Screen Caption of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) during ESEA hearing on HELP Committee

Though expected by Senate watchers to be a sideshow and forum for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to voice his criticism of the nation’s top education bill, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing today instead crystallized key provisions of the legislation meant to replace No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

That the hearing was held at all is unusual, since the bill up for discussion was voted out of committee  in October by a vote of 15-7. But an agreement was struck between Paul and committee chair Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to allow the Kentucky senator to learn more about the language of the bill under the condition he drop over 70 amendments proposed in an attempt to slow down its passage.

And while the co-writers of replacement bill, known as Harkin-Enzi, voted to push it out of committee in a bi-partisan fashion, both would like to see more added.

“This bill is not Mr. Enzi’s bill, and it ain’t mine either,” said Harkin. While Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) told the audience, “It is important to note that I do not support 100 percent of the bill we reported out.  I would have supported a much smaller federal role and far fewer federal programs.”

Witnesses were invited to participate in the round table discussion without prepared remarks, a more informal hearing than is typical of Senate meetings. Senators were also invited to ask questions, with much of the dialogue focusing on tracking teachers and their pay, improving student performance, and addressing high-needs pupils like those with disabilities and limited language skills.

Tom Luna, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction, said the current bill “has kept the good parts of No Child Left Behind.” He likened the 2002 law to the film The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, – with the emphasis on data-collection showing the good, while the federal government prescribing benchmarks and end goals representing the ugly.

He stressed a state’s right to set up its own education accountability measures was a 10th Amendment issue, and in moving away from NCLB, Idaho is “more than willing and ready to hold ourselves to higher level of accountability.”

Still, with many state budgets squeezed, federal largesse helps programs targeting high-needs students stay afloat. But with that financial support comes expectations states will live up to standards articulated at the federal level. That reality prompted Charles Seaton, a teacher at Memphis City Schools in Tennessee, to tell the senators, “We need your money.”

Harkin-Enzi disavows most of the performance targets schools were forced to meet under NCLB mandates, known as Adequate Yearly Progress, or face consequences, and instead focuses on the worst five percent of schools per district.

Pam Geisselhardt, a gifted and talented coordinator at Adair County Schools in Kentucky, welcomes the increased state control of monitoring student output. “The term NCLB is demoralizing for us at this point…testing, testing, testing…we have no time to teach.”

But accessing a rich data set on student learning is important, the other panelists said. “Everyone says we assess too much,” quipped Amanda Danks, a lead teacher in Baltimore who works with special education students. “We assess ineffectively too much.”

Danks’ comment was reiterated by a few of the national thinkers on the panel.

Rick Hess, an education policy analyst at American Enterprise Institute, said, “It is not useful to try to prescribe models” unless they pertain to the lowest five percent of schools. And Luna, a critic of federal involvement in local education, said he would not oppose federally mandated teacher evaluations but would see a problem if the “federal government tries to define it or regulate it.”

Special education took up a significant portion of the two and a half hour hearing, but was limited to matters of assessment, as well, with some senators and panelists arguing allowing more students with disabilities to receive alternative assessments would demoralize the students.

Harkin-Enzi puts a cap on the number of students who could qualify for alternative assessments as one percent — a point of frustration for low-performing schools with many high-needs students whose test scores would factor into the school’s overall performance.

Perhaps the bill’s harshest critic on the panel is Wade Henderson, President and CEO of  The Leadership Conference. “We must look at our history: states have achieved what they have because of the federal role, not in spite of it,” he said. Countering Sen. Paul’s assessment of the hearing, Henderson argued federal involvement is not a philosophical question, but a “practical debate affecting real-live students.”

Groups as politically divided as The National Council of La Raza and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce side with Henderson. In a letter released today, nearly 30 organizations that seek greater accountability standards for students and teachers said they do not support Harkin-Enzi.

From the statement:

Federal funding must be attached to firm, ambitious and unequivocal demands for higher achievement, high school graduation rates and gap closing. We know that states, school districts, and schools needed a more modern and focused law. However, we respectfully believe that the bill goes too far in providing flexibility by marginalizing the focus on the achievement of disadvantaged students.

Last month, President Obama unveiled his plan to grant states waivers from No Child Left Behind, putting pressure on congress to come up with a reauthorization of the 2002 law, which has been due for overhaul since 2007. Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the chair of the House education committee, has stated he prefers to augment the nation’s top K-12 law with smaller bills.

Some 20 amendments were approved during the process, which ended just before 9 pm Thursday, including ones with language on principal training, loosening restrictions on teaching oral traditions in Native American or indigenous school areas, and low-income student access to early college high schools.

Some notable amendments were not passed, including Sen. Rand Paul’s curious proposal to repeal No Child Left Behind — even though the bill in question seeks to effectively accomplish that end goal.

Committee chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) praised the proceedings. “Tonight is a victory – both for our nation’s children and for bipartisanship,”he said. “After more than two years of hearings, debate, and negotiations, the HELP Committee has come together in a bipartisan way to approve comprehensive legislation to improve education for our nation’s children.

“This bill will ensure that students graduate from school ready for college and careers and focus federal resources where they will be most effective. It will replace punitive sanctions and labels with supports for teaching and learning, increase flexibility for innovation on the local level, and distribute resources equitably to ensure a top-notch education for every American student.”

Indeed, a handful of Republican measures were taken up in the Democratic-controlled committee.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) successfully introduced an amendment offering more school choice options to low-income students enrolled at persistently failing schools.

Another, by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), clarified language on formula funding, an often contentious topic as a few percentage points can make a big difference in how much federal funding states can receive. Sen. Harkin quipped, “formula fights are always bad,” but the North Carolina Senator said his new language for Title II of the Elementary And Secondary Education Act would allow the section’s $3 billion in allotments to be “distributed equally.”

Title II of the ESEA supports state- and district-level efforts to improve teacher quality and instruction.

And Sen. Lisa Murkowksi (R-Alaska) managed to successfully introduce language mostly specific to Alaska in two amendments.

One of these amendments is discussed by TAI here, while the other addresses rural school districts in the state that have difficulty finding highly qualified teachers. Her amendment permits a form of distance learning provided that the off-site teacher is highly qualified and is in charge of the lesson plan.

Still, despite ranking member Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) voting for the final version of the bill, he said in a statement the “markup of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was an important first step, but we still have a lot of work to do when the bill reaches the floor of the Senate.

Sens. Alexander and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) were the two others to vote with the majority.

In general, the bill moves away from some of NCLB’s benchmark requirements, instead seeking to prod states towards more efficient oversight measures, data collection technology, and monitoring systems.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) sponsored or co-sponsored three amendments. One included language similar language to a principal and teacher preparedness bill he introduced with Sens. Alexander and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) called the GREAT Act that was endorsed by reform-minded education groups like Teach for America, New Schools for New Orleans, and the Charter School Growth Fund. The amendment places greater emphasis on selection criteria for instructor training academies and would rate academies based on how well its graduates improved student performance. The program, according to the amendment, is voluntary.

Another little item was an amendment that would expand federal research under a program similar to ARPA-ED. While conservatives worry this could centralize education reform and create a “National School Board”— one of the most used terms throughout the markup process — the Obama administration touts it as harnessing the research energy of public facilities to improve student learning.

Education policy Rick Hess of conservative American Enterprise Institute stands behind the basic premise of the amendment.

Throughout the discussions, the theme of the role of the federal government in local education cropped up — specifically, whether an authority that introduces a tenth of the funding towards school budgets can mandate too heavily how states should govern. Conservatives on the committee argued the ESEA bill still imposes itself too much, while more liberal members maintained federal money is voluntary, and states can opt out if they do not want the money.Of course, most states are financially strapped and rely on federal dollars to help pay for crucial items like textbooks and additional resources for high-need students.

The committee is slated to convene in early November. Even as the bill is now ready to head to the full Senate floor, leadership honored Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) request for a hearing in exchange for his support of the markup process.

His amendment, one of a handful passed so far by the HELP Committee as it undergoes a markup of the sweeping K-12 education bill authored by leading sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), would lift the restrictions currently in place that bar states from testing students based on their current skill level.

Just like the higher education entrance assessment the GRE, Sen. Franken’s amendment opens the door for states to use Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT), software that increases or decreases the difficulty of questions based on the test taker’s response. Present state efforts, like Oregon’s, to incorporate CAT have been stymied since current law views such methods as introducing questions not on level with the content skills of middle of the road students.

“I’ve traveled all over Minnesota and heard from principals, teachers, and administrators who say they need a better way to measure the growth of their students, because the current testing system just isn’t working,”  Sen. Franken told TAI in an e-mail.

CAT methods of student assessment, Franken said, can assist teachers in identifying a student’s strengths and weaknesses in real time, since results for the tests are generated immediately. He described the current testing standard — states issuing exams and receiving results months later — as an “autopsy” of student skill-level rather than an evaluation.

“When the results finally come back, it’s too late to do anything for students who are failing, said Franken to TAI. “Computer adaptive testing gives our teachers the tools and information they need to help our kids succeed in the classroom. I’m pleased that my provision was approved during the HELP committee markup this afternoon.”

Frequent criticism of the assessments borne out of the No Child Left Behind era is that they focus on getting students up to speed on a certain level of proficiency.

During the markup, Franken said of the few things he liked about No Child Left Behind was its name. “Well you’re leaving that kid behind, you’re leaving this kid behind,” he added.

A fact sheet e-mailed to The American Independent by Franken’s staff included the following analysis of assessments:

Fixed form tests allow students who are high-performing to look good all year with out much effort and struggling students who work and grow dramatically to still be counted as under-performers. Students and teachers are not accurately assessed and evaluated, and it makes it more likely that these students will not get adequate attention from teachers.

The amendment clearly states that a CAT evaluation method is not mandatory.

The reliance on technology has been one of the prevailing themes of the current markup session to reauthorize ESEA, the 1965 law passed by the Johnson administration that outlines the federal government’s role in education spending.

Computer systems were presented as solutions for creating cross-tabulation systems that would determine the performance of a subset of student groups, like African American females, and monitoring the matriculation of eighth graders to better understand high school drop out rates.

During day two of the HELP committee markup to approve the major K-12 education law meant to replace No Child Left Behind, senators proposed various amendments that addressed teacher requirements for Native American school lessons, testing standards for students with disabilities, classroom apprenticeship programs among others. The pace of the sessions have sped up, as well, following an agreement between Sen. Rand Paul and the committee’s leadership.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced an amendment slightly tweaking the language of the Harkin-Enzi bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on the federal government’s expectations for teachers. Her focus was on Native American, Hawaiian, and other indigenous communities that have a rich oral history but are kept out of the classroom anyway.

“These Native languages are dying out at astonishing rates,” Murkowski stressed, and when the  languages die out, she says, cultures follow with it.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) was uncomfortable with the amendment since it lured the Senate down, “a slippery slope on this high quality teacher thing,” he said. Sen. Murkowski elaborated, making clear her amendment doesn’t affect teacher standards nor does it require Native American history and culture in the curriculum.

“It doesn’t mandate teaching of culture,” she said. “It shows respect for our first peoples and for our elders who want to carry on that language… for the young people.” Murkowski said.

She explained there are various restrictions holding back an indigenous child from receiving formal access to his or her native language and cultural expressions like dance and music. For one, federal regulations view indigenous languages as foreign, something she thought was absurd. More importantly, tribal elders who have the greatest insight into their culture’s processions “is not going to get out to get a teacher certification,” Murkowski added.

Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) were supportive of the Alaskan senator’s effort to strip down the regulations, and the amendment ultimately passed.

Although Democrats are often accused of increased accountability and regulation, on specialized tests for students with disabilities, the tables turned between Sen. Harkin and Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). The Georgia senator, despite vehement protest from disabilities groups, brought up an amendment that would have expanded alternative testing for students with disabilities. Sen. Harkin, who has a strong history of supporting the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and whose brother was deaf, argued Isakson’s amendment amounted to a type of segregation against students with disabilities.

The Georgia senator made it clear he took umbrage to that characterization, but spoke with defeence of Sen. Harkin’s experience in the field. Ultimately, Sen. Harkin said, “special education means students needs additional tools to learn” as opposed to different ones. He added current law tests 1 percent of students with disabilities, with was based on academic surveys that found .5 percent of students need them. Isakson’s proposal would expand the testing pool to two percent, something Harkin said was not a “rational” choice given limited testing supporting the move and would lower expectations for more students.

Isakson’s amendment did not pass.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who surprised many by using an arcane procedural rule limiting committee discussion while the Senate was in session, agreed to withdraw his objection after striking a deal with chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). The arrangement allows the markup to proceed normally, while Sen. Paul will have a chance to voice his frustration during a full hearing on the bill before it goes to the Senate floor for a vote.

Sen. Paul also announced he is removing all but 7 of his submitted 75 amendments to speed the markup session along. The Kentucky junior senator admitted to submitting the amendments to slow down the HELP committee’s discussion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s overhaul. Sens. Harkin and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) co-authored the bill.

Of the amendments he proposed, one was to fully repeal No Child Left Behind. Though he admitted it was a mostly symbolic gesture, he argued it was important for the record to note who stood by complete repeal of the law. The Harkin-Enzi bill constitutes as an overhaul of NCLB already.

Other highlights include Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) successfully introducing a bill that would monitor the enrollment of eighth graders to better understand how many of them graduate from high school. Dropout rates are determined by comparing the amount of ninth graders enrolled to how many graduated high school.

“I haven’t been here a long time and I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about how the place works,” Bennet said, pacing at the podium, his voice rising, his hands at times folded in front of him modeling a posture of frustrated restraint. “I implore the senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection [to continued debate]… Finally, after two and a half years, there’s a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee and we’re told that meeting for two hours is too long…

“You know why people are fed up this place? It’s because they don’t think the debate we’re having is about them. They think the debate we’re having is about us. And they’re right about that.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act would remove the yearly progress reports mandated by the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act. It would also lift penalties imposed on schools that fail to meet annual standards set by No Child Left Behind, focusing accountability on only the lowest performing schools.

Indeed, the bill seeks in general to lower federal involvement in education, a proposal normally likely to draw the support of small-government lawmakers like Paul.

“The teachers all across this state want us to lift this burden from them, in my view the biggest federal overreach ever in domestic policy,” Bennet said. “That’s what this bill does, not for ideological reasons, but to respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents.

“[The bill] responds to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual progress, the idea that we’re going to label all of our schools failing by 2014 because we have a completely made up accountability system in Washington DC. This bill does away with that!”

The remarks came during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee markup session, a session where committee members amend and rewrite legislation. Bennet was superintendent of the Denver public school system before being appointed to the senate in 2009 and he seems to prize his work for the HELP committee and his work on this bill in particular.

Senator Paul, who won his seat in the Tea Party wave election last November, expressed frustration that he didn’t have time enough to fully consider the roughly 800-page bill. He derided the process as unrealistic and said the public had been locked out of the debate.

Committee Chairman Tom Harkin from Iowa pointed out in response that the committee held ten public hearings on the legislation in 2010 and that the bill had been in the works for years. As a HELP committee member, Paul could have taken time since assuming office to familiarize himself with the legislation, he said.

Bennet told Paul that while they were dithering over politicized chamber rules, teachers were at work in Colorado, at 11:15 pm, preparing for classes.

“When people see the political games that are being played here, when they see people who are unwilling to work together and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I’m not sure there’s anything more backhanded we could do.”

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Known as “comparability of services,” it forces states and districts that receive Title 1 funding — federal money meant to bolster schools with high percentages of low-income students — to spend a near equal amount on poor and affluent schools. Lawmakers are taking up the issue since Title 1 funding totals roughly $14.5 billion, meaning how states demonstrate their compliance with the provision matters a great deal financially.

The guidelines are complicated but over the years school districts have perfected tactics that allow them to get away with providing more funding to wealthy schools than high-poverty schools. The resultant discrepancy leaves the United States as one of three countries in the wealthy group of nations called OECD that spends more on wealthier schools than poor ones.

“We can no longer allow children’s Zip codes to determine the quality of their education, wrote HELP committee member Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) to the American Independent. “We need to ensure that our sparse federal dollars actually go to the disadvantaged children they were intended to serve, while also encouraging more equitable spending locally among schools.”

To that end, the bill to replace NCLB — co-written by HELP committee chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) — would greatly improve the equitability of school spending. If passed, it would close a loophole that inaccurately represents how much funding poor schools receive, much to their financial detriment.

Under NCLB, districts display compliance with equal school spending by reporting the average salary amount teachers receive. However, that tactic obscures the funding disparity between poorer and  wealthier schools: salaries at more affluent campuses are significantly higher since they attract more experienced instructors, and can do so since wealthier communities have more tax revenue to spend on education.

Moreover, teacher compensation makes up roughly 80 percent of school funding, and wealthier schools have more teachers to achieve smaller class sizes. The Harkin-Enzi bill would eliminate that method of reporting funding. Doing so, according to a GAO report, would mean augmenting the habits of 80 percent of surveyed schools.

A fairer way, analysts say and what the Harkin-Enzi bill is striving to achieve, is basing the reporting on spending per pupil.

Funding discrepancies are made much more explicit when teacher salaries aren’t assumed to be equal, and districts must then shore up the difference by sending more dollars to poorer schools.

“Closing the comparability loophole is a good thing. For the first time, policymakers and the public will have transparent reporting of funding disparities between schools,” says Anne Hyslop, an education analysts at Education Sector. “Most importantly, it’s good for low-income kids, who are more likely today to be taught by inexperienced teachers.”

One aspect of the spending gap not addressed by the Harkin-Enzi bill is how similarity is defined. Earlier in the year, Sen. Bennet wrote a comparability spending bill with Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) that would allow no more than a 3 percent difference in funds allotted to poor and wealthy schools. The current standard is 10 percent.

School districts that have adopted the new reporting measures witnessed a jump in the amount of dollars poorer schools received. In Oakland, funding for low-income elementary schools increased 24 percent. The increased flexibility allowed principals to expand learning time in the classroom and add more teachers–techniques studies show improves student learning.

Some education stakeholders worry the new education bill would force schools to ship teachers to poorer districts to satisfy the comparability rule. During the hearing today, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) had an amendment approved by the committee that assuaged those fears.

“It clarified that school districts don’t have to force teachers to transfer between schools to equalize funding between higher and lower income schools,” said Alexandra Fetissoff, spokesperson for Sen. Franken.

Though esoteric, the amendment was important since it keeps the onus on local authorities to find ways of incentivizing highly trained teachers of accepting jobs at low-income schools, an imperative set forth by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who don’t the new federal education law to seem too invasive.

Also, the proposed bill doesn’t change the formula for how schools receive Title 1 funding. Currently, the majority of funding is based on a simple calculation of whether the student population has at two percent of its population qualified as low-income.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was swept into law under the Johnson administration in 1965. It outlines a wide array of funding procedures and the federal government’s role in local K-12 education. No Child Left Behind is the current iteration of that law and has been due for an overhaul since 2007. As its rules have placed burdensome expectations on local school administrators and labeled close to half of the schools in the country as failing, both sides of the aisle have called for its replacement.

To relieve states of NCLB’s punitive sting, The White House has offered states a quid pro quo arrangement to opt out of the law in exchange for increased accountability and oversight standards valued by the administration.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) employed a Senate rule forcing the committee considering a law to replace No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to come to a sudden halt, even though lawmakers went head first into making sense of the 860-page education bill and the over 100 amendments tacked on — 74 from Sen. Paul.

The move by the Kentucky senator, a rarely-used tactic that forces a committee to wrap up its hearing after two hours if the full Senate is in session, was widely interpreted as another stalling technique aimed at thwarting the proposed bill despite it being co-authored in the Senate by a leading Democrat and Republican.

There’s a strange irony to Sen. Paul’s objecting the current bill: the law he argues he wants to overturn, NCLB, will remain in place without a comprehensive reauthorization of the country’s major K-12 education law.

“[He] urged early in the mark up period that NCLB be replaced, but he  is now procedurally obstructing the committee that’s in bi partisan support of the bill that will actually overturn NCLB,” said Justine Sessions, spokesperson for the Democratic leadership of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which is considering the bill.

During the markup period earlier today, Sen Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who heads the HELP committee, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by Sen. Paul’s actions. “If senators think we will be deterred in our determination to move this bill through committee, he added, “I can assure you that is not the case” and promised the committee can meet in the morning and at night to see the bill through.

“[Sen. Paul] wants to get rid of the Education Department and the Early and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),” explained one Democratic staffer who wished not to be named. That sentiment was echoed by several other stakeholders observing the committee markup who say the senator is trying to prevent the bill from moving forward.

Sen. Harkin will reconvene the committee either later tonight or early tomorrow morning. Sen. Paul’s objection forces the chairman to limit committee hearings to two hours while the whole Senate is in session.

The ESEA was swept into law under the Johnson administration in 1965. It outlines a wide array of funding procedures and the federal government’s role in local K-12 education. No Child Left Behind is the current iteration of that law and has been due for an overhaul since 2007. As its rules have placed burdensome expectations on local school administrators and labeled close to half of the schools in the country as failing, both sides of the aisle have called for its replacement.

To relieve states of NCLB’s punitive sting, The White House has offered states a quid pro quo arrangement to opt out of the law in exchange for increased accountability and oversight standards valued by the administration.

A recent report by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee revealed a combined $521 million in benefits for veterans, and from the Defense Department benefits for veterans in 2010 was received by 20 for-profit schools.

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee

For-profit institutions are required to follow the 90/10 rule. That is, only 90 percent of their revenue may come from federal aid. If the formula used for determining the 90 percent included benefits for members of the military, many of these colleges would not pass.

This information has been helping to fuel efforts led by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and U.S. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) to increase scrutiny on for-profit colleges.

“[T]hey are really going after the military in a big way,” Harkin told The Iowa Independent, believing it is because it does not count towards the 90/10 law.

Further fueling the nearly year-long investigation through the HELP Committee, which Harkin leads, is questionable recruiting and retaining efforts that have been uncovered.

Harkin said private non-profit colleges in Iowa, such as Buena Vista University, Simpson College, Graceland College and the like are still doing a good job of educating low-income students; perhaps even better than the Regents, because of the endowments they receive. But his attention toward the for-profit private colleges has raised a number red flags.

“The federal government is putting out half a billion dollars a year in educational assistance for veterans and for active duty personnel,” Harkin further told The Iowa Independent. “When I inquired from the Department of Defense as to where it was going, what was happening to these military people — Were they graduating? Were they getting diplomas? Were they getting jobs? — I got nothing back. The Department of Defense has no data on that. They simply send the money to them and that’s it.”

A Government Accountability Office report concluded along with the investigation Harkin led that the Defense Department and the for-profit industry lacked sufficient scrutiny over where tax dollars were going and how they were being used.

Carper told the Chronicle on Higher Education he was surprised to learn military aid was not included in the 90/10 rule, and suggested the government should consider adjusting that.

“I’m a big advocate of skin in the game,” he said. “There has to be skin in the game for markets to work.”

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee

For-profits have not been alone in courting members of the military. Nonprofit and public colleges have as well. A 2009 Iowa task force found adding 100 veterans a year would yield an additional $800,000 in tuition income annually for the University of Iowa and nearly $2 million in revenue for the city of Iowa City.

For-profit schools have become the fastest growing sector of higher education, moving from 550,000 students in 1998 to more than 1.8 million students by 2008. Although they are still only 10 percent of the total higher education student population in the U.S., they take 42 percent of all Pell Grants.

Deceptive Recruitment Practices

With little oversight by the government as to where the education benefits for veterans are going or being used, for-profit colleges have stepped up their recruitment of members of the military.

In one instance a veteran was repeatedly told by recruiters that his post-9/11 GI Bill benefits would completely cover the cost of his degree. It was only after enrollment, the veteran said, that he learned he would owe approximately $11,000 beyond his military benefits to Bridgepoint-owned Ashford University.

This veteran, or veterans overall, were not the only students to file formal complaints against Ashford. The complaints came from students of different backgrounds — more than 700 in a two-and-a-half year period. They accused school officials not only lying to them or misleading them, but of charging them with undisclosed fees.

One student claimed he was told he would be able to receive his teaching license from Ashford, based in Arizona. Yet a year later, right before his scheduled graduation, he learned Ashford was not allowed by the state of Iowa to award teacher licenses, and that he would have to attend a “cooperating school” in Arizona for a year. In the complaint he stated, “I was really blown away to find out that I had spent so much time and money at a college that I was not going to be able to obtain my teacher’s license from.”

A number of students also reported receiving very little help once inside for-profit institutions, insisting there was more emphasis on recruiting rather than assisting students’ classwork. Indeed, some documents detailed instructions for officials to make at least 50 outbound calls a week in recruiting efforts and hold meetings almost daily with prospective students.

In undercover audio recordings by GAO agents, counselors at the for-profit schools can be heard discrediting traditional universities for large class sizes, insisting they would not be receiving a value education. While there are lecture courses with sometimes more than 300 students in a class, most classes taken at Iowa’s public universities throughout a degree program have less than 50 students in them. They also go on to tell potential students they would have to try to get less than a B in their classes at the for-profit college.

The GAO encountered some schools encouraging prospective students to falsify documents in order to receive more aid.

Perhaps the most alarming tactic found within internal documents recently released was the use of the “Pain Funnel.”

Lines within the documents from the for-profit ITT Technical Institute, which has more than 100 campuses nationwide, include “Remind them of what things will be like if they don’t continue forward and earn their degrees” and “Poke the pain a bit and remind them who else is depending on them and their commitment to a better future.”

Drop Out Rates

Colorado Tech University’s online program has a 61 percent drop-out rate. The University of Phoenix’s Axia College has seen 84 percent of their students drop out.

Jason Deatherage, former admissions adviser at Colorado Tech, was fired for not meeting his quota of recruiting military vets. He told the New York Times there is massive pressure to enroll more veterans.

“We knew that most of them would drop out after the first session,”  Deatherage said. “Instead of helping people, too often I felt like we were almost tricking them.”

Bridgepont Education had a 63 percent drop-out rate in 2009. Despite such a high rate of drop-outs, that year Bridgepont’s Chief Executive Andrew S. Clark earned almost twice as much as Charles Edelstein, CEO of the University of Phoenix, when he raked in $20.5 million.

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee 

Student Debt Load and Career Barriers

Although, 11 of 16 community colleges in Iowa report graduation rates comparable to or worse than Bridgeport, students at for-profit institutions are almost twice as likely to default on their student loans.

Katie Bushnell currently attends Full Sail University, a for-profit school focused on the entertainment business. Bushnell takes classes online and expects to graduate within a year with a Bachelor’s degree and nearly $70,000 in student loan debt.

According to recent data released by the U.S. Department of Education, 13.8 percent of students who began repaying their public-private partnership loans in 2008 have since defaulted. For-profit institutions, however, reported 25 percent of their graduates defaulting after three years. There has been increased scrutiny over for-profit colleges as they enroll less than a fifth of all students but produce nearly half of all loan defaulters.

Bushnell actually walked away from traditional schools before coming to Full Sail. She started at Iowa State University, then attended Des Moines Area Community College and Indian Hills Community College. Much of her collegiate experience has been financed through student loans; however, she’s been working full-time hours to afford housing and living expenses since her family cannot contribute.

She counters the complaints students have lodged at other for-profits about not receiving support while taking classes.

“Full Sail does have excellent career services that has been helping me with resumes and career building exercises,” Bushnell said.

But Bushnell is worried about what she might end up doing after college since the entertainment business in Iowa is so small. She wanted to do music promotions, but with limited opportunities, she’s now considering out-of-state sports teams. Taking classes online, combined with trying to find work and build experience booking concerts during college has also placed obstacles in her way.

“I do miss having a set class time, because it is very difficult to focus and very easy to procrastinate with online classes,” Bushnell said. “Working full time and then coming home to classes is tough chore. I am envious of students who don’t have to work full time and still get by while in school.”

Watching tuition increases and budget cuts to public universities though is a big incentive for Bushnell to avoid going back to public colleges.

Contributions and Oversight

Part of Harkin’s investigation found 95 to 98 percent of students attending for-profit colleges borrowed money to attend. Since the average cost of a credit hour was often more than double that of tuition for a public college, the debt loads were significantly higher. Iowa has ranked in the top five for highest average student debt load by the Project on Student Debt every year that they’ve compiled data, ahead of all other Midwestern states.

With all of these reported problems, Harkin is seeking better oversight of the half a billion taxpayer dollars going to the for-profit colleges through military members’ benefits.

The Department of Education has already brought forward a new plan that would deny for-profits from receiving federal student aid if their graduates cannot pay off their student debt in a reasonable time frame.

While Harkin has been leading this charge, he has also been among the recipients of donations from the industry. As The Iowa Independent reported in 2010, he took significant donations from DeVry, Inc. and Bridgepoint. Democratic U.S. Reps from Iowa, Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack, also took contributions, as did U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was one of the biggest benefactors in contributions from the industry, receiving more than $30,000.

DeVry, based in Illinois, spent more than $300,000 on lobbying efforts in 2009 and 2010. Ten of the industry’s top companies collectively upped their spending on lobbying from $1.5 million in 2009 to more than $4 million in the first nine months of 2010. The industry is fighting against any new regulations.

“We need better oversight, and we need to bring this to light,” Harkin said. “I’ve had this ongoing investigation and it seems things keep getting worse and worse.”

The Education Department held back on imposing their new plan for regulations after facing heavy push-back from lobbying and opposition in Congress.

Wall Street money manager Steven Eisman testified before the HELP Committee last summer and called for-profit colleges “marketing machines masquerading as universities.” Eisman has hedged bets on some of these education corporations, but warned the committee the industry was reaping those rewards while taxpayers were at risk, as the companies are running on federal aid.

Harkin said Attorneys Generals around the country, including Florida, Illinois, Kentucky and Iowa’s Tom Miller, have launched investigations into the schools for any unlawful conduct. California and Maryland’s legislatures are pushing through bills to reduce or eliminate state aid to the for-profit colleges.

Although pensions are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the payout for insured benefits hasn’t increased in years, so many retirees would see their benefits slashed.  Plus, the collapse of any multiemployer pension plan places an incredible strain on an agency already beleaguered by fiscal woes, and the failure of a large plan could cripple the agency.

Congress has already taken steps to provide targeted, short-term relief to ease them through these tough economic times, and funding relief will surely help some of these plans remain afloat.  But for a handful of multiemployer plans, short-term funding relief simply isn’t enough. Those are the plans we are focusing on today — the minority of plans that are truly in dire straits. They find themselves bearing costs dumped on them by defunct employers that failed to pay their fair share while, at the same time, watching their contribution base shrink as industries and demographics change over time. Those plans need long-term help and systemic reforms. The challenges faced by multiemployer plans are real, and we need to face them head-on because, quite frankly, they are simply too big to ignore.

Casey’s Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act targets hard-stricken multiemployer pension plans, which have suffered during the recession as individual firms paying into the plan have gone belly-up or have withdrawn, leaving the other firms to shoulder bigger burdens. Casey argues that the remaining payees into the fund should not have to cover the “orphan employees” of collapsed firms, and suggests moving them into a new Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. fund — where the pension liabilities would be backed by taxpayers. But the PBGC is already running deficits. And any new bailouts, even to good causes, will have serious trouble getting past Congress’ deficit hawks.

Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) spoke out in opposition to the plan yesterday. “Workers should not be burdened with wondering whether or not their pensions are secure,” he said. “We must come up with a plan to overhaul the multiemployer pension system. But we should not do it piecemeal with just a very small handful of companies. Otherwise, the system will end up a house of cards. Congress is an enabler to this situation because it would rather kick the can down the road than try to resolve the difficult problems today. Instead of providing false hope to a few retirees, we must address this issue with the seriousness it deserves and overhaul the system.”

Multiemployer pension plans cover around a quarter of workers with a pension. Deficit hawks worry that bailing out some pensions would lead to a broader and much more expensive reform, adding tens of billions to the national debt. Casey estimates his plan would cost $8 billion over 10 years.

Federal regulators have been feeling the heat since this month’s blast, with many critics — including former federal regulators — arguing that recent safety concerns at the Upper Big Branch mine should have led the Mine Safety and Health Administration to shut the project down. Joe Main, who heads MSHA, is expected to testify at tomorrow’s hearing.

Notably, no representative of Massey Energy, the company that owns the mine, is scheduled to appear.