President Obama’s budget will increase funding to the Department of Education by 3.5% as it also eliminates support for the highly successful DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (DC OSP).

Over 1600 low-income children in one of the nation’s worst-performing and most dangerous school systems currently receive vouchers of $8000, for elementary school, and $12,000, for high school, to attend a private school of their choice. By contrast, the cost per pupil in DC’s public schools is approximately $18,000, making the DC OSP a veritable bargain.

Last year, President Obama told a Today Show audience that he would not send his own children to the Washington DC public schools:

Once again, the president is standing with public school teachers unions as he pumps yet more federal dollars into failing public schools and acts as obstructionist-in-chief to parents in Washington DC who want their children to have a chance for a better education and a better life. While Mr. Obama attempted to zero out the budget for the DC OSP last year, the program was restored and expanded through the efforts of Speaker John Boehner.

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Spurred on by the need to court a waning youth vote, the Obama Administration addressed a concern that has been on many students’ and recent graduates’ minds: The cost of education in America. Calling college presidents from across the country into the Oval Office, President Obama chastised university leaders for their high prices and lack of leadership in the area of cost control and admonished them to rethink the “cost equation” that accompanies higher education.

The take-away message from President Obama’s private meeting with higher-education leaders on Monday was threefold: There needs to be a new sense of urgency on college affordability, there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution as policies will have to affect all sectors of higher education, and the country needs innovations and cost-management from colleges and leadership from state legislatures.

That’s according to Thomas J. Snyder, President of Ivy Tech Community College, who participated in the meeting. President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, are now in what Mr. Snyder described as listening mode, “but I suspect some pretty substantial proposals will evolve in the next few months,” he said.

Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan got in on the action, lecturing university leadership on the difficulties faced by recent graduates and called on colleges to “clamp down” on education costs. Soros-funded Campus Progress heralded these actions as a “step in the right direction” and praised Obama for his work helping students afford higher education. Obama patted himself on the back for his efforts, saying that his administration would “help more Americans attain a higher education at an affordable price.”

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With the ever-increasing role the federal government is playing, the state of primary and secondary education in these United States has over the last thirty-plus years decayed – tragically, tremendously and inexorably.

President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 gift to the teachers’ union Educrats – the Department of Education – changed fundamentally and increased dramatically the federal role in K-12 education.

Government schools have year by year diminished as education facilities – and risen instead as indoctrination centers.

Where graduates can’t read the diplomas they’re handed – but they can roll a condom on a banana.

The taxpayer money spent on schools and union pet projects has increased again and again, year after year.

We’ve by now since the Department’s inception more than doubled per student spending – from $5,718 (1980-81) to $10,441 (2007-08) (yes, that’s inflation-adjusted).

The mythical import of lowering student-teacher ratios (it makes little to no difference in learning) imposed upon us a rash of new union hires – that did nothing to improve education, but did a great deal to inflate the union dues-paying rolls.

Yet another myth – Head Start – also does nothing to improve scores, but does a great deal to improve the unions’ bank accounts.

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Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is joining her Kentucky colleague Jack Conway in waging a war on for-profit colleges – with taxpayer funds – while turning a blind eye to problems in non-profit and state schools.  Except, in Bondi’s case, there are demonstrable instances of mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in those taxpayer-funded colleges that she appears to be ignoring for the time being.

A few examples of taxpayer waste that Bondi should be focusing on:

• State-funded Daytona State College, Florida A&M University, Edison State College, and Miami-Dade College all currently face losing their accreditation due to issues ranging from low performance standards to admitting students without required courses to employing too few professors.

• Florida’s biggest state universities are under fire for rampant abuses within their athletic programs.  Numerous Florida State University athletic teams have been forced to vacate wins due to academic misconduct, while University of Miami athletes have been discovered accepting illegal gifts and money.  The University of Central Florida is also under investigation for recruiting misconduct.

• The Florida state college corruption extends all the way up to state elected officials; former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom came under fire for securing funding for a building at Northwest Florida State College that was in fact an airport hangar for political donors’ private jets.

Sounds like enough material for some high-profile state investigations, right?  Actually, Attorney General Bondi is focusing her government investigation on a handful of small, for-profit schools.  The charges against the schools largely revolve around allegedly false claims used by recruiters leading to enrollment of students who were under-qualified and/or unable to repay their loans upon completion.

Could it be that Bondi and others, including federal regulators, are attacking for-profit colleges chiefly because they have taken a piece of the higher education pie in recent years that was traditionally serviced by state-run community colleges and vocational schools?  The fervor with which state officials in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and other states are going after for-profit schools suggests motivation beyond the desire to prevent a few gullible students from falling for glitzy ad campaigns.

At the federal level, the Department of Education’s proposed ‘Gainful Employment’ rule would create new narrow metrics to define “gainful employment” based on student debt-to-income levels and loan repayment rates.

What the DOE’s formulaic approach is missing is that these institutions serve student communities with significant risk factors such as low incomes, full-time employment, and delayed enrollment which adversely impact degree attainment and account for their having a higher loan default rate than less inclusive institutions.  Even with these challenges, the fact remains that for-profit colleges have a better record of graduating low-income and minority populations than public institutions and private, not-for-profit schools, at a substantially lower total government and taxpayer cost.

The definition of the word corruption, according to Merriam-Webster, is an “impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle.” No, this isn’t a post about WeinerGate, that corruption is being exposed elsewhere…so to speak. This is about two stories of corruption that aren’t getting as much attention as they deserve but have real-world implications for the lives of Americans.

We’ve all heard the saying “The fox guarding the hen house,” right? It essentially means  putting someone with their own agenda in charge of making sure something contrary to their interest doesn’t happen. What’s happening at the Department of Education (DoE) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are similar stories of inappropriate interactions between bureaucrats creating policy and the appearance of partnerships with outsiders with their own agendas. It’s not the fox guarding the hen house, it’s closer to the fox designing the security system for the hen house.

Over at the DoE, they’ve been working with Wall Street short-sellers to push regulations that would all but destroy the for-profit education system. Short-sellers, who stand to make a fortune once that regulation is fully implemented and have zero expertise in education policy, have been intimately involved in the drafting “Gainful-Employment” rules that essentially mean a certain percentage of graduates have to get jobs related to their field of study in order for a for-profit institution’s students to qualify for financial aid.

Forget the fact that in this economy, state-run schools would have difficulty in meeting that criteria. Focus on the clear conflict of interest in having people who stand to personally benefit financially helping create rules to increase the chances of that happening and you begin to see why the Inspector General of the DoE opened an investigation into this.

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Under normal circumstances, when a process is found to be corrupt, any outcome or recommendation from that chain of events is either cancelled or put on hold until the full extent of the corruption can be uncovered. Essentially, good practice dictates that you start from scratch, to ensure that there is no undue influence.

But that’s not how the Obama Administration works when the final outcome is something they want. Displaying the “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” attitude they’ve come to be known for on everything from health care and spending to cap & trade and net neutrality, the Obama administration is on the verge of adopting rules governing for-profit educational institutions, even though they have emerged from a wholly corrupt process that, to paraphrase Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), may end up with people going to prison.

It all started last summer when Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, held a hearing on whether or not students attending for-profit colleges should be allowed to receive federal financial aid. Harkin strongly supports a proposed Department of Education (DoE) rule, known as Gainful Employment, which would severely damage those institutions and kill higher education opportunities for thousands of Americans.

It was odd that one of the witnesses Senator Harkin chose as an “expert” on for-profit colleges had no expertise in the industry whatsoever. Steve Eisman is a Wall Street short-seller with no background or expertise on education policy. But with the stock prices of private-sector colleges and the companies that run them risking collapse, he does have a lot to gain by ensuring that happens.

This was just the first of what would be many curious developments in the Progressives’ crusade against for-profit education.

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The objective of having community colleges is to provide low-cost education to those who, for whatever reason, find four-year universities inaccessible. The idea behind supporting and subsidizing non-profit community colleges seems to be to give opportunity specifically to low-income students, those who require flexibility in education and those looking to acquire real world skills without the protracted course of study offered by full-time four year universities.

Beyond that, these schools are most-definitely not for profit, which should take them off the government’s radar when it comes to budget cuts and federal loan determinations. They are nearly the perfect fit for the administration’s alleged commitment to bettering the quality of life for all Americans, since they eat up taxpayer funds and require intense oversight, yet their non-profit status allows them to function outside of the market, allowing the ranks of teachers to become permeated with the unqualified and, more importantly, the Democratic, without fear of backlash from consumers. In short, their format and existence is beloved by the Department of Education.

And yet, they, too, live in fear of the administration’s heavy hand.

More than one million community college students in 31 states do not have access to federal student loans because their institutions choose not to offer them, according to a new report by the Project on Student Debt. (The report is a followup to a 2008 study by the group, and finds modest changes since then.) Many community college administrators fear that participation in the federal loan program would put their students at risk of losing federal financial aid if too many students at the institutions do not repay their loans. The report notes that there are “persistent racial and ethnic disparities,” with nearly one in five Native American students and one in six African-American students attending community colleges that do not participate in the federal loan program.

That fear stems from the administration’s recent and ongoing attack on for-profit colleges. Looking to run the institutions out of business, officials in the Department of Education, their cronies in Congress and a host of characters from Wall Street and beyond have been looking for ways to destroy the institutions’ student body. Their most effective weapon? The so-called “Gainful Employment” rule, which ties available federal funding directly to the success for-profit college graduates have in finding a job. Never mind that four-year institutions, which as of late have had miserable job-placement rates, have seen federal student loan increase even as the economy has declined, or that for-profit colleges tend to serve the under-privileged, lower-income and minority communities, they’ve continued with their attacks unabated. Now, community colleges, who face the same hurdles as for-profits, fear that the administration will respond to their rates of success with a similar backhand.

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A group affiliated with progressive rainmaker George Soros became the latest to join the in vogue assault on for-profit education, accusing proprietary colleges last week of offering predatory loans to satisfy referral rules governing financial aid.

The well-heeled National Consumer Law Center, masquerading as a legitimate consumer watchdog, released last Tuesday a report in which the group criticized the for-profit education industry for allegedly gaming the so-called “90/10″ rules, which mandates that at least ten percent of student financial aid must be secured from non-federal lenders.

Even beyond the support of Soros, NCLC counts The Institute For College and Success (TICAS) among its “generous” donors.

As BIG GOVERNMENT previously reported, TICAS was founded by Robert Shireman, who later became an advisor to President Barack Obama’s transition team and senior official in the Department of Education.

At TICAS, Shireman lobbied the federal government to more strictly redefine the regulatory regime governing for-profit schools. But finally installed as a member of bureaucracy he once lobbied, Shireman had the power and wherewithal to impose those regulations.

Already complicit in violating the president’s shallow ethics pledge to prevent lobbyists from joining his Administration, Shireman resigned his federal post in March last year. But before he left, Shireman’s DoE set the ball in motion — by hosting short-sellers with open intentions to cripple the industry for financial gain — to undermine career colleges.

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As evidenced by two recent reports, a chasm exists between the ways state government officials nationwide view federal control of education and health care:

On Feb. 2, the Heritage Foundation published an article in which they highlighted the fact that the majority of states (see graphic at right) have succumbed to pressure to adopt national academic standards; and

Two days earlier, a federal judge sided with attorneys general representing 26 states who had filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., “ObamaCare”).

According to a Wall Street Journal article published today, several polls show the majority of Americans believe ObamaCare should be repealed. That sentiment, I believe, stems from the widely-held belief that a person’s doctor is better equipped to make health care-related decisions than some federal government bureaucrat.

Without feeling the need to locate poll results to back it up my contention, I think most parents of school-age children in this country would agree that people closest to their children are better equipped to meet their education needs than some distant, unelected Department of Education bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.

In his Jan. 31 ruling on ObamaCare, which I wrote about here, Judge Roger Vinson wrote, “…this case is not about whether the Act is wise or unwise legislation. It is about the Constitutional role of the federal government.”

Conversely, Heritage outlines the unconstitutional pitfalls associated with federal control of education in the video, “The Dangers of National Standards in Education.” The video includes interviews with Governors Rick Perry (R-Texas) and Nikki Haley (R-S.C.), Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), Missouri education activist Gretchen Logue and others who spoke to Heritage about the dangerous consequences of Race to the Top-style programs.

In short, we must restore federalism (i.e., allowing states to set education standards and determine how funds are spent) to our system of public education.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth: Americans discovered that most federal “stimulus” funds were being used to stimulate government, not the economy.

I was on the road recently, driving from my home in southeast Louisiana through a long stretch of Mississippi to Tuscaloosa, Ala., then to the outskirts of Birmingham and on to Auburn, Ala., and finally back to my home by way of Montgomery and Mobile. Along the way I was slowed from time to time as I passed by road and bridge repair projects marked with prominent signs indicating they were funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s so-called stimulus bill.

Naturally I was thrilled to see my tax dollars at work, although honesty compels me to report that not much actual work seemed to be going on at any of the sites. Most of the visible workers were just standing around. Of course, such standing around is typical of public construction projects, so I don’t suppose that what I saw was in any way owing to the stimulus funding in particular.

This huge legislative enactment provides for a great variety of increased spending and some reduction in taxes over a period of 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office computed that the net amount of money to be injected into, or not removed from, the economy as a result of the stimulus bill totals about $787 billion.

At the time the bill was being debated and discussed, a common plea in its defense had to do with funding so-called shovel-ready projects to repair or replace public roads, bridges and other structures widely taken to be in a state of decay or disrepair. This plea made an appealing talking point, since most Americans place at least some value on such infrastructure.

Alas, only a tiny proportion of the funds expended so far has been directed to this well-advertised objective.

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Any American who wants the opportunity for a college education, or a degree that can help provide gainful employment, should be outraged at the Obama Administration’s back-room dealings to kill for-profit schools.  Obama supporters themselves should be asking how restricting financial aid to people, just because they want to go to a for-profit school, reflects the ideals they voted for…and that Obama promised would become easier.

Brian Darling’s excellent article, “For-Profit Education Under Assault“, exposes the details of this insidious plot.

There is, however, another aspect of this story — continued wealth destruction by the Administration.

The DOE’s plan to kill for-profit education is to restrict financial aid to students, as Mr. Darling described.  Therefore, enrollment will fall.  If enrollment falls, for-profit schools have less revenue, which means they have to cut services.

What services?  Teachers.

Voilá, these people get tossed onto the unemployment lines.

Hey, that’s okay!  Maybe they can get jobs in the public schools, which would require them to join the Teacher’s Union, and pay their dues into a union that is bankrupting the country state-by-state.

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For-profit education is under assault from elitists who hate the idea of free market educational institutions.  It is also under attack from bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education who are trying to make it hard for students to arm themselves with the education needed to find a job.  Elitism is alive and well at the Department of Education.

The Department of Education announced this week that they are “on schedule to implement new regulations of the for-profit education sector dealing with gainful employment and 13 other issues to protect students and taxpayers.”  The non-profit sector feels threatened; therefore allies in the Administration are trying to use the power of the federal government to provide non profit schools a competitive edge to slow the growth of for-profit institutions.  For-profit institutions are the trend and they are becoming more popular.

Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) has introduced legislation to prevent the Department of Education from denying federal financial aid to students attending for-profit colleges and vocational certificate programs.  Senator Risch said of his effort:

The ‘gainful employment’ rules could deny hundreds of thousands of students access to the training and skills development they need to secure a job in today’s troubled economy.  Highly-skilled workers are in high demand in certain sectors and propriety schools are uniquely qualified to meet that need.  It is simply irresponsible for the government to throw roadblocks in front of students and institutions at a time when job creation in America should be the administration’s number one priority.

Senator Risch’s legislation, S.3837, the Education for All Act, would forbid the Department of Education from singling out students from proprietary and vocational institutions and treat them differently than other students.  These institutions have proven to be uniquely qualified to help students find jobs in today’s complex economy. (more…)