk heap sooner rather than later.

Pearson's Standardized Tests Are Flawed And Useless

Bombshell report in the NY Times on standardized testing:

In 2006, a math pilot program for middle school students in a Dallas-area district returned surprising results.

The students’ improved grasp of mathematical concepts stunned Walter Stroup, the University of Texas at Austin professor behind the program. But at the end of the year, students’ scores had increased only marginally on state standardized TAKS tests, unlike what Mr. Stroup had seen in the classroom.

A similar dynamic showed up in a comparison of the students’ scores on midyear benchmark tests and what they received on their end-of-year exams. Standardized test scores the previous year were better predictors of their scores the next year than the benchmark test they had taken a few months earlier.

Now, in studies that threaten to shake the foundation of high-stakes test-based accountability, Mr. Stroup and two other researchers said they believe they have found the reason: a glitch embedded in the DNA of the state exams that, as a result of a statistical method used to assemble them, suggests they are virtually useless at measuring the effects of classroom instruction.

Pearson, which has a five-year, $468 million contract to create the state’s tests through 2015, uses “item response theory” to devise standardized exams, as other testing companies do. Using I.R.T., developers select questions based on a model that correlates students’ ability with the probability that they will get a question right.

That produces a test that Mr. Stroup said is more sensitive to how it ranks students than to measuring what they have learned. That design flaw also explains why Richardson students’ scores on the previous year’s TAKS test were a better predictor of performance on the next year’s TAKS test than the benchmark exams were, he said. The benchmark exams were developed by the district, the TAKS by the testing company.

Mr. Stroup, who is preparing to submit the findings to multiple research journals, presented them in June at a meeting of the Texas House Public Education Committee. He said he was aware of their implications for a widely used and accepted method of developing tests, and for how the state evaluates public schools.

“I’ve thought about being wrong,” Mr. Stroup said. “I’d love if everyone could say, ‘You are wrong, everything’s fine,’ ” he said. “But these are hundreds and hundreds of numbers that we’ve run now.”

...

Mr. Stroup’s research comes as opposition to high-stakes standardized testing in Texas is creating an alliance between parents, educators and school leaders who wonder how the tests affect classroom instruction and small-government conservatives who question the expense and bureaucracy they impose.

...

State Representative Scott Hochberg, Democrat of Houston, led the charge against the measure and has since proposed legislation aimed at reforming the role of standardized testing because of data showing that a student’s test score on the first year highly predicted it for the next.

“I have for a long time said that the accountability system doesn’t give us all the information that the numbers are used to generate,” Mr. Hochberg said, adding that basing accountability “more on the kid’s history than the specifics of what happened in the classroom that year may make us feel good but it doesn’t give us any true information.”

Great - the tests are flawed, but they're using them to make high stakes decisions on students, teachers and schools in states all over the nation, thanks to the Obama administration and the corporate education reform movement, led by the Gates Foundation.

Fantastic!

And how much money will Pearson and all the vendors who provide testing materials and test prep make off these flawed measurements and tests?

Somewhere between $20 billion and $50 billion.

This isn't just a travesty - it's criminal.

And yet, here in NY State Governor Cuomo and his education brain trust have decided that standardized tests are the only measure of teacher performance in the classroom and plan to add dozens of standardized tests a year not to measure student performance but rather to measure teacher performance.

Again, fantastic!

One wonders just how much money Pearson is throwing around to get these deals with the states for all this testing.

We know they bribed the former NYSED Commissioner David Steiner.

We know too that Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch has family in the test prep business, so she stands to benefit from all this testing too (We also know the parent company of her brother-in-law's test prep company is being investigated for securities fraud.)

As for current NYSED Commissioner John King, hard to know if he's taken any bribes from Pearson, but we do know that he has navigated quite a career from teacher to charter school leader to NYSED bureaucrat to youngest NYSED commissioner ever.

It doesn't hurt John King's career trajectory that he is such a promoter of standardized testing. In fact, one might think that's exactly how he's risen so fast in education leadership circles - he's happy to shill a corporate education reform agenda, including a heavy emphasis on test-based accountability systems.

I suspect that this study won't change anything here in NY State because the standardized testing train has already left the station and is barreling down the track at too fast a speed to be stopped.

We will spend a few years closing more schools, firing more teachers and leaving more kids back based on these flawed tests and measurements, all the while feeding Pearson scarce resources to do the crappy job they do with these things.

Too bad the AFT didn't jump off the standardized testing train years before, when we could have stopped these plans from being implemented (though it's nice to have them on record now acknowledging the harms that high stakes testing does.)

Unfortunately, I think it is now too late.

We will just have to pick up the pieces after it becomes apparent to the public the harm that is being done by the high stakes accountability system.

If it becomes apparent.

There is a lot of money to be made by the testing companies, the tech companies, the politicians, the education "consultants," and the rest of the education infrastructure with the Common Core Federal Standards, the new federal tests that will be rolled out as part of the CCFS, and the state and district tests that have been mandated as part of new teacher evaluation systems in many states.

You can bet these stakeholders will try and keep the high stakes standardized testing gravy train going for as long as they can - and they'll get lots of help from the corporate media, many of whom are stakeholders themselves.

Remember, the Washington Post owns Kaplan and News Corporation is in the for profit education game as well.

As I like to write all the time when talking about the financial markets, it's all rigged.

It's all rigged.

And there's so much money involved in this game that the boys and girls making it aren't going to want to unrig it any time soon.

Melinda Gates Steps Down From Washington Post/Kaplan University Board

I guess the NY Times expose on the fraud that is the Washington Post/Kaplan company got to Ms. Gates.

Here is how the Washington Post covered her resignation:

Melinda French Gates, philanthropist and wife of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has resigned from the Washington Post Co. board of directors, the company announced Friday.

Gates, a former Microsoft manager who runs the multibillion-dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, had joined the board in 2004.

She did not give a reason for stepping down. A family spokesman said she was spending more time than before working and traveling for the foundation.

The Post board's chairman, Donald E. Graham, said it is "sad at losing her."

The Post's Kaplan education unit has come under harsh scrutiny in news reports quoting former Kaplan employees who said that they had been instructed to use the Gates name to persuade students to take classes at the company.

Gates said in a statement released by The Post that she has "been impressed with The Washington Post Company's work with Kaplan, whose new approaches to education are allowing students opportunities that would otherwise not be possible."

She also said the "mission" of The Post "remains as vital today as at any time in its history."

Gates and her husband are close to Warren E. Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway company owns about 24 percent of the Post Co. Buffett has pledged to donate much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.

The Post's board, which includes Buffett, now has 11 members.

It's a shame Gates wasn't honest about the reason she was stepping down.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the Times expose was the reason.

She could have done the education reform movement some good by actually criticizing the Post/Kaplan Company for their fraudulent activities stealing money from students and taxpayers.

But to be honest, it would probably be difficult for Gates to do that.

The nexus between for-profit education companies and the education reform movement has never been more apparent than when Chancellor Klein jumped ship at the NYCDOE to head up Rupert Murdoch's new online for-profit education company this week.

Geoffrey Canada at the Harlem Children's Zone has his own connections to for-profit education companies, having taken $25 million in cash payments from Goldman Sachs, part owner the Art Institutes.

There is a lot of money to be made from the suckers out there and people like Gates, Klein, Canada, Buffet, et al. all know that.

That's why they don't do anything about the kind of fraudulent activity that the Post/Kaplan Company engages in.

In fact, not only don't they do anything about the fraudulent activity, they're not even willing to publicly criticize it.

But I guess it's hard to do that when they're making money off of it themselves.

I Write To Jay Matthews

Had to write to my favorite education blowhard at the Kaplan University Post, Jay Matthews, about the Times expose on the Washington Post/Kaplan University:

Mr. Matthews,

As an education writer, does it give you pause knowing you work for a company that runs its colleges the way Bernie Madoff ran his financial funds?

If even a tenth of the allegations in the Times article on Kaplan are true, every employee at the Post ought to be ashamed to work there.

But the people working the education beat, and particularly the writers who pontificate about education reform as you do, ought to resign in disgrace.

And frankly, the people running Kaplan and the Post, particularly Mr. Graham, belong in jail.

*****************
Teacher of English

PS: Here's my favorite Kaplan/Post recruiting practice:

"Many current and former Kaplan employees and students — including those, like Mr. Wratten, not involved in the lawsuits — said in interviews that they believed the company was concerned most with getting students’ financial aid, and that Kaplan’s fast-growing revenues were based on recruiting students whose chances of succeeding were low.

They cite, for example, a training manual used by recruiters in Pittsburgh whose “profile” of Kaplan students listed markers like low self-esteem, reliance on public assistance, being fired, laid off, incarcerated, or physically or mentally abused."

Just horrific.

These people really do belong in jail.

No wonder Joel Klein went to go work the for-profit education beat for Rupert Murdoch.

There's so much evil to be done there.

UPDATE: Matthews responds:

I share yr concerns about what the investigations have revealed, but I am very familiar with the morale and ethical standards of the people that run the Washington Post company, and am quite certain they are going to make sure that any of this nonsense that is still going on will be stopped. Every company has problems with employees, sometimes whole divisions, going in the wrong direction. The important thing is what they do about it. So let me know what you think a year from now. ---jay

I write back:

Mr. Matthews,

I teach English to seniors. I have long been aware of problems in the for-profit sector when a few of my former students who had attended for-profits - including the Art Institute, Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, Kaplan and Devry - were deeply in debt and had either dropped out of school or were holding worthless diplomas and were unemployed or working minimum wage jobs. Having seen Kaplan sign up special education students who graduated with IEP diplomas and load them up with $10,000-$15,000 in loans, then drop them without any intervention when the students couldn't do the work, I don't want to hear about your confidence that Graham and the Post company will take care of this mess. Graham and the Post company have had plenty of time to take care of this mess, having been aware of these problems for years according to the Times article. The only thing that matters to the Post company is profit - quarterly profit.

If Graham and the Post company want to do the right thing, they should come clean about the fraud, shut down these schools, and hand back all the money they stole from students and taxpayers.

No response from Matthews so far.

Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet and the Kaplan/Post Company

Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet sit on the board of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan University.

So do many other corporate luminaries.

The Washington Post editorial page often weighs in on education reform issues, inveighs against the status quo that they say unions and unionized teachers represent, and claims to have the best interests of students in mind when publishing their editorials on education issues and reform.

But after reading this NY Times article that exposes the Washington Post-owned Kaplan University as a criminal enterprise, I'd have to say that the only interests Post chairman Donald Graham and his editorial board have in mind is their own.

It's a long article, but here are all the criminal highlights:

Kaplan was still a test-prep company when the Washington Post Company bought it in 1984, after Richard D. Simmons, the president, convinced Katharine Graham of its potential for expansion and profits.

Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for-profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company’s operations. And Kaplan’s revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to $743.3 million — with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test-prep — helping its parent company more than triple its profits.

But over the last few months, Kaplan and other for-profit education companies have come under intense scrutiny from Congress, amid growing concerns that the industry leaves too many students mired in debt, and with credentials that provide little help in finding jobs.

Reports of students who leave such schools with heavy debt, only to work in low-paying jobs, have prompted the Department of Education to propose regulations that would cut off federal financing to programs whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low repayment rates.

...

Kaplan is facing several legal challenges. The Florida attorney general is investigating eight for-profit colleges, including Kaplan, for alleged misrepresentation of financial aid and deceptive practices regarding recruitment, enrollment, accreditation, placement and graduation rates.

Kaplan is also facing several federal whistle-blower lawsuits whose accusations dovetail with the findings of an undercover federal investigation of the for-profit industry this summer, including video of high-pressure recruiting and unrealistic salary promises.

“The claims they make are absurd and simply not reflective of the kind of company that Kaplan is,” said Andrew S. Rosen, Kaplan’s chairman. “We’re confident that when a court rules, we’ll have a clear demonstration that this is not who Kaplan is.”

...

This summer, Senator Tom Harkin’s committee, in oversight hearings on the industry, watched undercover videos about high-pressure recruiting tactics that Kaplan and others used to sign up students.

Using hidden cameras, investigators from the Government Accountability Office found deception or fraud at 15 for-profit colleges, including two Kaplan campuses.

The undercover videos showed Kaplan recruiters in Florida and California making false or questionable statements to prospective students — suggesting for example, that massage therapists earn $100 an hour, and that student loans need not be paid back.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Graham quickly issued a statement calling the video scenes “sickening,” suspended registration at the two campuses, began retraining employees and started their own “mystery shopper” program to check on employee practices.

...

Mr. Graham said the two locations included in the G.A.O. investigation were outliers, and not typical of what occurs at other Kaplan locations.

But dozens of current and former Kaplan employees said the videos painted a representative picture.

“They are not outliers; they are in the middle of the field, the middle of the bell curve,” said William Wratten, a former Kaplan admissions adviser in Chicago, who resigned after a year and a half because he disagreed with company practices. “Maybe not the exact same activities, but the mind-set was the same: Do whatever it takes to get the sale, to keep your job.”

Mr. Wratten and other admissions representatives said they were trained to “emphasize that Kaplan is owned by The Washington Post, one of the best newspapers in the country, and that Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates’s wife, Melinda Gates, were on our board of directors.”

Kaplan officials said that was never part of their training. In response to a question about this, they said they scanned two million recruiting calls and found “Buffett” or “Gates” in only 85.

Four whistle-blower suits against Kaplan under the federal False Claims Act have been made public in the last few years, all making accusations that the company used deceptive practices in its quest for profits, including enrolling unqualified students and paying recruiters for each student enrolled, a practice forbidden by federal law.

In addition, the suits allege, Kaplan kept students on the books after they dropped out, inflated students’ grades and manipulated placement data to continue receiving financial aid.

Three of the suits, from Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Miami, have been consolidated for trial in Miami. A fourth, from Las Vegas, is pending there.

...

Kaplan, said Mr. Rosen, its chairman, is a model of higher education for the future, helping working adults — especially low-income and minority students — improve their lives.

“Kaplan is engaged in making the world a better place,” he said.

But many current and former Kaplan employees and students — including those, like Mr. Wratten, not involved in the lawsuits — said in interviews that they believed the company was concerned most with getting students’ financial aid, and that Kaplan’s fast-growing revenues were based on recruiting students whose chances of succeeding were low.

They cite, for example, a training manual used by recruiters in Pittsburgh whose “profile” of Kaplan students listed markers like low self-esteem, reliance on public assistance, being fired, laid off, incarcerated, or physically or mentally abused.

Melissa Mack, a Kaplan spokeswoman, said the manual had not been used since 2006.

Admissions advisers, past and present, say the pressure to recruit students leads to aggressive, and sometimes misleading, sales tactics.

Carlos Urquilla-Diaz, a former Kaplan instructor and administrator who is one of the Miami whistle-blowers, recalled a PowerPoint presentation showing African-American women who were raising two children by themselves as the company’s primary target.

Such women, Mr. Urquilla-Diaz said, were considered most likely to drop out before completing the program, leaving Kaplan with the aid money and no need to provide more services.

“The idea was, we’ll take anybody, and I mean anybody,” he said.

Victoria Gatsiopoulos, a former instructor and director of career services at a Kaplan College in Pittsburgh, said in her complaint that the school made promises to students of “how their lives will magically change” if they attended Kaplan classes.

One prospective student with financial difficulties, the complaint said, was promised in writing that “in five years she would have a job in a hospital, a big house in Florida, enough money to go to Disney World with her family and a new Lexus.”

Ms. Gatsiopoulos said Kaplan representatives routinely misled prospective students about the jobs they could get after graduation.

“One of our biggest programs was criminal justice,” she said. “Students who were recruited were led to believe that they could get into the C.I.A. or F.B.I. or Border Patrol or crime-scene investigation when they graduated, and earn $40-$50,000. But those jobs all require advanced training.”

In reality, Ms. Gatsiopoulos said, graduates would often get the same $8 to $9-an-hour security guard jobs they could have had without Kaplan training.

Ms. Gatsiopoulos’s complaint said that Kaplan also manipulated its reported placement rates so that a graduate employed in sales at Wal-Mart, for example, would be reported as working in accounting management, and that a telemarketer was reported as working in “business administration fashion merchandising.”

She also charges that Kaplan would raise instructors’ grades for students so they remained eligible for federal aid. Former Kaplan instructors not involved in the litigation made similar claims.

“More than once, when I refused to inflate a student’s grade, they went ahead and did it on their own,” Ms. Gatsiopoulos said.

Kaplan officials said they had seen no evidence of manipulated grades, inflated placement reports or unrealistic job promises. But dozens of former students said they felt misled.

Nine years after graduating from high school, Rebecca Masci, a single mother with four young children to support, enrolled in a surgical-technology program in 2004 at Kaplan/CCI in Broomall, Pa., to improve her job prospects.

She took out student loans, lined up her parents to baby-sit, and for three terms, excelled in her classes in anatomy, physiology and pharmacology. But to complete the fourth term and graduate, students need a placement to give her hands-on experience in an operating room. She did not get one.

“When I signed up, they sounded all positive, about plenty of placements, plenty of jobs,” said Ms. Masci, now 32 and with five children. “But after I finished the classes, they told me to go home and wait and they’d call when they found something. I was in limbo for more than a year.”

Eventually, she said, she was given one short placement, not enough to graduate. Now she has $14,000 of debt, but no surgical-technology certification.

“I’m further behind than I was before I started,” she said.

The Future

David Goodstein, who was the school’s director of education for nine months in 2006, said Ms. Masci’s experience was not uncommon.

Mr. Goodstein, who has filed a federal whistle-blower suit against Kaplan, said that although the school had not had enough placement opportunities for the surgical-technology program since 2002, it kept enrolling new students, taking their federal student aid, leaving them stranded without a placement and then dropping them from the program, which was phased out in 2007.

Mr. Goodstein’s lawsuit, filed four years ago, is under seal. But the Post Company’s securities filings disclosed an investigation of the program.

In the Las Vegas case, Charles Jajdelski, an admissions adviser at Kaplan’s Heritage College, said that while cleaning up after an October 2003, graduation ceremony, he found five boxes of diplomas sitting off to the side.

When he asked colleagues about the boxes, his complaint said, they told him they were for phantom students, kept on the books even though they never attended class. The more questions he asked, Mr. Jajdelski said, the more he was told to drop it.

“When I called Kaplan’s Western regional assistant director, he told me he knew all about it, I shouldn’t worry about it, and we didn’t ever need to have this conversation again,” Mr. Jajdelski said. “I called the human resources guy in Atlanta, and he said, ‘Charles, we need you to be a team player here.’ That knocked my socks off.”

Mr. Jajdelski reported the situation to the Education Department hot line in November 2003, his complaint said. He was fired weeks later. Kaplan officials said the company was unaware of Mr. Jajdelski’s accusations until his lawsuit was unsealed in 2008.

The next time Melinda Gates opens her mouth about education reform, she ought to have to answer for the criminal activity of Kaplan University.

How can someone who claims to care so much about education and students sit on the board of a company that engages in the fraudulent activity that Kaplan does?

As for Donald Graham, frankly he belongs in jail with Bernie Madoff.

And their editorials on education ought to be laughed off as propaganda and jive.

Check that - ALL of their editorials ought to be laughed off as propaganda and jive.

Questions of the Day

Do you think the editorial writers at the Times will read the news section of the paper and discover that the Bloomberg/Klein "Education Miracle" is actually a fraudulent mirage and that both Bloomberg and Klein knew this pre-2009 even as they were ratcheting up the mayor's campaigns for re-election and the renewal of mayoral control of the school system by touting the fraudulent test scores?

Seriously.

Because so far, whenever I see editorial pieces about education or the NYC school system at the Times, it's always about what a great job Bloomberg and Klein have done, progress has still been made despite the fraudulent test scores and other instances of Klein-metic, etc.

It's like the Times editorial writers live in an alternate reality devoid of actual facts and just swallow hole whatever p.r. crap emanates from Tweed and Bloomberg LP, er, City Hall.

The same can be said for the editorial writers at the News, Post, and Murdoch Street Journal.

While I'm at it, do you think that the editors at the Kaplan Test Prep/Washington Post, led by Fred "The Iraq War Was A Fine Idea And I Still Stand By That" Hiatt will read the Times piece and think twice before they give Klein a platform to spew horseshit?

Nahhh....

Kaplan Crooks

The Washington Post is owned by Kaplan Test Prep.

Kaplan Test Prep is a for-profit education management organization that runs standardized test preparation programs and undergraduate and graduate programs both online and at traditional campuses.

Kaplan Test Prep, like many for-profit education management organizations, is run by crooks.

Don't believe me?

Officials from the Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation of 15 for-profit schools around the country, including two owned by Kaplan, and found “fraud and engagement in deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior" at all the schools.

Specifically here is what investigators found at one Kaplan campus in Florida:

At one college, later identified in congressional testimony as Kaplan College's Pembroke Pines campus, the investigation identified two scenarios where prospective students, who were working undercover for the GAO, were faced with “fraud and engagement in deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior” when inquiring about an associate degree in criminal justice.

In the first scenario reported by the GAO:

* The Kaplan admissions representative falsely stated that the college was accredited by the same agency that accredits Harvard University and the University of Florida.
* A test proctor sat in the room while the applicant took a test and coached her through it.
* The applicant was not allowed to speak to a financial aid representative until after she enrolled.
* The applicant had to sign an agreement to pay $50 a month to the college while enrolled.
* The admissions representative said the applicant should switch from criminal justice to the medical assistant certificate because she could make up to $68,000 a year. But, the GAO said 90 percent of medical assistants make less than $40,000 a year.
* When asked about paying back student loans, the Kaplan representative allegedly told the applicant: “You gotta look at it … I owe $85,000 to the University of Florida. Will I pay it back? Probably not …. I look at life as tomorrow’s never promised …. Education is an investment, you’re going to get paid back tenfold, no matter what.”

In the second scenario, the GAO red-flagged these tactics:

* Two Kaplan representatives refused to answer the applicant’s questions about financial aid, but they debated with him about his commitment level for 30 minutes.
* After first saying the criminal justice program would take 18 months to complete, the representative changed that to two years. The representative then said that student loans would fully cover the program’s cost. Yet, the GAO noted that the applicant would need to take out both federal student loans and private loans to finish the program in less than three years.
* The representative told the applicant that repaying the student loans would not be an issue once he got his new job.
* “Hard sell” marketing techniques were used, such as becoming argumentative, calling the applicant afraid and scolding the applicant for not wanting to take out loans.

The full GAO report can be read here, but the above highlights, showing that Kaplan college employees are no better than sleazy car salesmen looking to make a bottom line sale no matter what and willing to lie, cheat, and berate customers to sign on the dotted line (as they say in Glengarry Glen Ross, "ALWAYS BE CLOSING!!!"), get the point across quite well.

Kaplan, with more than 66,000 students around the U.S., received $211 million in Pell grants during the 2009-2010 school year.

Add in the amount of student loan money Kaplan hands out to students (for-profit colleges received $20 billion in student loans last year) and you realize that there is an awful lot of money the people running these schools are stealing from both students and taxpayers.

And they are stealing it. The USDOE released data last week showing that for-profit colleges have disturbingly low repayment rates for the student loans - especially at Kaplan schools:

Adding new fuel to the growing controversy over regulating for-profit colleges, the Department of Education on Friday released data on student-loan repayment rates at the nation’s colleges and universities, listing the institutions by name.

Although the department issued no analysis or comparison of repayment rates by sector, outside advocacy groups that analyzed the data found that in 2009, repayment rates were 54 percent at public colleges and universities, 56 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 36 percent at for-profit colleges.

“I think it’s notable that the for-profits are the only type of school where the majority of students are unable to repay their loans,” said Debbie Frankle Cochrane, program director at the Institute for College Access and Success, which has called for tighter regulation of for-profit institutions.

At some for-profit colleges, the repayment rates were startlingly low. For example, 33 of the 86 Corinthian Colleges’ Everest locations had repayment rates of less than 20 percent — and at several, the rates were less than 10 percent.

At the headquarters of the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit education company, the repayment rate was 44 percent, compared with 38 percent at DeVry and 27 percent at Kaplan University, a unit of the Washington Post Company.

So Kaplan schools have been caught engaging in fraudulent and "deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior" by government investigators and government data shows that only 27% of Kaplan students can afford to pay back their loans.

They are lying to and manipulating vulnerable people to get them to sign up for classes, then don't care whether people can actually pay back the loans they take out to attend their schools.

Here is how one former admissions officer at Kaplan University described the school and how they "rip off" students in 2007:

I was a Financial Aid Officer at Kaplan University which is owned by the Washington Post(1). My employment was for over a year and I quit to work at a new job. I am not angry at Kaplan yet I am disappointed. The school offers a very expensive education, aggressive enrollment process and a questionable quality of education. They don't seem motivated to educate. They are motivated to make money.

The cost of tuition goes up every year. The price hike usually takes place toward the middle of the year. I believe it is currently 305 a credit hour. This means a 90 credit associate degree costs 27,450 plus fees. A 180 credit bachelors degree costs 54,900. The equivalent ONLINE bachelors degree at the University of Florida is 18,240 plus fees.(1) There are more reputable sources of education available at a much lower cost.

P.S. you will not be eligible for any state scholarships at Kaplan unless you live in Iowa.

The Kaplan admissions telephone sales force is staffed is extremely aggressive. They sit in cubicles and try call 150 people a day or 750 calls a week. They try to get more than 3 students to enroll every month. Once they get a possible student on the line, they will do everything they can to get you to enroll. The telemarketing techniques they use can be very convincing. For example, I have seen people enroll who do not have computer access, don't know how to read or have a mental handicap. Reputable colleges have students calling them not the other way around.

By the way, once you enroll the admissions officers won't talk to you. So don't think they are your friends. You are their paycheck.

Will 55,000 buy you a quality education? Maybe. First, you have to graduate. When I left, the school was running into trouble with retention rates. This may explain why some of their staff are reporting a delay in paycheck payments. I can find graduation rates for other Universities on the web but Kaplan's is mysteriously missing. Perhaps this is a by product of enrolling anyone who will answer the telephone. As for the quality of education, a quick Kaplan search on Rip Off Report will show an extensive list of past Kaplan University students and they are not happy. Receiving a 55,000 education should make them happy.

Indeed, it should.

Yet that would mean that students are actually graduating from the schools and getting jobs with the degrees they received that help them pay off their loans.

Clearly that is NOT happening.

You would think the Washington Post, owned by Kaplan, would be embarrassed by these facts and might actually hold themselves and their company accountable (as they delight in holding D.C. teachers accountable), but you would be wrong.

Instead the Kaplan Test Prep Post attacked Democrats in Washington who have sought to regulate the for-profit college industry and make sure that schools are not stealing from students and taxpayers.

Here's what the crooks at the Post wrote:

THE OBAMA administration is considering rules that could sharply limit the availability of for-profit colleges to American students. The government is right to fashion reasonable regulation to discourage fraud or misleading practices, but it would be wrong to impose rules that remove an option that is especially useful for poor and working students.

Readers should know that we have a conflict of interest regarding this subject. The Washington Post Co., which owns the Post newspaper and washingtonpost.com, also owns Kaplan University and other for-profit schools of higher education that, according to company officials, could be harmed by the proposed regulations.

But our feelings about career colleges, as the for-profits are often called, are consistent with our editorial policy on education more broadly: that is, the more options available to parents and students, the better. Particularly among some Democrats, that's not always the prevailing view. But for the most part it has been the philosophy of the Obama administration, which is why an effort to narrow choice in this area would be inconsistent as well as misguided.

...

In a speech on higher education in Texas this month, President Obama noted that getting more Americans into -- and successfully out of -- college is an economic imperative. "It's an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who've never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college," Mr. Obama said. "Education is an economic issue when nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade." But the president noted that in college completion the United States has been "slipping. In a single generation, we've fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults." He vowed to reverse that trend.

...

But it's difficult to imagine achieving Mr. Obama's goal of 8 million more college graduates by 2020 if the for-profit sector is severely constricted. According to the Career College Association, as of 2006-07 about 9 per cent of the nation's 25 million college students were attending tax-paying schools such as Kaplan or Strayer University, and the number has been growing rapidly. It's been growing because for-profit schools have been adept at meeting the needs of working students who want to advance their careers but can afford to study only part-time and, often, online.

The government has an important role to play in helping to ensure that these students aren't taken advantage of. A recent Government Accountability Office video revealed repugnant instances of misleading and high-pressure recruiting, including by Kaplan employees. It's also reasonable to discourage students from paying for courses that promise but fail to deliver improved career prospects, which is why statistics on repayment of government loans are relevant.

Given that only 27% of Kaplan students can actually PAY BACK their loans, I think it is reasonable to assume that Kaplan schools are failing to deliver improved career prospects and instead are stealing millions of dollars from both students (many of whom do NOT belong in college without remediation and other academic services, as we learned from the former Kaplan admissions officer at Rip Off Report) and taxpayers.

Also, given the sleazy sales tactics and telemarketing scams, Kaplan uses to sign up any prospective student who can hold a pen, it is reasonable to assume Kaplan are not actually meeting the needs of working students but the needs of themselves and their investors.

As for helping students who can only go to school part-time, how about expanding state and city community colleges, which charge a fraction of the tuition that the for-profits charge, rather than provide taxpayer largesse in the form of Pell grants and student loans for the crooks in the for-profit industry?

Ah, but doing that would hurt the bottom line of the for-profit industry and the Wall Street investors who back them (including Goldman Sachs.)

So instead we get self-serving jive from the Kaplan Test Prep Post editors decrying new accountability rules that will force for-profit schools to show that students are graduating with useful degrees that expand their career opportunities and pay them enough to be able to pay back their students loans.

They don't say what kind of accountability measures they would support, only just that

If the data released Friday are used without further refinement, the effect will be to deprive many working students of their best option for higher education -- and to worsen the national problem that Mr. Obama has dedicated himself to solving.

So in other words, pay lip service to accountability and regulation of the for-profits, but DO NOT actually do anything to hold for-profits accountable.

Given how the same editors at the Post (and some of the columnists they have on staff, like Jay Matthews) delight in calling for new accountability measures for teachers but do NOT want to similarly be held accountable, I would have to say that not only are the editors at the Kaplan Test Prep Post crooks, they are also HYPOCRITICAL and SANCTIMONIOUS crooks.

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.

Poor Newsweek...

...the test prep guys took their swanky new offices:

Newsweek staffers, having suffered through layoffs and the struggle for the title’s future, have to endure yet another loss: their new offices.

Scarcely a year after they moved from their unglamorous Midtown offices to cushier Tribeca digs, staffers were told they would have to pack up again, to relocate uptown.

Newsweek will trade places with Washington Post Co. sibling Kaplan, the test-prep unit, which is outgrowing its Midtown space, according to a March 31 staff memo from Newsweek chief executive Tom Ascheim.

Staffers will make the move in August from 395 Hudson St. to Kaplan’s current space at 888 7th Ave., down the street from Newsweek’s old digs.

In the interim, Newsweek employees will have to endure construction and some internal relocation to make room for incoming Kaplan employees.

Ascheim tried to put a positive spin on the news, pointing out that after the move, staffers will be closer to Central Park.

The news comes at a particularly tough time for the newsweekly. Ad pages fell 26 percent to 1,117 in 2009. With ad revenue declining, the title cut its rate-base guarantee twice in the past year, to 1.5 million in January from 2.6 million a year earlier.

How ironic that both the Washington Post and Newsweek - which are publications at the nexus of the education deform movement with eduwankers like Jay Matthews and "reporters" like Evan Thomas pushing for the privatization of public schools, the wide expansion of charter schools and the busting of teachers unions - are owned by test preparation company/for-profit school operator Kaplan.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Even more ironic that Thomas, who says "bad" teachers who do not raise the test scores of their students need to be fired immediately can't seem to keep the circulation or the revenue of his weekly "news" magazine from plummeting.

Under his own guidelines for teachers, Thomas ought to be fired for failure.

I believe it was Thomas (or his headline writers) who said about teaching: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability."

I dunno, given the performance of Newsweek over the past few years, that anybody from the editorial board has still got a job looks like a failure of accountability to me.

But I have a feeling that oversight will be rectified soon enough.

Moving the test prep unit to Newsweek's office and moving Newsweek to where Kaplan used to be - that's a sign, I'll tell you what.

Maybe after they finally shut Newsweek down, Thomas and the others at the magazine can go into test prep.