Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated

Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that

student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program

and collecting millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.

Photo by Michael Temchine for The New York Times.

When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.

For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.

The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued.

Recent investigations by state attorneys general and Congress have highlighted how the department failed to clamp down on gifts and incentives that lenders offered to universities and their financial aid officers to get more student loans.

This from the New York Times.

Listen in: NPR has several programs following the student loan scandal.

Language Gap Impedes Parent-Teacher Chats

Federal law requires school districts to provide interpreters for parent-teacher conferences. But demand far outstrips the state and federal funds provided. How are schools adapting?

Audio from National Public Radio.

Achievement Gap 101: Let's Review

"In 1950, four years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, fewer than 20 percent of African-Americans had finished high school. By 2005, fewer than 20 percent didn't have a high-school diploma.

Those numbers tell a remarkable success story, but an unfinished one. For decades, the nation made steady progress in reducing the achievement gap between black and white students. But the gap has never been closed, and the goal of eliminating it remains a distant one.

The National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, is the closest thing the United States has to a national test. African-Americans have made steady progress on it since 1971. But so have white students, and while the gap between them narrowed through the 1970s and 1980s, progress stalled in many areas in the 1990s. Since then, progress has been slow, and for some groups, the gap has actually widened.

The picture for Hispanic students and children from poor families is much the same: steady progress over time, but these students still lag behind their white and more affluent classmates in virtually every measure of academic achievement, from kindergarten to graduate school.
Equally troubling is the fact that in some cases — Hispanics students in reading, for example — the achievement gap is narrowest in the fourth grade, then gradually widens as students progress through the system. As some critics of public schools have pointed out, the more time that poor and minority students spend in these schools, the farther behind they get.

The No Child Left Behind law signed by President Bush in 2002 makes closing the achievement gap a national priority. It calls for states to measure the performance of every school's students and for schools to be held accountable.

No longer would schools be able to mask lagging progress of minorities by reporting only average scores for all students. For the first time, the federal government requires schools to show improvement in the performance of specific subgroups of students: racial and ethnic minorities; special-education students; and those still learning English.

Schools that don't show improvement among all of these groups of students can find themselves identified as failing, which makes them eligible for extra assistance to help them get test scores up. And schools that over the course of several years fail to show improvement could face drastic restructuring.

Five years in, however, it's still too early to tell whether the law is having much of an effect. In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said that because of the law, "students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap."

Well, sort of. The White House cited improved scores of African-American and other minority students in some grades and subjects. In fourth-grade reading, for example, the achievement gap narrowed between 2003 to 2005 to its lowest level ever.

But for eighth-graders, the gap remained unchanged between 2003 and 2005. And in other grades and subjects, the improvements are incremental.

Five years into No Child Left Behind, progress toward closing the gap remains mixed, at best. The law's stated goal — that all children will be proficient in reading and math by 2014 — seems unlikely to be met, as the list of schools failing to reach their targets grows every year.

Nonetheless, supporters of the law say that doesn't mean its aims should be abandoned. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board, equality of achievement remains the biggest challenge in public education.

--by Steven Drummond for National Public Radio.