Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Notable Quotables, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013| 6 Comments »
“We have received 52 enrollment requests since the inception of Course Choice. Of the 52 requests, 42 have been from the Bossier Technical Center.”
—Spokesperson for Bossier Parish School Board, commenting on 52 attempted registrations for Course Choice courses by providers FastPath and Smart Start. He said there are no students at Bossier Technical Center.
Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013| 28 Comments »
It’s not always writer’s block when you have trouble putting your thoughts into something resembling comprehensible form.
In the case of the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program, the players are so intertwined as to be considered downright incestuous.
It’s not enough that the State Supreme Court has ruled that Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funds cannot be used to pay the tuition for Course Choice. Superintendent of Education John White has given every indication that he fully intends to plunge ahead with Course Choice and vouchers.
The depth of the apparent fraud is already emerging, even before Course Choice is really up and running, at a staggering rate sufficient to alert every investigative agency in Baton Rouge, from the local district attorney to state Attorney General and Legislative Auditor’s office to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
So where are they?
No, it’s not writer’s block. This convoluted mess called Course Choice can best be described as a cluster fart (okay, we cleaned that up a bit).
We just posted a story last week about FastPath, that Austin, Texas, firm headed by Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. FastPath, it has been learned, signed up 1100 students from Caddo and Webster parishes for Course Choice courses without the knowledge or consent of the students or their parents.
One of those registering for courses in Webster Parish was a parent and “at least one was a Severe Profound child,” said a spokesperson for the Webster School Board. “The recruiters went down the street knocking on doors,” he said.
Some of the courses for students allegedly signed up for in Webster included math courses entitled Single Variable Equations, Two Variable Equations, Number Line Inequalities, Applied Linear Equations 1 and 2, Quadratic Formula, Quadratic X-Intercepts, Trinomial Factoring and Graphs to Linear Inequalities.
Now, LouisianaVoice has learned that another 64 were signed up for course choice courses in Bossier Parish. Fifty-two of those were signed up by FastPath and Smart Start but a few others were signed up by other providers approved by DOE, namely K-12, Inc., Advanced Academics, APEX Learning and Education Solutions.
Smart Start is the company that we reported last week was running ads in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Central Louisiana for sales reps to earn up to $75,000 within six months by signing up students for course choice courses.
The ads have since been taken down but we subsequently learned that FastPath was running a similar ad for sales reps for the Monroe area.
All 64 applications were rejected by Bossier Parish. Of the 34 signed by Smart Start, all attempted to register for Precision Math and Reading Acceleration courses. One student who was not even enrolled in a Bossier Parish school attempted to register for two courses. The student identified his/her school as the Life Skills Center as the school he/she is presently attending. The Life Skills Center is closed.
Two students, a brother and sister from another parish attempted to register for four courses through Haughton High School.
One first grade student had someone attempt to register her in two courses—high school Latin and high school English. Her legal guardian did not enroll her through Course Choice and has no consistent computer access.
Another student attempted to register for two courses considered “academically inappropriate,” according to a Bossier Parish spokesperson.
Following our initial story last week, David Callaway, chief compliance officer for FastPath sent us an email that said everything was on the up and up with his company.
But judging from the track record of its CEO, Rod Paige, no one should be surprised if things aren’t completely on the level. While he was serving as Secretary of Education under the younger Bush, a major scandal erupted when it was learned that while he headed up the Houston Independent School District, the fifth largest district in the nation, the district falsified its dropout statistics.
In his response, Callaway said, “We have a strict protocol that all of our representatives follow, and they are paid a flat hourly rate for their work ($16 per hour, according to FastPath’s ad). As part of this protocol, parents are ALWAYS present during enrollment. All or our representatives wear identifying badges and we take immediate action to address all legitimate concerns. Parents enroll in significant numbers because our program works. Over 95 percent of parents report an increase in their child’s grades in multiple subjects.”
We fired off a second email asking him to quantify his 95 percent claim via a written document. We have not heard back from him.
“Before a student’s enrollment is completed,” he said, “it is approved by a guidance counselor to ensure it is academically appropriate.”
The Bossier Parish spokesperson, however, said the only way the local school board becomes aware of enrollees is by logging onto the DOE dashboard through the Course Choice website. For all intents and purposes, the local guidance counselors are out of the loop on Course Choice registrations until well after the fact.
Callaway said FastPath does not receive full tuition from the state for students “unless our program results in significant gains on the LEAP/iLEAP.”
The actual agreement between FastPath and DOE, however, is not quite that strict. FastPath, as with all course choice providers, charges $700 to $1250 in tuition and like all providers, receives 50 percent of that ($350 to $625) up front. Only 10 percent of the final 50 percent (or 5 percent of the overall tuition) is contingent upon students’ showing only an increase, not a “significant” increase. Thus, if a FastPath student failed to show gains, FastPath would lose only $62.50 of a total tuition of $1250 or $35 of a $700 tuition.
Some penalty.
Now here’s where it begins to get a bit muddled and we’re probably going to have to develop an organizational, or flow chart to illustrate just how tight this little cadre really is.
First, we should point out that FastPath has two sister companies, Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed, both of which have numerous complaints registered against them for deceptive practices.
That, however, has not deterred one Eric Nadelstern, Ed.D., from offering ringing endorsements of both companies. Nadelstern has been called “The great apologist for everything Joel Klein did for a decade.”
Nadelstern was Klein’s Deputy Chancellor for Academics in New York and was John White’s boss there.
Oddly enough, he appears on the web pages of both Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed with identical blurbs with only the company’s name changed: “(Name of company) delivers outstanding products and services that effectively raise reading and math proficiency,” his endorsements say.
The DOE official responsible for coordinating all the course choice programs is one David “Lefty” Lefkowith, the frequent flyer who commutes to and from his home in Los Angeles for a $146,000 per year salary.
Travel records released to LouisianaVoice as part of the settlement terms of our recent public records lawsuit against DOE reveal that Lefty was reimbursed $860 for traveling to Austin, Texas, on Feb. 17-18 to meet with officers of Agilix Labs regarding Course Choice registration.
So just who is Agilix Labs? It’s a company that thus far has managed to fly under our radar but which we now know has a contract with DOE to help develop its Course Choice platform. We’ve not been able to determine the amount of that contract but we have made a public records request for the document.
Agilix announced in a Feb. 27 news release that it had created “one of the first educational applications to tap into the emerging InBloom data standard (IBDS).”
The news released continued by saying, IBDS was designed by its creators at Shared Learning Cooperative (SLC) to standardize access to myriad disparate forms of student, school, course and other educational data across platforms. Supported with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, InBloom supports data needs of states, districts, nonprofits and corporations promoting personalized learning.”
What?
“We had to look at the issue of how to interface with all these systems to provide the broadest possible access to our customers,” said Agilix CEO Curt Allen. “After much analysis, we settled on adopting the rapidly emerging InBloom standard. That choice means that any school district or state that supports IBDS can leverage Agilix Honeycomb technology.
“John White, Superintendent of Louisiana schools, says, ‘By connecting to IBDS, Agilix opens a lot of doors for our Course Choice product not only for registration but also for detailed analysis of student performance. We expect this will assist greatly in tracking and reporting results of Course Choice adoption to state authorities,’” the news release said.
So there you have it. The circle is complete. After all the guarantees that data provided to InBloom would not be shared, we have Agilix, contracted by the state, saying otherwise.
We have White’s former boss endorsing two shady companies affiliated with a course choice provider (FastPath) from the same city as Agilix (Austin) that is signing up students in three northwest Louisiana parishes without the knowledge or consent of the students or parents.
And Agilix is joined at the hip with InBloom to whom White was going to provide sensitive personal data on some 700,000 Louisiana school students to “park” the information in its “data garage.” White has since said he cancelled the agreement with InBloom but in response to our public records request has denied the existence of any document verifying any such cancellation. Nor has he ever produced a contract or memorandum of understanding with InBloom to provide the data in the first place.
And coordinating the entire Course Choice racket is a nomad who jets in from Los Angeles for a four-day work week before heading back to the West Coast every Thursday—a nomad with his own questionable past of working with the now defunct Enron and the Jeb Bush administration in Florida in an unsuccessful effort to corner the market on drinking water there.
What could possibly go wrong here?
Posted in BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 16, 2013| 31 Comments »
More than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs with a provider whose chairman with close ties to former President George W. Bush and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
An outfit named FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has somehow managed to obtain student information to sign up the students without the knowledge of the student or of their parents.
If true, that’s fraud, pure and simple—and a blatant violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
And the chairman of the board for FastPath? None other than Dr. Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term and a member of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group during last year’s presidential campaign.
Paige, it should be noted, also once served as superintendent of Houston’s schools and during his tenure there, he became mired in an ugly scandal when it was learned that the Houston system, seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout statistics.
Course Choice, which is under the supervision of Department of Education (DOE) Deputy Superintendent of Portfolio Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, is a DOE program whereby Louisiana public school students are allowed to sign up for online computer courses offered by providers approved by DOE.
Lefkowith, who once worked with Enron and with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, commutes from his home in Los Angeles and is paid $146,000 per year by DOE.
Tuition for the courses ranges from $700 to $1,275 each and providers get one-half of their tuition fees up front upon registering students for courses. The second half is paid when a student successfully completes a course and the course providers have full autonomy in making the determination of when—or if—a student completes a course. The incentive to the provider, of course, is to have as many students as possible “complete” the courses.
Fox, welcome to the hen house.
The tuition is free to the student with the state picking up the tab. Students also receive a free iPad upon registering. There was no word if the 1,100 students who were unknowingly registered received iPads.
Students are allowed to take up to five classes outside their home school at taxpayer expense.
Students and parents in the two parishes say they never requested nor approved the registering of the students for the courses. One student was registered for a class he had already successfully completed in the classroom—with an A grade.
State Superintendent of Education John White, asked about the apparent lack of oversight, said Course Choice providers underwent a “rigorous” four-part approval process before being allowed to offer classes and that checks and balances are in place to insure that students do not end up in an academically unsound course.
Really?
On Wednesday, White announced DOE would attempt to finance the Course Choice program through its own resources following last week’s Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding a lower court decision that the method of using Minimum Foundation Program funds to pay for the vouchers was unconstitutional.
White said that more than 3,000 courses have been chosen thus far at an average cost of $700 each, a total of $2.1 million. Registration will remain open through August, he said.
The revelation of the 1,100 registrations which, if true, could be construed as fraud and theft could also involve a violation of the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) since FastPath would necessarily require certain student information, including names, addresses, social security numbers, etc., in order to register the students.
The question then becomes just who provided that information to FastPath? There are already questions about White’s leaking information about evaluations of three Caddo Parish elementary teachers through an intermediary to the Baton Rouge Advocate last October.
That intermediary was Rayne Martin, a former employer of DOE who currently serves as executive director of Stand for Children Louisiana.
In the wake of the flap over the negative evaluations of the teachers, the Advocate published a letter to the editor which defended the Value Added Model used by DOE to evaluate the teachers and which even cited statistics from the leaked document.
Turns out that letter was written by Monica Candal, policy and data analyst for Stand for Children Louisiana, leaving one to wonder about the connection between White and Stand for Children.
Who knew?
Louisiana Voice attempted to contact FastPath by telephone. An automated message told us to press 1 if we were a student already enrolled in FastPath or to press 2 for “all other inquiries.”
We pressed 2 and got another automated message that said, “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” So we called back and pressed 1 and got an automated message that said (take a deep breath and count to 10), “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” This was at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, so it wasn’t because they close during lunch.
Next, we went online and clicked on “Contact us” and several boxes popped up on our computer screen asking for our name, our organization, our email address and the city and state from which we were emailing them. Strangely, it did not request our telephone number, though we would have been happy to provide that as well.
The following note was typed into the message box:
“This is for Compliance Officer David Callaway:
How did FastPath obtain the information (names, schools, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, etc.) on the 1100 students in Caddo and Webster parishes who were signed up for your Course Choice courses without, the students and parents claim, their knowledge or consent?
It would appear that you would have to be in possession of certain information in order to enroll these students and I simply want to know who provided that data to you.
Thanks.”
A few minutes after we sent the message, we received a computer-generated message in our email in-box that said, “Thanks for contacting us! We’ll get back to you soon.”
Does anyone care to take odds on whether or not we’ll ever hear back from them?
The leaks would seem to validate concerns about a recent agreement, since cancelled because of a public outcry, to furnish personal information on some 700,000 Louisiana school children to a data bank run by White’s former boss Joel Klein, now with inBloom, a data storage company (or data “parking garage,” to use White’s terminology) run by NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch.
inBloom had offered no guarantees that the data could not be accessed by hackers and in fact, an unrelated privacy breach on Bloomberg News occurred when reporters extracted subscribers’ private information to break news stories. That breach would seem to lend credence to security concerns about inBloom.
Recent stories by LouisianaVoice have prompted a witch hunt at DOE in an effort to determine the source of recent stories. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must now be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.
It seems to us, security—and Louisiana taxpayers—would somehow be better served through efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students signed up for courses without their knowledge or consent.
Posted in BESE, Education, Layoffs, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on May 16, 2013| 11 Comments »
Could it possibly get any worse for Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White?
For that matter, could the State of Louisiana possibly do any worse than John White as education superintendent?
Good questions both. The answers are, in order:
That remains to be seen, and
Probably not.
There are so many things going on with the Department of Education (DOE), not the least of which is the breaking story of what appears to be the fraudulent enrollment of more than 1,100 students in two north Louisiana parishes in Course Choice classes without their knowledge and the close association of the chairman of the course choice provider company to former President George W. Bush and recent Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Folks, this is a huge story.
More about that later, but first a few others:
• Voucher funding knocked down by the courts;
• Confidential files on teachers evaluations leaked to the media;
• Personal information on Louisiana students provided and then, presumably revoked, to a data base “parking garage” operated by Rupert Murdock and Bill Gates;
• Mass layoffs by DOE even as it advertises for yet another six-figure unclassified appointment;
• Rejection of the Minimum Foundation Program formula by the State Senate;
• A legislative bill to reorganize DOE even as White moves forward with doing just that without benefit of the bill’s passage;
• Attempts to tweak the Value Added Model for teacher evaluations, lending ample evidence that the entire methodology was flawed from the outset;
DOE is the single agency that is responsible for the expenditure of more funds—federal and state—than any other state agency and for the education of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana children.
And it’s being run like a snow cone stand.
And that snow cone stand is being run by a gaggle of highly overpaid, grossly under-qualified preppies who have somehow convinced themselves that six-weeks of Teach for America courses and/or a six-weekend course spread over 10 months translates to solid credentials that qualify them to run roughshod over people who have obtained full-blown college degrees, many of those advanced degrees, and who have dedicated their entire professional lives to educating children.
And on top of everything else, White just can’t seem to be able to resist embellishing facts or simply plucking them out of thin air. He seems to forget that while he is certainly entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts.
Case in point:
Last week, immediately after the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding the lower court’s decision that the funding formula for school vouchers was unconstitutional, White was quoted thusly:
“On the most important aspect of the law, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of families (that, folks, is what is known as spin). The scholarship program will continue and thousands of Louisiana families will continue to have the final say in where to send their children to school. Nearly 93 percent of scholarship families report that they love their school, and we will work with the legislature to find another funding source to keep parents and kids in these schools.
The “93 percent” caught our eye and as we have begun doing with any such utterance by White, we went after documentation. After all, someone once said 87.5 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Accordingly, we fired off the following public records request:
• Where do the data supporting the 93 percent approval come from? Please be specific and provide all written documentation supporting this claim;
• Are your data from a survey of parents actually conducted in the spring of a particular school year? If so, which year?
• Are students and/or parents who are unhappy and/or who transfer out of a voucher school included in your survey?
• In calculating the 93 percent favorable rate, do you/DOE count all surveys sent out or only those that are returned?
Because of this week’s public records lawsuit settlement that was favorable to LouisianaVoice, DOE actually responded in a timely fashion and with precisely the answer we expected:
“…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”
Go figure.
So, if there are no public records to support his claim, just how did White arrive at that “nearly 93 percent” figure?
Who knows, but hey, it’s not the first time that White has been unable to back up his claims. Remember, he claims that he cancelled the agreement with inBloom to provide personal data on hundreds of thousands of Louisiana students to its data base but when asked for the written communication of cancellation, guess what? “…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”
Anyone detect a trend here?
HB 650 by Jindal old reliable ally Rep. Stephen Carter (R-Baton Rouge) calls for the reorganization of DOE and would give White broad powers in creating new offices—undoubtedly at exorbitant salaries to more under-qualified appointees—for the department.
But White isn’t waiting. The reorganization has already begun.
White has submitted a layoff plan which, if approved, will put 34 civil service (classified) employees out of work. These are the ones, just as in other agencies, who get things done, who show up day in and day out to process paperwork, answer inquiries and generally keep the department afloat. They are also, unlike their appointive supervisors, qualified.
The layoff plan was submitted ostensibly to save $3.4 million for fiscal year 2013-2014.
Yet, DOE is currently advertising online to fill an unclassified (appointive) position, almost certainly at a six-figure salary, for the position of Chief of Staff, Office of Portfolio.
If the Office of Portfolio rings a bell, that would be our old friend Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, the $146,000 per year commuter (between Los Angeles and Baton Rouge), the director (or deputy superintendent, depending on which day of the week it is) of the Office of Portfolio. The new hire (or in-house appointee, more likely) would be Lefty’s right hand (yes, we meant to do that).
Turns out the Office of Portfolio is in charge of filling up all those course choice online courses—even, it seems, if students don’t know they’re enrolled.
Course choice providers get about whatever they wish to charge in “tuition,” some of them setting the bar at $1200. They get half of that upon the successful enrollment of the student, no matter if he or she completes the course. The student can sign up, participate for say, a week, drop out and the provider still gets $600. And it is the provider who decides whether or not the student has successfully completed the course, which would qualify the provider with the other half of the tuition.
Fox, welcome to the henhouse.
Now it turns out that more than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs—but they didn’t know it.
An outfit named FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has somehow managed to obtain student information to sign up the students without the knowledge of the student or of their parents.
If true, that’s fraud, pure and simple—and a blatant violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
And the chairman of the board for FastPath is Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term and a member of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group during last year’s presidential campaign.
Paige, it should be noted, also once served as superintendent of Houston’s schools and during his tenure there, he became mired in an ugly scandal when it was learned that the Houston system, seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout statistics.
Fox, henhouse.
The question here, then, is: just where did FastPath get the student information needed to arbitrarily enroll 1,100 students? It would seem highly unlikely that it came from the local school boards.
White, asked about the apparent lack of oversight, said Course Choice providers underwent a “rigorous” four-part approval process before being allowed to offer classes and that checks and balances are in place to insure that students do not end up in an academically unsound course.
Really?
What flavor snow cone would you like?
It should come as no surprise that recent stories like this has prompted a witch hunt at DOE. To even the most casual LouisianaVoice reader, it should be obvious that we have sources within DOE.
The ongoing efforts to find leaks would rival the White House Plumbers of those nostalgic Nixon years. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.
Seems to us, security would be better served with efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students.
But our sources are not stupid. Most of them are actually former employees who either retired or quit in disgust but who had the foresight to download incriminating documents on computer flash drives which were then passed on to us.
And then there’s that Joan Hunt email SNAFU:
We recently made a public records request and Hunt, the DOE general counsel, responded by sending an email to DOE attorney Willa LeBlanc and Troy Hebert, director of the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control. It’s not certain if Hebert was mistakenly copied instead of another DOE attorney named Troy Humphrey, but the message simply said, “Troy, we need to reply and say that.”
But Hunt inadvertently copied us into that reply.
Naturally, we wanted to know what that reply was supposed to say. So we sent a public records request asking for copies of all emails between Hunt, LeBlanc, Hebert and White to which Hunt responded on Wednesday:
“No documents. Attorney-client privilege.”
Well, Troy Hebert is not a client of the DOE legal staff; he works under the Department of Revenue and he’s not an attorney, so attorney-client privilege is out the window and we feel entitled to any communication that has us as a subject that has been discussed with someone other than an attorney.
We fired off a response to Hunt that we may well be back in court seeking a contempt ruling and monetary damages.
Finally, there’s this, suggested by a friend and regular reader:
Inasmuch as White is so frantic to track down the source of the leaks and since those leaks were provided on a few flash drives provided by former DOE employees, perhaps it would be appropriate to show up at the next Board of Elementary and Secondary (BESE) meeting with a few hundred lapel pins to hand out.
The pens would be in the shape of a computer flash drive and would have inscribed on them (again, at the suggestion of a reader), “Louisiana Believes LouisianaVoice,” thus commemorating in our own humble way the DOE web page that now calls itself Louisiana Believes.
Posted in BESE, Education, Notable Quotables, Public Records on May 14, 2013| 10 Comments »
“Copies of evaluation results and any documentation related thereto of any school employee may be retained by the local (school) board, the board (Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education), or the department and, if retained, are confidential, do not constitute a public record and shall not be released or shown to any person.”
—One of the provisions included in Act 54 of 2010 that was designed to ensure the protection of personal information pertaining to teacher evaluations. Superintendent of Education John White may have violated that provision of the law when he released a report that helped identify three Caddo Parish teachers.
$2.50 each or three for $6.00
Louisiana Voice 