NEWSBYMIKE SMITH

For profits colleges are responding to some awful press—which is frankly, well deserved—by starting a lobbying war. They're fighting proposed changes that the Department of Education wants to enact to prevent colleges from making students take on too much debt in return for poor training. Federal aid would be cut off to colleges who broke the rules whether for profit or not.

The Washington Post Company have joined the fight against regulation with their chief executive meeting with Sen. Tom Harkin who will be leading the hearings on for-profit education. But why are the Washington Post company getting involved?

The New York Times explains that the Post Co. gets more than half of it's revenue (62%) from its Kaplan education business, so it's clearly in their interest to fight regulation that could hit their profits. The Washington Post's ombudsman admitted however that the Washington Post newspaper has done enough to be transparent in their coverage of for-profit schools. Indeed, the Post was decent enough to admit that two Kaplan campuses have engaged in deceptive recruiting practices. But that doesn't make it right.

Dr. Edward P Fiszer, the principal at a charter school in the L.A. Unified School District, allegedly stole and misused as much as $2.7 million, auditors have revealed. The L.A. Times reports that the Superintendent of L.A. schools is moving to shut down the school, but the school board is resisting.

In a twist that only modern education reform would permit, minimal gains on test scores may save the school. The school board chair explained that they were the victim of fraud and that the children should not suffer further. True, the school should remain open (while its charter is reconsidered), but L.A. schools need to take a long hard look at all of their charter schools and consider whether its a model that can continue to work without much tighter regulation and oversight.

Stephanie Farland, who studies charter school policy for the California School Boards Association,  told Southern California Public Radio "A lot of these little charter schools just don’t have sophisticated boards and they don’t have the proper training, quite frankly, in how to govern a school."

So let's heed her advise and rather than see this case as a single bad-apple, let's see it as a symbol of what happens when you allow schools to operate with minimal oversight and regulations, paying attention to small changes in test-scores rather than the overall effectiveness of those running the school.

But if you want other bad apples then we've got a barrel of them: This isn't the first time that a charter school on the West Coast has had money troubles, and it's unlikely to be the last. A husband and wife team who ran Ivy Academia in the West San Fernando Valley embezzled $200,000 and were charged with 38 crimes in June.

How do you solve a problem like the ethical erosion of doctors who treat patients like walking diseases rather than people? Harvard and N.Y.U think that making incoming med-students face patients on their first day of training could help give students a little more humanity, reports the New York Times.

The students are given a more of a hands-on education in order to improve idealism and morality, the alternative is to have them spend two years in lecture halls and libraries, buried deep in textbooks.

DonorsChoose.org, who we've given a lot of praise to in the past, have been lucky enough to receive a cool $1.3 million completely out of the blue. The site provides a platform on which teachers from all around the country can raise funds for school projects. The projects range from asking for funds a few graphic novels to requesting money for 25 state-of-the-art laptop computers.

SFGate report that the mystery white knight was Hilda Yao, executive director of the Claire Giannini Fund, set up for the daughter of the founder of Bank of America. At a time when schools are cutting budgets, increasing class sizes, and firing teachers it's a ray of hope and a rare piece of good news for school and teachers facing massive reform and uncertainty.

The Governor of Ohio has heeded the calls of 11,711 Change.org members and granted clemency to death-row inmate Kevin Keith after admitting that there were "real and unanswered questions surrounding the murders for which Mr. Keith was convicted." This was an absolute last-resort for Keith who had his execution scheduled for Sept 15.

An unusuallly bipartisan group of politicians and judges had demanded the Governor heed doubts about Keith's guilt. Gov. Ted Strickland didn't go so far as issuing a full pardon, and still contends that Keith committed the murders.

Keith's legal team has asked for a new fair trail that includes evidence pointing to innocence. At this time Keith will spend his life in prison with no chance of parole. Nina Morrison, staff attorney at the Innocence Project, told CNN that the verdict was a "win-win for the justice system."

Tens of thousands of pre-schoolers are among the half a million kids in the U.S. being given antipsychosis drugs. Most of the pre-schoolers given drugs fail to receive a full and adequete mental health assessment to determine whether such radical treatment is neccessary.

We are giving very young children drugs without fully exploring the risks and alternatives, or questioning whether the drugs are necessary at all. Factor in aggressive marketing by drug companies (Johnson & Johnson went as far as handing out Legos stamped with name of anti-psychotic drug Risperdal) and we've got even more reason for caution in dealing with an industry that has seen antipsychosis drugs become a $14.6 million market, by revenue no class of drug sells more.

But with children as young as two or three years-old being diagnosed as clinical depressed, perhaps traditional and common sense thinking on young children's mental health is off the mark and in need of updating to reflect new advances and possibilities.

Can hybrid money-raising efforts by non-profits, foundations and governments help save the 11 million children under the age of 5 who die every year due to malnutrition and preventable disease? With increasingly imaginative fund raising efforts, the Economist provides reasons to hope that "a spoonful of ingenuity" can make a big dent in child mortality rates.

In the last 20 years, funding sources have diversified with foreign governments increasing the amount they're donating. An increasing amount now comes from corporations and private philanthropy. In 2007 the Gates Foundation alone provided more than all corporations and private philanthropists provided in 1990. There is a sea-change, but $22 billion is still not enough.

In a high profile speech delivered yesterday, Hilary Clinton explained that development would be elevated to be a 'Central Pillar' of U.S. foreign policy. With the Obama administration not making its foreign policy thinking clear, it's unclear in what company this central pillar will find itself. Exactly what the pillar will be constructed of is similarly unclear. Tying security to improving delivery of aid is a nice target, but there were few specifics, and US global health and development policy has been slow under the Obama administration, illustrated most vividly by the terribly slow appointment of new administrator of USAID Rajiv Shah, who was finally sworn in this afternoon.

But this is just the beginning, and a beginning is what we need. USAID will now have a high profile and after the healthcare battle, and climate conference let-down, the Obama administration will able to concentrate even more of their resources to helping the world's most needy.

China has a problem with drugs. And I don't see their neighbours Pakistan, Burma, and North Korea leading an intervention to help them. Human Rights Watch explain that Chinese authorities are denying drug addicts the help they need. Instead, they're throwing them in jail, beating them, and making them endure forced labor. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS say that half a million users are confined.

Human Rights Watch explain that a law made in 2008 to ensure humanitarian treatment for drug addicts in detention is being ignored, and when placed in compulsory drug detention centers the addicts are not only denied treatment, but are often physically abused and made to work for no pay — even worse than previous Re-Education Through Labor practices supposedly outlawed, now replaced with a worse incarnation. The HRW report further explains that the 2008 Anti-Drugs law also allows seven years of detention — no trial, no oversight.

Rather than fixing the problem through therapy and needle exchanges, the new drugs law is making things worse. One former detainee explained that police ambushed and beat him, demanded a bribe of $440, and continued to beat him until relatives raised the money. His testimony is frightening: "I’ve tried to get clean and have been in compulsory labor camps more than eight times. I just cannot go back to a forced labor camp - [it is] a terrifying world where darkness knows no limits.” HRW demand that detention centers close, that voluntary, affordable treatment is made available, and that the harassment stops. Hopefully the collective weight of the UN and enough noise from around the world will be enough of an intervention to make China stop treating drug-users like prisoners and punch-bags, and start treating them like patients.

Photo credit: Augapfel

More than half students in the South are members of a minority, a milestone reached for the first time last year says a new report by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF). This is likely to happen nationwide by 2020. Worrying though is that more than half of students from the South are from low-income families, and the number of students receiving free or cut-price lunches is on the rise in every state, reports the New York Times.

If the South doesn't step up, the long-term consequences could be terrible; the states are desperate to create a workforce that can help their economies develop. The same is true nationwide, and the implications of a majority number of students coming from impoverished background makes it even more essential to improve schools (and teachers). Sadly, lawmakers don't appreciate that doing things like legalizing undocumented would help their economy and give a huge boost to local economies.

The SEF explain that the way public education is financed has to change in order to ensure fair opportunity for all — those in most need don't get enough money. The SEF conclude by saying "No challenge is now more important than helping the South’s new, diverse majority of public school students realize the full measure of their potential for themselves and the rest of the region." We're not just letting students down by failing them, but dragging the South and the nation down with every high-school student we allow to drop-out, and every child we fail.

Photo credit: Bloomsberries