Starting next year, for-profit schools, including some of the nation’s biggest online colleges–like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Strayer University–will have to provide graduation rate and job placement figures to new students and applicants, the Department of Education has ordered. That’s a sample of more than a dozen reforms the government will impose on for-profit schools beginning July 1, 2011. Students will now be able to make more informed decisions, the Department says. “These new rules will help ensure that students are getting from schools what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an Oct. 28 press release.

[Online programs have respect to gain among employers.]

The regulations were announced amid scrutiny of for-profit schools from the Senate Health, Labor and Pensions Committee, a damning report from the Government Accountability Office, and investigations into abuse of taxpayer funded loan money by state attorneys general. In October, for instance, Oregon’s treasurer and attorney general sued Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, claiming that the school was eager to boost profits with little regard for its students. A motion filed in federal court claims that the school “concocted a scheme to fraudulently inflate revenues and boost profitability by exploiting well-intentioned and often lower-income students, including veterans of the U.S. armed forces, who were hoping to improve their qualifications and employment prospects,” adding that “students often withdrew early or failed to complete degree programs.”

The firm dismisses the claims and plans to fight the suit. “Apollo Group takes its disclosure obligations very seriously and intends to defend this lawsuit vigorously,” company spokesman Manny Rivera said in a written statement. “Apollo Group is a leader in enhancing the student experience, expanding student protections and working to help students succeed in completing their degree programs.”

[Learn more about online education.]

Last week, the office of Florida’s attorney general also announced that it launched an investigation into the for-profit sector. These suits come on the heels of recent legal action against for-profit schools in Texas, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “Federal scrutiny has unearthed a whole set of questionable practices that conscientious AGs across the country start wondering ‘what’s happening in my state?’” says Christine Lindstrom, higher education program director at the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group. “It makes absolute sense that they’re looking into these programs.”

Deanne Loonin, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, works regularly with students–including several that enrolled online–at for-profit schools who have amassed seemingly insurmountable debt and has heard first hand of the dubious practices alleged by federal and state regulators. While she can’t mention specifics due to confidentiality agreements, she says it’s common for poorer people with limited or no Internet access at home to be persuaded to sign up for an online programs, hoping to rely on libraries to complete their coursework. Once they realize they can’t fulfill the time requirements because of their limited access or that the material is simply too advanced for them, they complain to the school or try to pull out altogether. She claims they’re typically met with limited feedback–almost all of which is intended to keep them enrolled in online programs as they amass more loan debt. “They’re told, ‘don’t worry about it. We’ll figure things out,’” she says. “It’s hard to beat all of these problems, even for people who recognize there’s a problem.”

[Learn more before you enroll in an online program.]

Though the new Department of Education regulations have been put in place to help prevent just what Loonin describes, a more significant battle looms on the horizon. Regulations, which will be based on data, will judge an institution’s ability to prepare students for jobs comparable to the cost of their education, have yet to be finalized. They will target so-called “workforce programs” which include for-profit schools, community colleges, and some state universities. If schools’ students are unable to meet adequate loan debt, loan repayment, and career earnings thresholds, the institutions could be denied federal funding, which supplies a vast majority of revenue at most for-profit online programs. The rules are intended to weed out schools that don’t prepare students for their working lives, which, in theory, would benefit students and perhaps shut the doors of several institutions not up to par. Given the severity of the regulatory threat, the industry is expected to put up a fight, experts say.

Rivera, of Apollo, refuses to speak for the sector regarding the potential for a lawsuit, but Lindstrom at PIRG believes litigation will be inevitable–possibly on the grounds that the new rules unfairly discriminate against the already much-maligned sector. “We absolutely anticipate that as soon as the final rules come out the Department of Education will be met with a lawsuit,” Lindstrom says. “The sector will sue.”

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

Starting next year, for-profit schools, including some of the nation’s biggest online colleges–like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Strayer University–will have to provide graduation rate and job placement figures to new students and applicants, the Department of Education has ordered. That’s a sample of more than a dozen reforms the government will impose on for-profit schools beginning July 1, 2011. Students will now be able to make more informed decisions, the Department says. “These new rules will help ensure that students are getting from schools what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an Oct. 28 press release.

[Online programs have respect to gain among employers.]

The regulations were announced amid scrutiny of for-profit schools from the Senate Health, Labor and Pensions Committee, a damning report from the Government Accountability Office, and investigations into abuse of taxpayer funded loan money by state attorneys general. In October, for instance, Oregon’s treasurer and attorney general sued Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, claiming that the school was eager to boost profits with little regard for its students. A motion filed in federal court claims that the school “concocted a scheme to fraudulently inflate revenues and boost profitability by exploiting well-intentioned and often lower-income students, including veterans of the U.S. armed forces, who were hoping to improve their qualifications and employment prospects,” adding that “students often withdrew early or failed to complete degree programs.”

The firm dismisses the claims and plans to fight the suit. “Apollo Group takes its disclosure obligations very seriously and intends to defend this lawsuit vigorously,” company spokesman Manny Rivera said in a written statement. “Apollo Group is a leader in enhancing the student experience, expanding student protections and working to help students succeed in completing their degree programs.”

[Learn more about online education.]

Last week, the office of Florida’s attorney general also announced that it launched an investigation into the for-profit sector. These suits come on the heels of recent legal action against for-profit schools in Texas, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “Federal scrutiny has unearthed a whole set of questionable practices that conscientious AGs across the country start wondering ‘what’s happening in my state?’” says Christine Lindstrom, higher education program director at the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group. “It makes absolute sense that they’re looking into these programs.”

Deanne Loonin, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, works regularly with students–including several that enrolled online–at for-profit schools who have amassed seemingly insurmountable debt and has heard first hand of the dubious practices alleged by federal and state regulators. While she can’t mention specifics due to confidentiality agreements, she says it’s common for poorer people with limited or no Internet access at home to be persuaded to sign up for an online programs, hoping to rely on libraries to complete their coursework. Once they realize they can’t fulfill the time requirements because of their limited access or that the material is simply too advanced for them, they complain to the school or try to pull out altogether. She claims they’re typically met with limited feedback–almost all of which is intended to keep them enrolled in online programs as they amass more loan debt. “They’re told, ‘don’t worry about it. We’ll figure things out,’” she says. “It’s hard to beat all of these problems, even for people who recognize there’s a problem.”

[Learn more before you enroll in an online program.]

Though the new Department of Education regulations have been put in place to help prevent just what Loonin describes, a more significant battle looms on the horizon. Regulations, which will be based on data, will judge an institution’s ability to prepare students for jobs comparable to the cost of their education, have yet to be finalized. They will target so-called “workforce programs” which include for-profit schools, community colleges, and some state universities. If schools’ students are unable to meet adequate loan debt, loan repayment, and career earnings thresholds, the institutions could be denied federal funding, which supplies a vast majority of revenue at most for-profit online programs. The rules are intended to weed out schools that don’t prepare students for their working lives, which, in theory, would benefit students and perhaps shut the doors of several institutions not up to par. Given the severity of the regulatory threat, the industry is expected to put up a fight, experts say.

Rivera, of Apollo, refuses to speak for the sector regarding the potential for a lawsuit, but Lindstrom at PIRG believes litigation will be inevitable–possibly on the grounds that the new rules unfairly discriminate against the already much-maligned sector. “We absolutely anticipate that as soon as the final rules come out the Department of Education will be met with a lawsuit,” Lindstrom says. “The sector will sue.”

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.

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Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher

A big legal battle is brewing between New York City’s education department and the local teachers union over the recently announced plan to issue public rankings of teachers based on how their students perform on tests. Union leaders say the practice would be an intrusion on the privacy of rank-and-file members — and are suing the city today to prevent the plan from going forward. Unless the union prevails, the education department will hand over the rankings of 12,000 teachers tomorrow morning to reporters who have requested the data.

The suit says teachers will face “harassment” from angry parents if the data is released, reports education blog Gothamschools.

“Such harassment could include demands for termination, discipline, and transfer of children out of teachers’ classrooms, as well as threats to the persons of individual teachers,” the suit reads.

So what’s the big deal? It seems reasonable for parents to want to know if their child’s teacher is improving classroom performance on standardized tests. Indeed, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that all U.S. school districts should issue such public rankings, saying in a speech that “the truth is always hard to swallow, but it can only make us better, stronger and smarter.”

But what if the scores aren’t really the “truth”? That’s what the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) contends, arguing the city’s data is faulty and will wrongly stigmatize some teachers as bad. Those worries echo complaints from teachers unions across the country, which are fending off the call for more rigorous teacher evaluations in education reform circles.

“We’ve looked at the first 20 reports we had access to, and 13 of them have the wrong information in terms of they don’t have the right students with the right teachers. So it’s not good information,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the cable news station NY1.

But the battle over what are known as “value-added” ratings goes beyond specific inaccuracies. For one thing, standardized tests can be flawed themselves; a recent study of New York tests, for example, found that they were too easy. For another, value-added analysis is often inaccurate if the rankings take into account only a few years of data. A study found that there’s a one-in-four chance a teacher will be misidentified as bad if the sample only includes two years’ worth of data. In addition, some argue that the measurements can never fully control for outside factors, such as a student’s economic background.

“There are a lot of benefits to this approach, but the science of the methodology at this point isn’t where it should be to attach teachers’ names to it,” Douglas Ready, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, told the Wall Street Journal.

This same battle played out in Los Angeles in August, when Los Angeles Times reporters released data that spanned seven years of teaching to rate 6,000 local teachers. Teachers union president A.J. Duffy called for a boycott of the paper in retaliation. He told teachers that the scores were “an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.”

The paper set up a database allowing readers to search for a teacher by name and establish his or her value-added score.

The reporters found that a student who spent a single year with a teacher ranked in the top 10 percent would score 17 percentile points higher on English and 25 points higher on standardized math tests compared with students who spent that year with a teacher in the bottom 10th percentile.

In New York, 25 percent of the 12,000 teachers received poor scores, another 25 percent high scores, and the rest of the teachers fell somewhere in the middle. According to Gothamschools, about 45 percent of New York teachers didn’t download their own performance scores when they were made available online this year.

(Photo: Getty)

Teachers unions fight public performance rankings (The Upshot)

Teachers unions fight public performance rankings (The Upshot)

Gwinnett County Public Schools snagged the Broad Prize for Urban Education, an award the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation gives annually to urban districts that show the most gains in student performance and closing minority achievement gaps.

It’s the second year in a row the 150,000-student district was nominated for the prize.

The district is 28% black and 25% Hispanic, with about half of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. But last year in reading and math, Gwinnett County schools outperformed all other Georgia districts serving students with similar family incomes.

The district has among the state’s smallest achievement gaps between black and white students at all grades in math, and the district narrowed that gap for middle school math by 8 percentage points between 2006 and 2009. In the same time period, the rate of black students taking the SAT college entrance exam rose 9 percentage points.

Ninety-nine percent of the district’s schools met federal benchmarks in 2009, compared with 86% of schools statewide, and the superintendent has been in office nearly 15 years, providing consistency at the helm of the large district.

Gwinnett County beat out Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and Socorro Independent School District and Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso.

Though Gwinnett County is in suburban Atlanta, the district meets the criteria for the Broad Prize because it has a high percentage of minority and low-income students.

The prize, created in 2002 by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, is the nation’s largest education award given to school districts. It is designed to reward schools for increasing graduation rates, improving low-income students’ performance, and reducing differences in achievement rates between minority and white students. Winners are chosen from the country’s 100 largest school systems serving a large percentage of low-income and minority students.

The prize money goes to college scholarships for students from each district. Runners-up win $250,000 for scholarships.

The Aldine Independent School District near Houston won last year. Other past winners include the New York City Department of Education, Boston Public Schools and the Houston Independent School District.

Georgia school district wins $1 million Broad prize

Georgia school district wins $1 million Broad prize

THE rich are sitting firmly in the public cross hairs, especially as the economy continues to stumble. Reports that Wall Street bonuses will again be high, and the debate in Congress over tax increases for the wealthy, just add to the outrage.

Wealth Matters: Scrutinizing the Elite, Whether They Like It or Not

President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

Instead, the former judge found a “lively, articulate cross section of people” she meets for dinner, aspiring author workshops, parties and game nights, says Brown, now an attorney who joined Mensa as an undergrad at Spelman College.

“Honestly, it doesn’t look like a convention out of Revenge of the Nerds,” she says with a laugh. “We do have that, but that’s not all. There’s a little of everything.”

Brown, 34, is part of a growing and increasingly visible younger contingent of Mensa, the 58,000- member “High-IQ Society.”

American Mensa says 42% of new members in 2009-2010 were ages 29-49; in the past decade, membership of people under 30 has grown 63%.

American Mensa, now 50 years old, “is getting up there in age,” says national chair Elissa Rudolph, a Mensan for 35 years. But it aims to get “more people involved and younger people more involved,” she says.

It hopes to attract some with National Mensa Testing Day this Saturday; an estimated 6 million people in the USA (about 1 in 50) could qualify, Mensa says.

To qualify, a person must score in the top 2% of the population on an accepted, standardized test. That score can come from Mensa’s own admission test or one of 200 others, such as the Stanford-Binet, the Miller Analogies Test, the GMAT or the GRE.

What’s in it for members, besides bragging rights?

A network of people with whom to share a wide range of social and intellectual activities, says Rudolph, who joined in 1975 when she was a single mother in Pittsburgh.

Andrew Heffernan, 33, a reliability engineer in Albany, N.Y., appreciates the variety of people. “It’s not a professional organization, so we’re not all interested in the same thing,” he says. “Everybody has something new to add.” He was also familiar with Mensa’s “nerd” reputation but put it aside after checking out his local chapter, one of 135 across the country, three years ago.

“It’s not about segregating myself into a highly intelligent group, but learning and trying new things,” he says.

Adds Brown: “You know that the person standing beside you is going to be bright and interesting, even if you don’t share their politics or beliefs. I know I can count on having a lively discussion about something.”

Educating gifted children is of special interest to Mensa, Rudolph

says; more than 1,300 members are under 18. In addition to local activities and excursions, there is a national college scholarship program (for members and non-members alike), resources for gifted children, a quarterly online magazine, Fred, and a group for teens.

Alexis Wise, 19, a member since age 14, coordinates that group via text messages, Facebook and other forms of communications, and she helps plan activities for teens at Mensa’s annual national gathering.

Now a sophomore at Yale, she says: “I have the coolest group of friends, and that’s only grown over the years. I’ve learned so much. Not the type of academic learning we’re used to in school, but learning though conversation, interacting.”

Mensa’s face is changing as it catches a young brain wave

Mensa’s face is changing as it catches a young brain wave

In a ruling that puts new restraints on get-tough “zero tolerance” discipline, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled Friday that schools must provide strong reasons for denying alternative schooling or tutoring to students after they are suspended for misbehavior.

The case was brought on behalf of two girls who were suspended for five months in 2008 after a brief fistfight at their high school in Beaufort County that involved no weapons or injuries. The suit did not question the district’s right to suspend them, but protested the additional, harsher step the district took, denying them access to the county’s alternative school for troubled students or help with study at home.

Legal experts said the decision, in a case that had drawn national attention from civil rights groups, children’s advocates and school leaders, was likely to be cited as a precedent as other states confront similar issues. The ruling affects one aspect of the zero-tolerance discipline policies that spread throughout the country over the last two decades, a policy originally intended to weed out dangerous children but one that critics say is used too readily for lesser infractions, derailing the lives of black children in particular.

In North Carolina and throughout the country, school officials have traditionally had wide latitude to impose discipline. In this example, the district refused to explain why it took this extra step, usually applied only to students deemed particularly dangerous or disruptive. The girls’ lawyers argued that the district was obligated to justify the extra punishment, which they called unreasonable and unnecessarily harmful to the girls.

“School administrators must articulate an important or significant reason for denying students access to alternative education,” the State Supreme Court declared, sending the case back to the original court with the new conditions.

Jane Wettach of the Duke University Children’s Law Clinic, who argued the girls’ case along with Legal Aid of North Carolina, called the decision a victory that could have wider impact.

“Before, school administrators were not required to justify at all a decision to deprive a student of alternatives during a suspension,” she said in a telephone interview. “This ruling says that they have to give a reason and it has to be substantial.”

Both girls returned to school the next year. Ms. Wettach said Friday that the lawyers had not decided whether to refight the case.

Trey Allen, a lawyer from Raleigh who represented the school district, noted that the court had not accepted the proposal by the girls’ lawyers to establish an even stronger constitutional right of alternate schooling for virtually all suspended students.

Ruling Limits State’s Power in School Suspensions

Los Angeles – Country music star Tim McGraw made a surprise visit to Grassland Middle School in Tennessee to talk with students about bullying last Friday.

According to the Tennessean, the singer spoke about Asher Brown, the 13-year-old Houston boy who shot himself in the head after antigay bullying went unaddressed at his school.

“To keep that from happening to their friends, he encouraged the students to speak up if they see bullying behavior, walk away from bad situations and, above all, not to fall into the trap of becoming a bully,” reported the Tennessean.

McGraw made the appearance, his first ever to discuss bullying at school, on the invitation of his nephew who attends Grassland.

Watch the video.

Tim McGraw Talks Bullying at School (The Advocate)

Tim McGraw Talks Bullying at School (The Advocate)