(A) Fund ( (B ) Copy ) This (C) Steal (D) Sell (E) All of the Above

30 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS CRISMAN C’03 Education

What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform. BY TREY POPP

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 31 Sabrina Kay GrEd’09 was nobody’s $1.5 million a year for its private-equity ly in the future of fashion design. In 1991 idea of a typical student. owners. “They wanted to dump it,” says she struck a mutually beneficial deal For one thing, the fashion-industry Kay. “And of course, here comes Sabrina, with a software company that was hav- entrepreneur came to the United States and I paid cash for it.” ing trouble finding buyers for its new, as a 19-year-old Korean who didn’t speak She renamed it Fremont College, and quarter-million-dollar CAD suite. Give enough English—as she would say years got down to the task of remaking it— me the software for free, she said, and I’ll later—to order lunch at McDonald’s. For largely in the image of the very GSE- train your first generation of customers. another, by the time she applied to Wharton program she was now attend- It worked. Kay hired space and faculty, Penn’s Graduate School of Education, ing, via cross-country commute, in in- built a curriculum, recruited students, she had already retired. And really, what tensive week-long blocks. and won the all-important regional ac- does a thirty-something California girl “When you look at the Wharton creditation. Her graduates got job place- with “good, eight-figure money in my Executive program, you’re not just taking ments at a rate that even Wharton might checking account” need with a doctor- the brightest and the greatest—you’re tak- envy—consistently above 90 percent. And ate in education? ing anyone who can pay the money,” Kay the software company had a growing That’s a fine question, but put it aside says. “And you have to inject the knowl- market of fashion designers trained on for the moment, because in 2007 Sabrina edge in one week, and give them a very its proprietary platform. A decade of Kay was facing a more pressing one: specific outcome, which is either learn work paid off in 2002 when she sold the What does a doctoral candidate need to read financial statements, or learn- school for a reported $15 million to with an eight-figure checking account? ing leadership so that you become a Education Management Corporation, a She had been thinking about the perfor- better person.” Kay wanted to do the publicly traded company that would mance gap between America’s K-12 educa- same thing, albeit for mid- to low-in- shortly be acquired by Goldman Sachs. tion system, which is lambasted every come adults whose previous academic (EDMC, which runs 71 for-profit colleges, time US kids finish 20 places behind the experience had, to put it gently, lacked is once again a NASDAQ-listed firm, cur- Finns on an international test, and its rigor. “So I sat there and kind of did a rently valued at $2 billion.) universities, which remain the envy of the data input of what we were doing, hour If you think that talking about educa- world. “What happens between 18 and by hour, at Wharton, and drew up a model tion—much less education reform—in 19 for these students?” as she somewhat with six steps.” terms lifted from venture capitalists is facetiously puts it. “Do they get smarter This she showed to Doug Lynch, the vice vaguely sacrilegious, listening to Doug overnight—in one year? Or do we drop a lot dean of GSE and the person responsible Lynch might send you sprinting for the of our students on the street?” for starting the Work-Based Learning nearest exorcist. Ever since he was re- She was pretty sure it was the street. Leadership program. She showed it to cruited to GSE in 2004, as a trained econo- Too many young adults were falling other GSE professors. She made adjust- mist who’d never worked for an education through the crack between four-year uni- ments and additions, sometimes appro- school, Lynch has ordered his life as an versities and community colleges. Pick priating whole classroom exercises into administrator and classroom teacher any reason you wanted—breakneck tu- her curriculum plan. What she wanted to around one guiding belief: that America’s ition increases among the former, insuf- know was whether she could copy the best hope for improving its educational ficient capacity among the latter, uncer- most effective parts of her executive- outcomes lies in opening the marketplace tainty about the real economic value of a doctorate program and paste them into as wide as possible to entrepreneurs. And diploma from either one—it didn’t mat- the for-profit educational tracks at graduate schools of education, it follows, ter. Kay thought she knew how to deliver Fremont College—if, as she later put it at should be doing everything in their power the kind of education that would help an education-industry conference, she to equip and enable them. these overlooked people thrive. Namely, could “knock off Wharton.” Lynch has challenged and changed the the same kind she was getting at what Lynch answered with a memorable status quo at Penn GSE over the past few she called her Penn “brain spa,” the new piece of advice: “Steal shamelessly.” years, though not necessarily in a way Executive Program in Work-Based Learning that’s attracted a lot of outside attention. Leadership, offered by GSE in partner- ynch would not have been the He negotiated a partnership with Teach ship with Wharton. least bit surprised by Kay’s pur- For America wherein GSE would adminis- The thing was, just writing a disser- Lchase of a for-profit college as a ter a custom-built certification program tation wasn’t going to do it for her. “I’m “laboratory” for her dissertation work. for TFA recruits—an idea he considered a more of a practitioner than an aca- That was how she’d banked eight fig- “home run” but only managed to pull off demic,” she says now. “I needed a labo- ures to begin with, as the founder of after being “drawn and quartered by the ratory to kind of test out some of my California Design College. After study- faculty,” some of whom, he recalls, “basi- theories. So I bought one.” ing computer science and industrial cally said, ‘They’re the devil. What are you To be precise, she bought a college in design at California State University at doing? They undermine everything that southern California about 45 minutes Long Beach, Kay, whose parents owned a we’re about.’” (Because most TFA corps from where she lived. Nominally a for- clothing business, intuited that comput- members only teach for two years before profit institution, it was losing about er-aided design (CAD) would figure huge- pursuing different careers—and there’s a

32 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE lot of evidence that it takes three or four years of classroom experience to make What [Kay] wanted to know was whether teachers really effective—some scholars criticize TFA for sending inexperienced, if she could copy the most eff ective parts well-intentioned, college graduates into of her executive-doctorate program and the country’s neediest classrooms. “There are folks who argue eloquently that teach- paste them into the for-profi t educational ing is an intellectual endeavor, and that it takes a long time to get good at it, and tracks at Fremont College—if, as she later we’re one of the few decent ed schools in the country, so we should be sort of pre- put it at an education-industry conference, paring the Jedi masters,” Lynch elabo- rates. “And here you are signing a deal she could “knock off Wharton.” with these 21-year-old kids who are going to last two years.” But the faculty came Lynch answered with a memorable around, he says, when they started inter- piece of advice: “Steal shamelessly.” acting with TFA recruits and realized, as Lynch puts it, “’Oh, these are really smart, thing centrally: ‘We’re going to change Foundation and the KIPP charter school committed kids—and they really do need the whole system, and we’re going to program to La Guardia Community College our help, because they’ve [only] gotten five legislate it.’ Well, that’s been tried sort and Rosetta Stone. weeks’ training.’”) of for the last 50 years, and that’s got- “Part of it is sort of being a yenta,” Lynch He started the program in which ten us pretty much nowhere.” explains. “One of the big problems [in Sabrina Kay enrolled—a first of its kind So he advocates jettisoning that top- the education marketplace] is what they among Penn’s peers in that it was de- down approach and replacing it with call ‘deal flow.’ Once you’re University of signed for senior-level executives in what amounts to an army of entrepre- Phoenix, it’s pretty easy to get capital— charge of corporate-based education neurs who can test out ideas great and you’ve got 500,000 students; you’re and training. (“At first faculty were small—rather the way Supreme Court sort of worth a gazillion dollars. They’re like, ‘What the hell?’”) Justice Louis Brandeis envisioned state worth, like, $10 billion or something. His most emblematic initiative, though, legislatures serving as the “laboratories That’s pretty easy. The problem is, think came to fruition in 2010: an annual of democracy.” of University of Phoenix 30 years ago, education-business-plan competition, “The hypothesis is that by creating when somebody said, ‘Okay, I have this sponsored by GSE and the Milken opportunities for entrepreneurs to ex- idea for a totally different way of run- Family Foundation, whose two top cash periment,” Lynch says, “and they could ning a university. Oh, and by the way, prizes were richer than the ones of- be for-profi t, non-profi t, it doesn’t mat- I’m going to make it for-profit.’ It was fered by the well-known Wharton ter—that folks who think that they have impossible for them to raise capital.” Business Plan Competition. an interesting solution to a problem Lynch wants to spread the message far “If you take early childhood all the that they’re seeing out there, whether and wide: whether you want to be the next way through K-12, higher ed, and then it’s access to college via technology, or University of Phoenix or you just have an what you could call corporate learning,” training teachers better through a new idea for a smartphone app that forces Lynch likes to say, “more money is spent sort of strategy … whatever the thing is eighth-graders to solve an algebra equa- on education than on healthcare.” or the idea is, rather than trying to or- tion before they can fire off a text mes- But, he’ll add in his next breath, that chestrate it from up high, allow all sage, Penn GSE wants to play the enabler. market is strewn with barriers to entry. these things to sort of percolate.” “If you’re an oncologist and you have And the unfortunate reality, Lynch it turned out, that smart- an idea for how to cure cancer, there’s a concludes, “is that there’s no mecha- phone app—the brainchild whole system in place to help you vet nism anywhere in the country to do AS of Emily Durham GEd’10, the idea and bring it to market,” Lynch that.” Which is why he wanted to spon- the only Penn student to reach the com- says. “Nothing like that exists in the sor the business-plan competition— petition’s final stage—didn’t finish in the world for education. along with a new network of for-profi t money. But both of the business plans “And the interesting thing is that it’s education companies, non-profi t foun- that did also came away with something not like curing cancer—a lot of these dations, and (mostly) venture capital- more valuable: venture-capital funding. things are fairly, in theory, solvable,” ists that would serve as a built-in audi- The runner-up was a software tool de- he adds. Just not the way education re- ence for it. Dubbed NEST (Networking veloped by a TFA alumna that classroom formers have gone about it in the past. Education Entrepreneurs for Social teachers would be able to customize to “The old approach to education reform Transformation), it was what Lynch en- track and quantify student progress in is that a bunch of policy wonks get in a visioned as a “safe place for people to fine-grained detail, on a day-by-day basis. room and sort of orchestrate the whole meet”—everyone from the Walton Family So it might crunch all the data from

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 33 homework assignments and pop quiz- says. For instance, several years ago Porter gies have improved, this is an amazing zes, for example, to clue in a teacher that developed a psychometric assessment time to really pursue different ways of her kids are, say, getting a handle on mul- tool that district administrators can use helping kids.” tiplying decimals but still lagging with to evaluate the effectiveness of principals. “Public K-12 education is a $700 billion fractions. (The system is also currently “I’ve had various ‘tools’ I’ve invented over business,” he points out. “Philanthropy being marketed, somewhat less inspir- my career, and some of them I’ve kept in can’t be the answer. All the philanthro- ingly, as a way to streamline the imple- the public sector,” he says. “But this as- pists can do is set up models that can mentation of classroom discipline.) sessment-of-school-leadership thing I put be copied.” The winner was a fledgling company out in the private sector, because I didn’t called Digital Proctor, which has devel- think it would ever get out there and be This enthusiasm for alternative oped a keystroke-based authentication used if someone didn’t have a profit incen- and untried models is not exactly tool designed to detect “outsourcing”- tive.” So he sold it to a company that has breaking news in American education. style cheating in Web-based classroom since deployed it in about 2,000 schools. The past 10 years have been boom times environments. (The underlying assump- “The profit motive can get lousy stuff for charter schools, for-profit colleges, tion, which is supported by some evi- out there—and does,” Porter allows. But in and a general faith that entrepreneur- dence, is that everyone has a more or his view, that’s all the more reason for ship is the way to “bring our outmoded less unique style of touch-typing.) Penn GSE to insinuate itself into the pro- school system into the 21st century”— There’s little doubt that each of these cess. “If you can make it a two-step deal,” to use the rhetoric of the believers. tools addresses a fast-growing niche in in which the University brings its research This has lately culminated in a fervor for the American education marketplace. The expertise to bear on a product first, “and shaking up school systems by appointing Obama administration lists “building then you get somebody in there selling it, as their leaders people with limited experi- data systems that measure student growth I think there’s a lot to be said for that.” ence in public-school administration, or and success, and inform teachers and So does Joel Greenblatt W’79 WG’80. even in education. Two of the most visible principals about how they can improve The hedge fund founder, philanthropist, have been , an accomplished pros- instruction” as one of the four specific and University trustee also serves on ecutor who had headed the antitrust divi- ways states can win coveted grants from Penn GSE’s board of overseers. “There sion of Bill Clinton’s Justice Department its Race to the Top initiative. And the ex- should be more educational entrepre- before being named chancellor of New plosive growth of online education hardly neurship,” he says. “And I think Doug York’s Department of Education, and Mi- needs commenting upon. But still, the no- Lynch is trying to lead the way.” chelle Rhee, a Teach For America alumna tion of a graduate school of education Greenblatt has been on the front lines of and founder of a teacher recruitment and lending its weight to something like a education reform as an instrumental training non-profit who was named super- cheating-detection business—or Sabrina backer, along with John Petry W’93, of the intendent of the Washington DC system Kay’s for-profit college, for that matter— non-profit Harlem Success Academy and partly on the basis of her outsider status. strikes some people as, well, novel. Bronx Success Academy charter schools (Rhee stepped down in 2010 after the elec- “Entrepreneurship wasn’t a word I in New York. The lauded seven-school net- toral defeat of her patron, Washington used much before I came here,” says work (whose goal is to charter a total of 40 Mayor Adrian Fenty, in a Democratic pri- GSE Dean Andy Porter, who came to schools in high-need communities) is run mary wherein discontent over her school Penn from Vanderbilt in 2007. Asked by Eva Moskowitz C’86 [“Alumni Profiles,” reforms was a major issue. In New York, about the education business-plan com- May|June 2009] according to a philosophy Mayor ’s controversial petition, Porter goes straight to the that Greenblatt describes in terms that choice to succeed Klein, announced in No- question that probably occurred to most are strikingly similar to the advice Lynch vember, is another outsider, Cathie Black, people who heard about it: “Why in the had for Sabrina Kay. who previously ran Hearst Magazines.) hell would we do something like that?” “[Moskowitz] started out with the idea “I think more economists should go “Well, the GSE here at Penn wants to of stealing liberally from the best practices into education,” says Greenblatt, ex- be the place the rest of the world looks from other successful charters,” he says. plaining one of the things he likes to for ideas,” he says in answer to his “And the [measure of] success for us is about Lynch. “The incentive systems in own query. “Our mission is to provide that if we’re successful, other people steal education don’t work. They make no leadership in education … and in educa- as much as possible from the things that sense. And I think if there were more tion, the kind of research that tends to we’re doing, that work. Otherwise, well, economists in education, people would make a difference usually has a develop- it’s not exactly a waste of time—because figure out faster why they don’t work.” ment phase to it—you create a curriculum, the project will end up helping a lot of kids But not everyone shares the faith. Diane you create a program, you create a tool—so that are directly affected—but the real goal Ravitch, who was a high-profile supporter we try to promote good research and de- is to set up something that can be used by of some of these ideas as assistant secre- velopment. Then of course you want to get others … Not much has changed in the way tary of education under George W. Bush, good visibility for your ideas.” teaching has been delivered over the last has metamorphosed into an even-higher- Linking them to the profit incentive is 100 years. Now that information can be profile apostate. In her widely discussed sometimes the best way to do that, he shared, and communication technolo- 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great

34 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE American School System, Ravitch charac- student aid, while their students ac- margin—than in-state undergraduate tu- terized the emphasis on “applying the count for 43 percent of all loan defaults. ition at the University of Michigan. Penn principles of business, organization, man- Investigations have turned up an alarm- charges tuition on an annual basis, but agement, law, and marketing” (especially ing catalogue of accusations. Nursing the full tab for a student taking five cours- when those tactics focus primarily on students at one institution graduated es per semester would work out to about “choice and accountability”) as a sort of only to learn that their program had $1,300 per credit hour.) bait-and-switch. never been accredited, making their de- Eisman offered the Apollo Group, “Instead of dealing with rancorous prob- grees worthless—but their five-figure which owns the University of Phoenix, lems like how to teach reading or how to debt loads quite real. Recruiters have as an example of educational entrepre- improve testing, one can redesign the trawled halfway houses and homeless neurship gone wrong: management and structure of the school shelters for new students (and thus, “In fiscal 2009, Apollo, the largest com- system and concentrate on incentives and more taxpayer-provided revenue in the pany in the industry, grew total revenues sanctions. One need not know anything form of federally guaranteed loans). A by $833 million. Of that amount, $1.1 bil- about children or education,” she wrote. Government Accountability Office un- lion came from Title IV federally funded Ravitch now argues that curriculum de- dercover investigation of 15 for-profit student loans and grants. More than 100 velopment and teacher training—boring colleges documented deceptive practic- percent of the revenue growth came from though they may sound as a reformer’s es at all of them, and fraud at four. the federal government. But of this incre- rallying cry—are the things we need most. Perhaps the most memorable statement mental $1.1 billion in federal loan and Penn GSE, to be sure, does both of those about the for-profit college sector, which grant dollars, the company only spent an things. Lynch just has a much more ex- enjoyed a stupendous run on incremental $99 million on faculty com- pansive view of what the school’s mission over the last decade due partly to a soften- pensation and instructional costs—that’s encompasses. “Does curriculum matter? ing of regulations by the Bush adminis- nine cents on every dollar received from Heck yeah. Do teachers matter? Heck tration, came from hedge fund investor the government going towards actual yeah,” he says. “The mistake is not think- Steve Eisman C’84. At an investment con- education. The rest went to marketing ing about it ecumenically. The problem ference last May, Eisman—whose pre- and paying the executives.” with all these folks—whether you’re Randy scient and lucrative bets against subprime Lynch doesn’t dispute this. He just Weingarten, or Diane Ravitch, or Linda mortgage lenders made him a central thinks it misses the point. “I think there Darling-Hammond, or Michelle Rhee—is character in Michael Lewis’s The Big are proprietary schools that are crimi- that you’re orthodox. You think your algo- Short—lambasted the industry. nal. I think you could also make a case rithm is the grand unifying theory [that “Until recently, I thought that there there are some not-for-profi t institu- will work in every kind of classroom] … would never again be an opportunity to tions of higher education that are equal- And I think that’s intellectually boring, be involved with an industry as socially ly criminal,” he says. “I believe that the and it’s also just a pipe dream.” destructive and morally bankrupt as the beauty of the American system is insti- He adds, “I think you need to be much, subprime mortgage industry,” he said. tutional diversity. And I think there’s much more pragmatic than that. Simply “I was wrong. The for-profit education room for good for-profi ts. I think what because we have a moral obligation to industry has proven equal to the task.” we need is a lot more scrutiny on all uni- learn, and to further the profession. And to He charged that “the for-profit model versities in terms of their outcomes and simply sort of say, ‘We are going to ignore seeks to recruit those with the greatest their outputs. But in this instance we all this stuff that’s going on’—which is ap- financial need and put them in high- are sort of being agnostic about it. What parently what a lot of ed schools are doing— cost institutions,” and that the for- we’re just saying is, if you’ve got a good is to me both immoral and impractical.” profit sector’s tuition rates—which tend idea, let’s kick the tires of it. And if it Of course one might make the argu- to be vastly higher than at community seems like it’s viable, let’s help you get ment that some things really ought to colleges and frequently eclipse those resources to explore it further.” be ignored. of state four-year colleges—bear little Which brings us back to Sabrina Kay. This an awkward time, for instance, relationship to the underlying cost of for an elite Ivy League education school the education they deliver. hen Kay first applied to to give credence to for-profit colleges. (Tuition rates vary widely in the higher- Penn, she received some- Heavily dependent on federal student education marketplace. For most of its Wthing that confirmed her loans—which typically account for be- associate-degree courses, the University status as an atypical applicant: a one- tween 80 and 90 percent of their total of Phoenix charges $385 per credit hour. page rejection letter. revenue—for-profit colleges have lately By comparison, California community It was not a feeling she’d had many op- come under withering scrutiny by reg- colleges charge $26 per credit hour—but portunities to grapple with. “Everybody ulators, Congress, and short-sellers. are often oversubscribed and lack the abil- wanted me at that point,” she recalls. “I For-profit colleges enroll about 11 per- ity to add additional sections. For bache- was on 21 boards! I was involved with cent of the nation’s college students, lor-level courses, the University of Phoenix charities. I was the commissioner on sev- reported in Novem- charges as much as $550 per credit hour, eral very important boards in California. I ber, and collect 25 percent of all federal which is higher—in some cases by a large was like, How could I be denied?”

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 35 When she picked up the phone to get One of the central elements of year, full-time college students. an answer to that question, the person “Professional Action Learning”—a term “Students who go to Harvard and who’d signed the letter wasn’t available. Kay has trademarked—involves group- Wharton, they start at a pretty high She got transferred to Doug Lynch. “And based exercises structured around place,” Kay says, “These are the students Doug told me—and I had thought it was role-playing; students are variously who, if you drop them off in the jungles just the biggest insult I had ever heard— charged with occupying the role of of Africa, they’ll still somehow survive ‘You do not belong here.’ “presenter,” for instance, or “evidence and pay their student loans, you know? “And I was like, This is exactly what I analyst” or “devil’s advocate.” But if you take the single mother who is wanted to do! I’ve been in education my Asked why she chose the for-profit route on welfare and already had defaulted on entire life. I’m in my 30s—I don’t think over, say, trying to achieve her educational many different loans before taking out I can retire forever!” goals at a community college, she has a another student loan—more likely than Slow down, Lynch said. The fit be- ready answer: “Immediate gratification.” not, that person will have a higher tween student and program is impor- “If I went to a junior college and said, chance of defaulting.” tant. The one to which she had applied, ‘I’m a student at Penn and I’m doing my Are society’s interests best served when GSE’s executive doctorate in higher- doctorate thesis and let’s test out taxpayers guarantee such a student loan? educational management, primarily Professional Action Learning,’ I think Kay’s answer is unequivocal. “One option served senior university administra- the entire faculty would have hated me … is to leave her alone so that she can be on tors. Of course, to her mind, Kay had And by the time I was done with the pre- welfare for the rest of her life,” she says. the ultimate credential—college presi- sentation and all the politics [of getting “The second option is to give her an op- dent—but the fact was that she’d been faculty buy-in], I would be 70 years old.” portunity so that she can better her life.” president of the wrong sort of college. Educational inputs are one side of Lynch concurs. “You have to keep in Lynch gave her the impression that the coin. But outputs are arguably mind that Penn students are so not typi- some on the admissions committee more important, particularly given the cal. University of Michigan students are “looked at for-profit colleges as not increased scrutiny of for-profit colleg- not typical. Something like 80 percent of even part of the higher-education sys- es in Washington. In a suite of new students now are what they call ‘nontradi- tem,” Kay recalls. regulations scheduled to be published tional,’ depending on the US Department But not Lynch, who added that she in 2011, the Department of Education of Education classifi cation. So your typi- sounded just right for the new program is expected to make federal aid to col- cal college student now is like a 29-year- he was launching. lege vocational programs contingent, old working mother.” Four years and one doctorate in educa- to some degree, on measures that in- For Lynch, who is as apt to frame educa- tion later, Kay comes across as both a clude the dropout and job-placement tion in moral terms as in economic ones true believer in democratizing higher rates of their students. (references to the 19th-century Catholic education and a tenacious exponent of About three years into her tenure at educator Cardinal Newman crop up regu- the for-profit sector as the way to do it. Fremont, Kay is pleased with the results. larly in his conversations and papers), Fremont College essentially com- “When I first bought the school, we had that makes Fremont College an excellent petes with community colleges. It of- about 40 percent student retention; now vehicle through which GSE can amplify fers about a dozen associate’s degrees we’re up to close to 80 percent,” she says. its infl uence in the world. Kay “feels very in programs that range from the voca- “And most important is our [job] place- strongly about providing similar oppor- tional (massage therapy, Web design) ment rate, which went from 50 percent tunities to immigrant women.” Lynch to the somewhat more academic (para- placement to 91.3 percent.” says. “And she doesn’t apologize for the legal studies, accounting). Kay touts Compared to some of her larger for- fact that her company is for-profi t. Her Fremont’s pedagogical approach as a profit peers, who have lobbied intensely argument is, ‘If I don’t provide a valuable “unique six-step process” that “adopt[s] against the DOE’s proposals to tighten service, then I go out of business.’” the framework of Work-Based Learning the regulations governing them, Kay is Leadership at the Wharton School” and sanguine about the coming changes. Wally Boston GrEd’10, who was accepted her own “thesis on improved learning (She says 80 percent of Fremont’s reve- by GSE’s executive doctoral program in through practice and collaboration.” nue comes from federal loans and higher-education management the year (Wharton, which in 2009 lost a $435,000 grants.) “Once all this shakedown is after Kay was denied, echoes that senti- lawsuit—later reversed—brought by a dis- over,” she says with confidence, “there ment. Boston is the president and CEO gruntled graduate of the Executive Mas- will be a really big premium to the qual- of American Public Education Inc., a ters in Technology Management pro- ity of the institution.” publicly traded company that runs gram, a collaboration between Wharton But like many of her colleagues, she American Public University System and the Engineering School, has actually argues that measures like student-loan (APUS), a for-profit college whose opera- removed its name from the Work-Based repayment rates make for tricky com- tions are entirely Web-based. Learning Leadership program. Though parisons. After all, the for-profit sector “I think a few of my classmates found numerous Wharton faculty still teach in tends to serve a population that has lit- it interesting that a for-profit institu- it, GSE is now its sole sponsor.) tle in common with “traditional” four- tion could have a mission,” he says

36 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Sabrina Kay at Fremont College. PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN PINES C’92 about his cohort at Penn. “But we do degree requirements might be different. increased tuition for some of its gradu- have a mission to be open-access and to So he wanted to start a school that ate-level and MBA programs, which pri- be affordable, and we’ve had that mis- would follow the soldier around.” marily serve officers aiming to advance sion since our founding.” The guiding mandate was that under- beyond the rank of major, or soldiers lay- APUS was founded in 1991 as American graduate tuition be priced to allow a sol- ing the groundwork for a transition to Military University. “Our founder was dier to obtain a bachelor’s degree (a pre- civilian careers.) pretty adamant that many of the tradi- requisite for becoming an officer) with- “Back in 2002, at $250 a credit hour, our tional schools that served the military out spending any of his or her own money. tuition was lower than private non-profits, didn’t follow a soldier or sailor from The military has a tuition-assistance pro- and also many of the private for-profits, but base to base,” says Boston. “So if you gram that will pay up to $250 per credit it was higher than many of the state schools started a program with, let’s say, a state hour at an accredited college. That is we viewed as competition,” says Boston. school down in Texas when you were what APUS charges. The military’s tu- “But in the [last] nine years, the state stationed in Texas, and then you went to ition benefit level has remained constant schools have increased their tuition quite a North Carolina, and had to switch to a for a decade, which factors into a point of bit. So right now we believe that [the com- North Carolina school—that place may pride that few other colleges of any stripe bined cost of] our undergraduate tuition or may not have the same program you can match: APUS has not increased un- plus our book grant [for students who carry started with, and if it did, some of the dergraduate tuition since 2001. (It has a minimum 2.0 GPA] puts us lower than

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 37 just about all the state schools we see.” phone, that’s not a panacea either—even if the largest studies, by Stanford’s Linda The convenience and price point, cou- you also gave her teacher software capa- Darling-Hammond, concluded that un- pled with the increasingly interactive na- ble of categorizing the types of mistakes certified TFA teachers had an insignifi- ture of its online classroom environments, she made. But that’s exactly why Lynch is cant or even negative effect on student has proven attractive to civilians as well. keen on giving all of them a boost. To his achievement compared to teachers who In 2002, when Boston came to APUS from mind, the lure of the All-Encompassing enter the field the old-fashioned way. the healthcare industry, there were about Education Fix is a mirage. And if you can’t Hence Lynch’s push to bring TFA corps 2,200 students enrolled in its various dis- run a mile in one stride, you’d better take members into GSE’s classrooms, even if tance-learning programs. Over the last every small step that gets you closer to the it meant adjusting GSE’s curriculum for eight years that number has ballooned to finish ribbon, even if each one only pushes them to close the deal. 75,000, of whom approximately 50,000 you an inch or two along. And even if you agree with Steve are active-duty or veteran military. “So many of these artificial lines we’ve Eisman that for-profit giants like the At Penn, Boston did his dissertation on drawn over time—traditional versus non- University of Phoenix are the devil’s a topic he had grown passionate about: traditional, charter schools versus dis- spawn, come to Earth to bilk the vulner- student retention. “In an online environ- trict, for-profit versus non-profit, higher- able at taxpayer expense, you might still ment, any institution that serves a lot of ed verses K-12—so many of these distinc- see the value in lining up venture capi- adults is bound to have a high percentage tions can be useful descriptions, but they talists behind a TFA alumna who has a of churn with its students, particularly if can also become mental roadblocks,” says tool that might just help your child’s the admissions process is not selective,” Frederick Hess, a scholar at the conserva- teacher catch what’s stalling her math he says. “The most-selective schools, plac- tive American Enterprise Institute who progress before the problem snowballs es like Penn, have the highest graduation also teaches in GSE’s mid-career doctoral into a C-minus on her next report card. rates; and the least-selective schools have program in educational leadership. “What I Yet surely, you might say, having ex- the lowest graduation rates. We are not a find neat about Penn is that I think Doug tended the benefit of the doubt that selective school. We accept every student and Andy have very intentionally created far—surely it is another thing entirely who can demonstrate that they have a an environment—and I think you’ve seen it to bring a for-profit-college mogul into high school diploma or at least a GED. And at a couple other universities, Harvard and your ivory tower and tell her to “steal so over the years, having had a back- Stanford in particular—where the leader- shamelessly.” But Lynch confirms that ground in going to selective schools, I felt ship is aggressively seeking people from all those were his exact words to Sabrina like I needed to understand the retention of these parts of the pie and recognizing Kay. And the truth is that they amount issue and solve the puzzle.” that they all have important roles to play.” to the clearest distillation of what, to It is not an easy code to crack. APU’s Some education-policy wonks who his mind, GSE’s mission should be. students face challenges that do not typi- stump for entrepreneurship can at times Still, it’s worth hearing the long version. cally beset “traditional” college kids, who seem to be advocating it as an end in it- For the last six years, ever since Penn for the most part cannot be ordered to self. Skeptics find it hard to credit as a President Amy Gutmann’s inaugura- dodge mortar rounds in the middle of a coherent operational philosophy. After tion, the University community has semester. Nevertheless, Boston says his all, what do an executive program for heard the ceaseless beat of a simple- GSE doctorate has paid dividends. “We’ve corporate chief learning officers, a busi- sounding imperative: that Penn must designed all kinds of dashboards to moni- ness-to-business relationship with Teach “rise from excellence to eminence.” For tor activity in classrooms and outside of For America, and a psychometric tool for Lynch it is a profound mandate. the classrooms. We study the demograph- assessing grade-school principals—to “It feels like a sound bite. But if you ics of our students a lot more deeply. And take just three ideas this story touched really pull it apart and try and manifest we’ve actually created an early-warning on—have to do with one another? To non- it, it’s really different as a way of operat- metric that helps us flag students we believers, it suggests a massively frag- ing,” he says. think may potentially be in a position mented attention span—as though the “If you’re excellent, you’re still proprie- where they’re going to drop out, and try to ADHD kids have stormed the education- tary. In fact, you probably try to protect provide them with a mentor and a coach reform castle, spilling all their Ritalin [your areas of competitive advantage]. But before that happens.” pills into the moat on the way in. eminence implies being magnanimous. “In my mind, it’s all the same thing,” Which means that you can sort of give it Internet dashboards designed to flag Lynch counters. “NEST, our executive away. You say, ‘Please, Fremont College, potential online-college dropouts will programs, the TFA thing—they’re all copy what we’re doing and see if it plays not solve America’s education riddle. simply ways of trying to get out of this out.’ … If we were only excellent, we would Neither will the replication of an Ivy League box, which is graduate education as it then file a lawsuit saying, ‘Hey, you’re executive doctoral program’s pedagogy at was conceived a hundred years ago.” copying what we’re doing.’ Whereas being a small, for-profit college in Southern They’re also ways to amplify Penn eminent gives us this opportunity to be California. And no matter how much you GSE’s influence. For example, research gracious. It sounds corny, but I would say like the idea of making your 10-year-old on the effectiveness of TFA teachers has we breathe it here. solve math problems to unlock her cell- not produced a consensus, but one of “It’s license to do good.”◆

38 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE