How to Sustain a Nationalized Educational System. Turn it Over to 501(c)(3) Groups for Outsourcing.

Outsourcing: Outsourcing is any task, operation, job or process that could be performed by employees within an organization, but is instead contracted to a third party for a significant period of time. In addition, the functions that are performed by the third party can be performed on-site or off-site.

The two private trade organizations The National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) sure had a nifty plan to nationalize education.  Get states to "voluntarily" sign  up to relinquish their constitutional authority to develop and deliver education for their citizens in exchange for two consortia controlling state educational programs.  "Voluntarily" refers to the dangling of money to states competing for Race to the Top, but when some states still didn't compete for or win grants, the ESEA waivers included states having to commit to CCSS. 

The two consortia (PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia) have been funded by stimulus money which runs out in 2014.   The Tampa Bay Times writes that the Common Core deadlines won't be met regarding assessment completion, computers and infrastructure requirements, and how to pay for the mandates. 

We attended a SBAC meeting open to the public last year and it was evident the consortia was concerned about the issue of how the consortia would survive after the federal tap of stimulus money was finished.    From what we heard in the September 2012 meeting, a move to privately fund a consortia should not be surprise, but rather a move for sustainability:

Twenty million students are expected to take the SBAC assessments on-line. There needs to be technical and professional support for this system going forward. Both SBAC and PARCC were funded with seed money from TARP. This money will run out September 30, 2014. Any remaining unused funds will revert to the US Treasury. Both consortia must now figure out how to make the assessments sustainable by finding other funding sources.

The first RFP for a consultant to take on this work received zero bids because SBAC had grossly underestimated the effort needed to do the work. They are now looking to identify areas of commonality with the other assessment consortia, PARCC, and see if the two groups can share a consultant on those common points. It is not a stretch to see that these two groups are probably going to have to combine in the future in order to remain sustainable. Then we will truly have national standards.

The plan is to go to private foundations to fund Phase 2. 

The plan for private funding has now been put into place for one consortia.   PARCC announced it is reorganizing itself as a 501(c)(3).  From edweek.com and Testing Consortium Reorganizes for Long-Term Survival:

The two big groups of states that are designing tests for the common standards have a lot more on their minds than the thorny work of test design. They're trying to figure out how they can survive once their federal funding runs out in the fall of 2014, before the tests are even administered.

One sign of this focus cropped up when PARCC announced that it had reorganized itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This move facilitates the receipt of foundation funding, among other things, something that has been under consideration as a mode of survival once the group runs out of federal money.

As we've reported to you, PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium have teamed up to do some thinking about sustainability. They've got a heavy-hitting consulting firm working on sustainability plans, and the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers—the folks who spearheaded the common-standards drive four years ago—are playing roles as well.

Read more here.

What's the problem with turning over the nation's education development and delivery to a 501(c)(3)?  Questions not having any easy answers include:

Who will be in control of the standards?  Who will be designing the assessments?  Will voters have any say in who is educating their children?  Could billionaires with an agenda (pick your side, left or right) organize a nonprofit to deliver the type of education they believe students should learn?

Edweek writes:

The sustainability question is key to the long-term work and goals of the consortia. Right now, no one really knows who will update the tests, for instance, as secure item pools dwindle. The research agenda is in question, too, and that's pretty huge. Without a multiyear inquiry into how students at various cut scores actually perform in college, it's tough to validate the test as being a sound proxy of college readiness. These—and many more—questions ride on the question of sustainability.

There is a near-term question of sustainability, as well. The groups are mindful that in order to protect the $360 million in federal funding they won, they each need to have at least 15 member states. With 24 in SBAC and 22 in PARCC right now, that doesn't seem to be a looming issue. But if enough states get skittish and drop out, federal officials could—according to their own regulations—cut off the funding that is meant to carry the consortia's work through the fall of 2014.

Count many folks in Missouri becoming more and more skittish of CCSS standards that were never field tested or even written before they were adopted by the governor, education commissioner and State Board of Education members.  

Now that taxpayers know of the plans of these two private trade organizations to nationalize education, do you think they will still want their tax money used for copyrighted standards by non-profit organizations?  Isn't education development and delivery the role of the states and local school districts?  Why is education now outsourced to private consortia and in the future, 501(c)(3) groups?

Listed here are some downsides to outsourcing which include:

• loss of managerial control
• hidden cost
• threat to security and confidentiality
• quality problems
• tied to the financial well-being of another company
• bad publicity and ill-will

The New Hybrid Public/Private Education - Coming Soon To Your School

Remember when everyone was all upset that the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was going to require people to purchase something just to be considered a citizen in good standing?  But then the Supreme Court reassured us that it wasn't a criminal matter if we didn't purchase health insurance, because it was just a tax.  Citizens would just be fined. However,  the IRS has been named as the enforcement agency for the healthcare bill, and according to section 7201 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), it is a federal crime for anyone to willfully attempt to evade or defeat the payment of federal taxes. The IRS has the authority to incarcerate anyone found guilty of tax evasion. So how is it an honest statement that failure to comply with the terms of the PPACA will not result in criminal incarceration?

Why am I talking about health care in an education blog?  PPACA, like Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae sets up a hybrid public/private entity which ties people to government while enriching private businesses. If you want a home, your mortgage is ultimately going to be owned by the government through Freddie Mac. If you want a student loan, the pressure has been applied to send you into the arms of government supplied student loans (which are a great investment for Uncle Sam since they can never be forgiven.) The government is forcing you into a businesses relationship with private insurers with PPACA. They have already stated that their end goal is a single payer system, but those private insurers know that the government will contract with them to manage that system so they will end up with guaranteed business no matter what.  The reason this topic is here is because they are setting up the same scenario in education.

Stephanie Simon of Reuters attended a gathering of investors in Manhattan, and the business sector they were looking to invest in is education. The conference was billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies," and was attended by about 100 hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and education vendors.

"You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up," said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. "It could get really, really big."

...The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.

...Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

And government is pushing for them to be able to do that. From education reform advocates pushing for the expansion of charter schools, to Teach For America creating its own shorthand education degree course collecting money both from government and students to pay for their business, to the coming explosion of on-line learning, there are so many profit avenues into public education.

The goal: an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards, said Michael Moe, the founder of GSV ( an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.)

Back to the question of why talk about the health care situation in an education blog. Just like you are required now by the government to purchase something from a private company for health, you will be required to pay a private business (through your taxes if not directly) to comply with the government mandate that your child be educated.  You must send your child to school. Homeschool parents know this all too well as many of them are harassed by school officials and local police for being unfit parents who fail to do the right thing and send their kids to public school. Unless you are strong enough to do the work of educating your child yourself and put up with push back like this, you have no choice but to send your child to public school. Now that the job of that  public school is being outsourced to private business, you are in essence required to participate in a private business contract not of your choosing.  If you don't, and the PPACA is the legal precedent, you might be subject to incarceration.

I have no problem if a charter school wants to come in and try to do a better job educating children. But in the current environment of regulation, they will only be able to provide the regular public school education in a different building. I have no problem if a company wants to create educational modules to help teach a subject. But if the government is going to have the authority to either bless that method or not, regulating whether the module fulfills the governments requirements, then we will not have the free market operating.  We will have the continuation of government control over education and government selection of winners and losers in the private sector. We will have yet another pubic/private hybrid on our hands that is the worst of both worlds.