EWA Interview: John Fremer on Investigating Suspicious Test Scores
USA Today's Greg Toppo interviews John Fremer, president of Caveon Test Security, Inc., on the topic of investigating suspicious patterns in school test results. Toppo was part of a team of reporters who investigated scores that seemed too good to be true in districts around the United States.
In Part 1, Toppo and Fremer discuss how reporters can begin to identify cases of possible cheating, and how to track down the relevant statistics.
First Quarter Data Reveal States Have Spent 75% of Stimulus Funds
Cross-posted at EdMoney.org
New federal data compiled on EdMoney.org, EWA's stimulus-tracker website, show that cumulatively, the 50 states and the District of Columbia have spent 74.82 percent of their funding for education from the 2009 economic stimulus law.
As of the end of April 2011, 28 states had reported spending 75 percent or more of their stimulus money, while 40 states reported spending two-thirds of it or more. The 10 states that had reported spending the largest share of their funding were:
Iowa, 93.07%
New Hampshire, 92.42%
South Dakota, 89.14%
Minnesota, 87.36%
California, 87.12%
Idaho, 86.92%
New Jersey, 86.84%
Arizona, 85.61%
Illinois, 85.25%
Indiana, 84.62%
The 10 states that reported having the most stimulus aid still to spend were:
Wyoming, 34.28%
Alaska, 34.33%
Delaware, 41.77%
Tennessee, 44.07%
Rhode Island, 51.58%
Hawaii, 54.73%
District of Columbia, 56.01%
South Carolina, 59.83%
Nebraska, 61.71%
Ohio, 62.46%
Not surprisingly, the states that have the most stimulus funds remaining were by and large the winners of the competitive Race to the Top grants. By contrast, none of the 10 states that had spent the biggest share of their stimulus money had won Race to the Top money.
The federal grants being tracked by EdMoney are Title I, Race to the Top, Idea B, Idea B (Pre-school), Idea C, Homeless Children and Youth, State Stabilization Fund, School Improvement Grants and the Rural and Low Income School Program.
Richard Arum, co-author of the book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," talks with EWA member and Money Magazine Senior Writer Kim Clark about how reporters can investigate academic rigor in institutions of higher learning (1:00), discusses voluntary systems of accountability (6:50) and addresses criticisms of his study (9:12).
EWA is grateful to Lumina Foundation for Education for its support of the higher education track at EWA's 64th National Seminar, where this video was recorded.
How We Did the Story: Investigating For-Profit Colleges
This is a first-person column by Bloomberg News reporter Dan Golden, who won EWA's Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, along with colleagues John Hechinger and John Lauerman.
Read the stories here. To find out more about the grand prize and the National Awards for Education Reporting, please visit our website contest section.
During my first week at Bloomberg News in August 2009, Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler asked me to examine for-profit colleges, saying he wondered if their meteoric growth was too good to be true.
I began to pore over the US Securities & Exchange Commission filings of Apollo Inc.'s University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit university. I was surprised to find not only that its enrollment had quadrupled in eight years but that its business model had changed markedly since I had covered it for the Wall Street Journal some time before.
Back then, Phoenix had primarily served middle managers with some college experience whose private employers frequently paid for them to complete their four-year bachelor's degrees. About half of its revenue had come from federal student aid.
Now, I saw, it had more than 200,000 students in a two-year, associate's degree program, that started in 2004 and accounted for most of the university's enrollment growth. And almost 90% of the university's revenue derived from federal grants and loans to students, with tuition reimbursement from private employers no longer significant.
For easy reference, all of our materials from the EWA's 64th National Seminar -- including podcasts, blogs and Powerpoints -- are now collected in one place on our homepage.
