All the News That Fits the Political Agenda—ED's New Motto?

A few months back, AFT's Closer Look questioned a $700,000 U.S. Department of Education (ED) contract with Ketchum, a PR firm that the Bush administration had used to produce fake television news stories promoting President Bush's Medicare plan for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). We wondered if ED had produced similar fake news stories, known as video news releases (VNRs), to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Now, we no longer have to wonder, thanks to an Associated Press (AP) news story by the AP's Ben Feller. He found that "The Bush administration has promoted its education law with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money." ED even went one step further than HHS did with its Medicare videos. After planting the story with a television news outlet, ED redistributed it through its No Child Left Behind Extra Credit newsletter, failing to note its own role in creating the story and placing a TV report of the story on its Web site.

The Ketchum materials, obtained by People for the American Way through a Freedom of Information Act request, also reveal that ED used Ketchum to create a system of rating reporters' media coverage of NCLB. For example, a commentary by Secretary Rod Paige earned 95 out of a possible 100 points, while six stories by USA Today's Greg Toppo received an average of 2, apparently having earned the ire of the Bush administration. As the AP story also noted, coverage received extra points if it sent a message that "the Bush administration/the GOP is committed to education."

Three weeks before an election, it's not clear that the media will be able to accurately gauge the seriousness of such offenses as either an abuse of public money or misinformation. Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D.-N.J.) and Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to determine whether ED illegally spent taxpayers' funds on this enterprise. But the violation seems clear. Earlier this year, HHS's fake television news stories about Medicare drew a rebuke from the GAO, which found that HHS had violated federal anti-propaganda rules. And using tax dollars to rate reporters was once considered an egregious offense—leading the New York Times to editorialize against it. Whether we'll see similar condemnation this time around remains to be seen.

More information:

• New York Times editorial about politicization at ED
• Federal funds pay for tutoring programs
• Excerpts of video produced for ED by Ketchum
• Cox News Story "Another Tax-Paid TV "News Story" is Confirmed"
• Item from Al Kamen's "In the Loop" Column, Washington Post, "The Passed and the Present"
• New York Times article about ED's rating of reporters

Report's Hidden Conclusion: Teachers Send Their Children to Public Schools

A recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute concludes there's something wrong with public education. This conclusion will not come as a shock to anyone who is familiar with Fordham's tendency toward slanted discourse.

In "Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?", authors Denis P. Doyle, David A. DeSchryver and Brian Diepold contend that public school teachers are more likely than other parents to send their children to private schools. But they leap to this dubious conclusion by using a number of misleading comparisons, beginning with a selective use of statistics.  For instance, they compare urban teachers to families in the nation as a whole.  It is a misuse that skews their findings.

Even within urban areas, Doyle and company cook the books by considering only teachers who reside in central cities, regardless of where they work. This choice excludes approximately one-third of big-city teachers who send their children to public schools in the communities where they reside, and it inflates the percentage of teachers who send their kids to private schools.

Here are the accurate and relevant statistics, stripped of the Fordham Institute's spin, found in supplemental tables provided by the authors:

• In 2000, 10.6 percent of public school teachers sent at least one child to private school. That was down from 12.1 percent in 1990.
• In 2000, 12.2 percent of all families sent at least one child to private school. That was down from 13.1 percent in 1990.

Conclusion #1: Public school teachers are less likely than other parents to send their children to private schools. Conclusion #2: Both groups are less likely to send their children to private schools than they were 10 years ago. And that's good news for public schools. The breathless promotion of this report about where teachers supposedly send their children would be more credible if the promoters—Fordham and other public school bashers—would acknowledge that teachers have an important role in how to improve the schools where they teach.

More information:

• USA Today Commentary by AFT President Edward J. McElroy
  

ED and Congress Point Fingers While "Loan Cloning" Continues To Waste Tax Dollars

Americans should be grateful to the Institute for College Access (TICAS), whose efforts may help shame Congress into taking a simple, long-overdue action to end the practice of "loan cloning" and save billions of taxpayer dollars. That's billions of dollars flowing out of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) even as the Bush administration shortchanges federal student financial aid.

Student lenders are gouging taxpayers through an obsolete student loan program that guaranteed a 9.5 percent return on certain loans and an accounting gimmick that allows lenders to increase the number of loans in the 9.5 percent portfolio. Government officials have failed to end the practice.

The biggest beneficiary of the loophole is Nelnet, an Omaha-based lender that reaped huge profits after informing ED in June 2003 of its intention to exploit the accounting gimmick. Some of the money has come back to Washington—the company has contributed $750,000 to political campaigns over the past 18 months.

TICAS's highlighting of the loan cloning has drawn a tepid response from ED and Congress. The proposed solutions still may not be enough to end this waste of tax dollars. A bill approved by both houses of Congress provides only a temporary and partial ban of the practice and hampers the government's ability to recover $2.7 billion already lost through loan cloning.

More information:

• Article about the scandal by the New York Times' Greg Winter
• Washington Post article about congressional action addressing student loan cloning
• Washington Post editorial about congressional action
• A timeline of the unfolding scandal of student loan cloning
• Providence Journal article about a recent graduate with $65,000 in student debt
• "Money for Nothing," a report from TICAS
• Tablature for the bass part to Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing"

Early Educators Do Important Work, But You Wouldn't Know It from Their Paychecks

If you think you should have gotten a better raise last year, you'd be even more disappointed if you were an early childhood educator, according to the Center for the Child Care Workforce, a project of the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation. The organization reports that wages for early care and education teaching staff rose just 0.6 percent in 2003. Child care workers' mean hourly wage is $8.32, and preschool teachers' is $10.67.

How poor is the pay in early childhood education? Of 770 occupations surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 18 have lower mean wages than child care workers. More and more policymakers recognize that early childhood education is critical to closing the achievement gap. But it's hard to believe that this nation can increase access to high-quality early childhood education unless those who work most closely with young children receive appropriate compensation.

Rushed Charter School Study Proves . . . Charter Zealots Know How To Circle the Wagons

After AFT researchers uncovered charter schools' poor performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Caroline Hoxby rushed a sloppy and glowing study on charter schools. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform also went on the attack. She rounded up the usual suspects for full-page ads in the New York Times and Education Week criticizing the NAEP results. We've already made clear in a special issue of AFT's Closer Look why the criticisms of the NAEP report are misguided, but this new attack demonstrates what happens when enthusiasm for a cause trumps reality.

Critics claimed that the reporting of the NAEP results did not meet current professional research standards, but one of the signers of the ad, Caroline Hoxby, failed to meet these very standards when she released a report titled, apparently without irony, "A Straightforward Comparison of Charter Schools and Regular Public Schools in the U.S."

The gap between Hoxby's professed standards of research and those exhibited in her research is huge. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, is among those who recognized the hypocrisy of many charter school cheerleaders, writing that the contrast between their praise for Hoxby's study and their condemnation of the NAEP results reveals "a decidedly double standard." And former New York Times education columnist Ted Fiske, in a letter to Education Week, questioned whether Hoxby's standards "vary depending on the conclusions of the study."

If Hoxby's study is the best research that charter school zealots can produce, then charter schools are in much deeper trouble than AFT's uncovering of NAEP results revealed.

Paige Visits Indianapolis, Delivers "Slap in the Face"

AFT's Closer Look reported once before on an unusual trip to the Midwest by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige. Paige returned to the heartland last month to visit Indianapolis' 21st Century Charter School. A local school official criticized Paige for turning down an invitation to visit nearby Indianapolis Public School 27, which has shown great improvement in recent years. IPS 27, located just two miles from 21st Century Charter School, has a higher percentage of poor and minority students and something else the charter school lacks: a Blue Ribbon label from Paige's ED. Paige's September visit means that the charter school has received yet another visit from a high-ranking ED official. No wonder the local school board president described the snub of IPS 27 as "a slap in the face of the people who are working very hard to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind."

Paige blamed his snub of IPS 27 on a tight schedule, but he managed to make time for other priorities during his visit to the Hoosier capital, picking up an award from Greater Educational Opportunities—a pro-voucher group that received $1.3 million from Paige's department in 2003.

Worth Reading

The State of Working America 2004/2005, recently released by the Economic Policy Institute, is filled with facts that help cut through the political rhetoric about the strengths and weaknesses of the economy. A key finding: Even as worker productivity is on the rise, median family income is not. Real family income declined more than $1,000 between 2000 and 2002. The book version is more than 400 pages. The press release is just four.

"Talk Tough, But . . . Put the Money Where Your Mouth Is," a Washington Post commentary by Jack Jennings and Nancy Kober of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, chastises the Bush administration's failure to fulfill the promise of No Child Left Behind. Jennings and Kober analyze the administration's bureaucratic bungling, stinginess and indifference, which have squandered the bipartisan spirit that allowed for the law's passage. They include advice that would have served President Bush well over the past four years: "Real change takes hard work, applied day after day, year after year."

Notable Quotes

"It's along party lines but it's not partisan?"

—Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), questioning National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chairman Robert Battista's
denial that politics influenced a policy change that ended collective bargaining rights for graduate employees at private universities.

"We bought them from an American company in . . . New York. Where they make them, that's free enterprise."

—Labor Department spokesman Michael Volpe, in Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in the Washington Post, explaining why the U.S. Department of Labor spent about $2,000 on Chinese-made foam-filled, star-shaped tchotchkes to promote the Office of Disability Employment Policy.

If you have a comment or suggestion for AFT's Closer Look, let us know.

AFT's Closer Look is a publication of the public affairs department of the American Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20001, 202/879-4458. Alexander Wohl, Executive Editor; John See, Editor; Annette Licitra, Copy Editor.