College partners with online education leader

In an effort to increase College revenue, maintain the College’s leadership in language education and expand language education in America, Middlebury joined forces with online education leader K12, Inc. in April to create Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL). MIL will serve students in eighth through twelfth grade, and will come online in late summer of this year with courses in Spanish and French.

K12, Inc., based in McLean, Va., has been providing online education to both public and home-schooled students for a decade. It was co-founded by renowned conservative commentator William Bennett in April 2000.

In addition to co-founding K12, Bennett worked for the government on education and drug policies during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations. He is also the author of multiple books on education, including The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, a collection of stories assembled to teach readers of morality and virtue.

Despite his longtime commitment to education, Bennett has been involved in multiple controversies over the years.

Bennett found himself the subject of widespread anger in 2005 after a comment he made on his nationally syndicated radio show, Morning in America.

Responding to a caller’s suggestion that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would be enough to preserve Social Security’s solvency, Bennett suggested that if your sole goal was to reduce crime, you could also “abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Such an action “would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do … but the crime rate would go down.”

The Bush White House condemned his comments, as well as many Democrats and civil rights groups. Stating that Bennett would step down to avoid distracting K12 from its mission, K12 thanked Bennett for his service but made it clear that “[t]he opinions expressed by Dr. Bennett on his radio program are his and his alone.”

Nevertheless, in a recent interview on Bennett’s own radio show, K12 CEO Ron Packard said, “I still consider [Bennett] the education expert.”

Professor of French Paula Schwartz is concerned that Middlebury is partnering with K12. Even though Bennett has since left the company, she wrote in an e-mail, “Middlebury has legitimized K12 and the ideas it stands for — wittingly or not,” by making such a partnership.

Professor of Geography Tamar Mayer agrees, writing in an email that the “past of [K12] with Bill Bennett at the helm will continue to haunt Middlebury.”

Bennett aside, some worry that K12’s curriculum — which in theory would have no impact on MIL, whose content will be created exclusively by Middlebury faculty — is not appropriate.

Arizona State University researcher Susan Ohanian published an extensive critique of K12’s methods in 2004.

“K12 ignores such issues, which have to do with the nature of childhood, cognitive development and the purpose of schooling,” she wrote. Instead, “the curriculum relentlessly pushes ahead with eliciting memorized replies to adult questions.”

The company once again found itself the subject of media scrutiny in 2004, after it was awarded a $4.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand its program to public school students in Arkansas.

According to an analysis done by Education Week, an education newspaper based in Bethesda, Md., “K12 and its Arkansas partner received the grant despite the fact that one project that independent reviewers rated higher was not funded,” a highly unusual occurrence, sources within the Arkansas government affirmed.

According to an employee in conversation with EdWeek, who asked not to be identified, “Anything with Bill Bennett’s name on it was going to get funded.”

Three years later in 2008, K12 was criticized for outsourcing its essay-grading to India.

Kwitowski declared that students’ privacy was not jeopardized, EdWeek reported, though the two-year old pilot program was still discontinued.

Some wonder if K12’s history will have a negative effect on Middlebury’s new company, Middlebury Interactive Languages, of which K12 owns a 60 percent share.

President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz believes such concerns about K12’s past issues with content are unfounded, as the College will be in total control of the new products’ content.

“By virtue of the long list of operating agreements that formed the new company, Middlebury controls the content of what the new company produces, and nothing can carry the Middlebury name on it if it is not approved by Middlebury,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Although Old Chapel claims that all decisions regarding content will be made by Middlebury, Professor Mayer said she worries that the profit-minded board of directors, which is slanted towards K12, could still influence the programs’ content.

“The fact that this is a for-profit venture will certainly define what the content is,” Mayer wrote in an e-mail. “[I]mportant topics, such as religious conflicts or issues concerning sexual orientation, for example, could be censured (or vetoed).”
“How will we be able to control the contents if Midd’s representatives are less than 50 percent of the board?”

Liebowitz maintains that, in addition to the fact that MIL’s content will be created without K12’s input, the program is only for profit because it is designed to subsidize the very expensive education offered at Middlebury. In essence, it is acting as a fourth revenue stream for the College, like the endowment or tuition.