Failing Students, Rising Profits

This is a piece about the for-profit group, Community Education Partners (CEP) and is worth reading. -Angela

by Annette Fuentes
The Nation
>
>Morris Gandy's son was a problem student throughout elementary school,
>playing hooky and acting up. A few days after he began sixth grade in 2002
>at Gillespie Middle School in Philadelphia, he was suspended. Gandy, a
>single parent, beseeched the principal, "What can you do for a problem
>child?" He got no help.
>
>Then a neighbor told him about Community Education Partners (CEP), an
>alternative school for kids like his son. So Gandy enrolled the boy,
>expecting that teachers there would know how to handle him. Instead, the
>situation went from bad to worse. "The teacher said my son shot him in the
>head with a rubber band," Gandy said. "I said, 'What are you going to do
>about it? This is supposed to be a school for troubled kids.'" His son told
>Gandy that all they did was watch movies. He went truant. "They are
>supposed to be the experts on the kids outside the box. They are supposed
>to get them back inside the box," Gandy said. "They couldn't hold his
>interest."
>
>Morris Gandy is what you'd call a dissatisfied CEP customer. CEP, however,
>continues to prosper. Founded ten years ago in Houston, the company entered
>the private-school market at a time when Texas was a roiling caldron of
>Republican politics and Enron-style corporate dealing--and a laboratory for
>education reform. George W. Bush was governor, the mantra was
>accountability for public schools and the tools were high-stakes testing
>and privatization. What emerged from the mix were the so-called Texas
>Miracle, which boosted student achievement; Rod Paige as President Bush's
>Education Secretary; and ultimately Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law,
>authored by Texas education player Sandy Kress.
>
>The Texas Miracle has since been debunked as so much manipulation of test
>scores and phony graduation rates. Paige, who rode to the White House on
>its falsehoods, is history. And Bush's NCLB is sagging under the weight of
>impossible test goals and unfunded mandates, with even some Republicans now
>criticizing it. But privatization in public education and the credo of
>accountability through testing still chug along.
>
>CEP is one beneficiary. Despite a tarnished history and no independent
>evidence that its student-customers fare better than in regular public
>schools, CEP uses political clout to carve a niche market serving students
>the public schools don't want, and it makes millions in the process. CEP's
>story is a primer on how the politics of education reform serve business
>interests. Its success represents the triumph of free-market ideology over
>sound pedagogy and the fallacy of the accountability-through-testing
>approach to teaching. "It's fair to say they [CEP] have avoided true
>scrutiny," said Carl Shaw, a former Texas state official who evaluated
>CEP's program. "Their modus operandi is political, not educational and not
>scientific."
>
>The CEP Program: Be Here, Be Tested
>
>CEP contracts with public school districts in Houston, Atlanta,
>Philadelphia, Richmond and Orlando, and in the Pinnellas and Bay districts
>in Florida, to run alternative schools for students in grades six through
>twelve who've been suspended for behavioral problems. Most students sent to
>CEP also are academically failing, and the vast majority are
>African-American and Latino. CEP's contract requires that students spend
>120-180 days in the program--far in excess of the typical ten-day
>suspensions public schools impose on misbehaving students. CEP's rationale
>is that it needs time to transform kids' behavior and academic performance,
>but the company also has an obvious financial incentive for a longer
>placement. CEP's per-student charge varies by district, but it's more than
>the districts spend per pupil on regular students. In Orlando CEP gets
>$8,865 per pupil, double the district's own cost. Philadelphia pays CEP
>about $13,000 per pupil--almost twice the district's $7,000 average cost.
>"We charge more. We're a premium product," said Randle Richardson, the CEO
>of CEP. "Anyone can warehouse a child."
>
>CEP renovates abandoned big-box stores or industrial spaces, creating
>sex-segregated "learning communities." The students can't mingle and are
>walked in groups to bathrooms at specific times. Lunch is provided in their
>classrooms. Students may not bring money to school and are screened as if
>going through airport security, shoes and coats off. Teachers take
>attendance with an electronic fingerprint scanner that transmits the
>information back to CEP headquarters for payment. Some critics have called
>CEP schools "soft jails."
>
>CEP boasts that it employs "certified teachers and degreed individuals with
>experience in behavior management, counseling or social services." But CEP
>faces the same shortage of certified teachers the public schools do, and it
>pays lower salaries. In its early Houston days, says Marsha Sonnenberg, a
>Fort Worth educator who consulted for CEP, "they used some people from
>corrections and some they trained. Some had been from the streets
>themselves and rehabbed. Some were a little more like me." Irving Mitchell,
>principal of CEP's Atlanta school from August 2003 to January 2004, said
>his school had few certified teachers and high turnover, so on an average
>day classes were doubled up. "There was very little instruction, because
>you were dealing with fights and staff shortages," Mitchell said.
>Richardson said CEP pays for teacher-certification training when needed,
>and that such classes are brought onsite for his Philadelphia staff.
>
>"Be Here, Behave and Be Learning," is CEP's motto, but it should include
>"Be Tested," because students spend much of their learning time at
>computers with Plato, a self-paced tutorial that tests and assesses
>achievement. CEP uses Plato data to prove its claims of student
>improvement, but assessment experts give Plato mixed reviews, and some
>who've worked with it say cheating is not difficult.
>
>Political Juice
>
>Richardson founded CEP with his college buddy Phil Baggett, CEP's vice
>chairman. Richardson says his inspiration came from his early years as a
>small-town lawyer taking $50 juvenile delinquency cases from the family
>court judge. Then Richardson ran the Tennessee Farmers Home Administration,
>making loans to low-income homeowners. John Danielson, who would become
>Under Secretary of Education to Paige, was also a founder. Initial
>investors included Bill McInnes, formerly of the Hospital Corporation of
>America, and Tom Beasley, founder of the Corrections Corporation of
>America, the private prison company. CEP's early investors put up $65
>million; the company is now backed by Stephens Inc., a Little Rock,
>Arkansas, investment bank, and the Texas Growth Fund, a private equity firm
>created by the Texas legislature with public employee pension funds.
>Richardson says CEP's annual revenues are $70 million.
>
>Richardson bristles at questions about Beasley's role, sensitive to critics
>who've likened CEP schools to juvenile jails. "We had discussions early on
>that we are not going to be correctional," Richardson said. "Tom
>understood. He said, 'I'm an investor. You guys are here to run the
>company.'" But like Beasley, Richardson saw a ripe business opportunity in
>privatizing a public service--one that, like prisons, deals with society's
>messy failures. CEP's first contract was to operate a juvenile detention
>alternative-education program for Harris County, Texas.
>
>Giving CEP entree into the Texas education scene was George Scott, then
>president of the Tax Research Association, a nonprofit education-reform
>group in Houston, and now a senior writer for the online newspaper
>Education News. Scott, who was close to Paige when Paige was Houston
>schools superintendent, helped CEP score its first public school contract,
>with the Houston district. Scott said he told Paige, "Rod, this is it. This
>is privatized accountability at its best." Scott later became a CEP critic,
>though, charging that the company evaded real accountability for a program
>that was educationally flawed and a waste of taxpayer money. "I look back
>on my role with CEP, my dedication and commitment to accountability, and it
>is the greatest professional disgrace in my career," Scott said. "As long
>as the district and the vendor have influence over accountability measures,
>it is corrupt."
>
>Richardson says his background is in government, but it's his Republican
>Party credentials that pay off. Like Tom Beasley before him, Richardson was
>Tennessee's GOP chair--from 1992 to 1995--helping to lead Republicans "out
>of the wilderness and into control of statewide offices," according to one
>news account. Richardson soft-pedals his political ties, calling himself a
>"Howard Baker Republican" and insisting CEP is above the partisan fray. But
>CEP has thrived on the accumulated political juice Richardson and his
>cohorts have squeezed, mostly Republican-flavored, since its founding.
>
>In Texas CEP executives cultivated powerful friends, hiring Houston school
>board member Larry Marshall as a $6,000-a-month consultant and landing an
>endorsement from George Bush Sr. at the opening of CEP's first Houston
>school. "They were putting together the juiciest political team," Scott
>said. "They had powerful people at their beck and call." Political pull
>helped CEP waltz into Florida. Richardson and Baggett contributed to
>Charlie Crist's successful 2000 run for state education commissioner and to
>Governor Jeb Bush's 2002 campaign. In 2001 CEP's Florida lobbyist Juhan
>Mixon helped write a provision in a state appropriations bill that
>earmarked $4.8 million for "Alternative Schools/Public Private
>Partnerships." It was "to serve a minimum of 500 or more disruptive and low
>performing students"--a description tailored to CEP. Mixon also lobbies for
>several Florida school districts, including Bay, which hired CEP.
>
>In Philadelphia CEP found privatization high on the agendas of
>then-Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican, and state politicians. The state
>took control of the bankrupt Philadelphia school district in 2001, and
>state legislators made privatizing schools one of the conditions for the
>bailout. CEP's chief political ally has been Republican State House Speaker
>John Perzel, whose beefy visage graces the company's website along with his
>testimonial. Richardson, Baggett and CEP execs have contributed more than
>$11,000 to Perzel's campaigns. CEP's five-year, $28-million-a-year contract
>with Philadelphia schools was renewed in May 2004 with no debate.
>
>Accountability in Action
>
>CEP is a product of the high-stakes testing and accountability approach to
>education reform, which aims to run public schools like businesses whose
>products are students. Yet holding CEP accountable has been a quixotic
>undertaking because of the fluidity of the student population, the
>malleability of statistics and the company's political savvy. The few
>totally independent evaluations of CEP's effectiveness have rated it
>poorly. Several evaluations were paid for by CEP, like one in 1999 by Bush
>Sr. Education Department appointee Diane Ravitch, whose glowing endorsement
>of CEP's Houston program appears on CEP's website. Others were based on
>testing data completely controlled by CEP.
>
>In Texas CEP's first brush with evaluation was a lesson in the pitfalls of
>accountability and the importance of data control. In 1997 Texas state
>education commissioner Mike Moses hired Carl Shaw, former chair of the
>Texas Education Agency's (TEA) assessment committee and head of Houston's
>testing for fourteen years, to assess CEP's first contract, the juvenile
>detention program. Shaw found limited student progress after six months in
>CEP, and after a year, actual regression. "I could find no evidence that
>there was a strong-enough academic program in place to produce change," he
>said. "One report I wrote for [the Houston Independent School District]
>said few CEP students would be smart enough for prison education. It's
>shocking, and here's a company touted as a leader." Shaw said CEP head
>Richardson was angry at his findings and his refusal to compromise his
>work. "The first reaction I had from Richardson was, 'I am more powerful
>than you,'" Shaw said.
>
>CEP executives turned to Scott, the taxpayers' group president, for backup.
>"They wanted support that his test had gone awry," Scott said. "I told them
>I was 100 percent into Dr. Shaw's approach." Scott says discussions he and
>CEP had been having about a consultancy and shares of founders stock broke
>down because Scott refused to repudiate Shaw. Richardson says CEP raised
>concerns about Shaw's tests having "both positive and negative
>aberrations," and that they couldn't be validated by the TEA. Richardson
>noted that his relationship with Scott soured after the problems with
>Shaw's testing emerged.
>
>Next up was Dr. Tom Kellow, an evaluation specialist for Houston's schools.
>In 1999 Superintendent Paige asked Kellow to evaluate CEP--but he was
>forbidden to visit the school and could only use data CEP provided. Kellow
>learned that CEP's contract stated that it could only be held accountable
>based on its own in-house testing, not the statewide Texas Assessment of
>Academic Skills (TAAS). "What I found is what Carl Shaw found," Kellow
>said. "The longer [students] stayed, the worse their performance." Although
>under NCLB all schools must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards
>for specific percentages of students testing at grade level in math and
>reading, the TEA exempts CEP. For both 2003 and 2004, the AYP status of
>CEP's two Houston schools is listed as "Not Evaluated." CEP's school
>profiles on the Houston schools website also reveal that the company evades
>the accountability that public schools face: No TAAS scores are listed and
>no information is provided for either state or district accountability
>measures.
>
>Houston continues to contract with CEP despite those early assessments, but
>Dallas's public school district was more discriminating. Dallas hired CEP
>in 1999, with a five-year, $10 million yearly contract. But after three
>years the district bowed out; its own evaluation of CEP in 2002 recommended
>ending the contract, stating that "the model of education provided by [CEP]
>was untenable from a pedagogical standpoint. The reliance on non-certified
>teachers for the bulk of the student-teacher interaction was useful for the
>company to save money, but was not a design in the best interest of the
>students.... Students who attended Community Education Partners did not do
>very well academically." CEP had refused to provide its budget data, the
>report noted, making it impossible to know just how it was spending the
>district's money.
>
>Dallas's report and a series of critical articles about CEP in the Houston
>Press, an alternative newsweekly, helped New Orleans public schools decide
>against a contract with CEP, according to former school board president
>Cheryl Mills. But Atlanta public schools ignored the negative press and
>evaluations, contracting with CEP four years ago. CEP's Atlanta school was
>the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a
>black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP
>school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal
>Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste,"
>Mitchell said. "Accountability is with the Atlanta school board for
>disenfranchising these kids. There was a contract and expectations, and I
>feel they were not met. The statistics show they weren't met."
>
>Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell
>"disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books
>home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I
>think we're improving," Augustine said. "It's a developing relationship.
>Finding leadership is key to that." She said she had no evidence that CEP
>was not living up to its contract. Told that CEP's school had failed to
>meet AYP standards for reading and math in the 2003-04 school year,
>Augustine said, "The AYP piece is different for nontraditional schools
>because children are very fluid." She noted that the school board had voted
>to extend CEP's contract through 2009.
>
>In Philadelphia even supposedly independent evaluations of CEP were
>dependent on company-controlled data. In March Philadelphia released an
>evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple
>University. The report surveyed seventy students and seventy parents who
>offered positive reports on CEP's program--a fraction of more than 4,300
>students CEP has served. In evaluating student academic growth, the report
>relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of
>three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180
>days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay
>that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin.
>Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent
>newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that
>excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders,
>which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results
>for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation
>of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly
>schools don't.
>
>CEP's Richardson says the proof of his company's success is that districts
>keep renewing their contracts. The question is how success is defined.
>Public schools have strong incentives to remove the lowest-performing
>students from their classrooms and make them CEP's problem, especially
>since the passage of No Child Left Behind. "CEP was a way to get around
>NCLB," said Mitchell. "If you move these kids from the regular school
>program, you automatically decrease the dropout rate and get a gain on your
>test scores. So you contract those kids out; they're in a separate
>environment, but they aren't counted in the total." For Socolar, CEP is a
>political solution to the public system's failures: "From the beginning,
>the concern that jumped out about CEP is whether putting these students in
>the hands of private companies is a way of putting them out of sight and
>out of mind," he said. While the public schools are hammered by the
>accountability-through-testing mandates of NCLB, CEP skirts the same
>accountability and proves the uselessness of high-stakes testing as an
>education strategy. Judging CEP by its test data only seems to make sense
>because the company and school districts that hire it buy into that
>accountability measure. Test scores, in truth, can never be an end in
>themselves--or proof that children are learning. That's why NCLB is phony
>education reform.
>
>At the end of an interview Richardson asked in almost plaintive tones, "Are
>we the enemy?" Well, yes and no. CEP may be doing a poor job, but it's only
>a symptom of the crumbling national commitment to public education,
>including the public schools' failure to educate huge percentages of mostly
>black and Latino students. Vouchers and other privatizing efforts in
>education have still not gained the momentum that conservatives had hoped
>for. But companies like CEP in the expanding private education industry
>help chip away at the public school infrastructure by targeting a
>market--the "bad students"--that has few advocates. CEP promotes
>privatization in a more quiet, effective way than Chris Whittle's troubled
>Edison schools have. And Richardson's future ambitions reveal an astute
>understanding of the changing nature and needs of today's student
>population: He'd like to run schools for overage students--17- or
>18-year-olds who work or raise families and need flexible programming, the
>students who "don't fit in the box," he says.
>
>As the box holding traditional students shrinks, one challenge facing
>public school educators is how best to serve all students--from high
>achievers to the most disruptive kids like Morris Gandy's son. If the
>public sector abdicates its responsibility to educate all children,
>businessmen like Randle Richardson are ready to step in. >
>
>This article can be found on the web at:
>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/fuentes
>
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