Betsy DeVos’ Education Department violated privacy laws.

[seemslikeadream]

Court: Gov’t violated privacy law for defrauded students


WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal court has ruled that the Education Department violated privacy laws with regard to students defrauded by the Corinthian for-profit college chain.

In a break with Obama administration policy, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced in December that some students cheated by the now-defunct schools would only get a part of their federal student loan forgiven. In order to determine how much to forgive, the agency analyzes average earnings of graduates from similar programs.

But a California district court ruled late Friday that the department’s use of Social Security Administration data in order to calculate loan forgiveness violates the Privacy Act. The court ordered that the Education Department stop the practice and stop debt collection from these students.

The court also said that it needs to hear more from the agency and plaintiffs in the class-action suit in order to decide whether or not to compel the agency to return to full loan forgiveness. A hearing is scheduled for June 4.

The decision marks an important victory for students challenging the partial loan forgiveness rule.

Toby Merill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, which is representing the students, hailed the decision.

“The notion that students got anything other than negative value from Corinthian has been roundly disproved by student experience and the judgment of employers and the legitimate higher education sector,” Merill said in a statement. ”

An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

DeVos said the approach of the Obama administration left room for potential abuse and unfairly burdened taxpayers who ended up paying for those loans with their taxes. DeVos said her new procedure will take into account the value a student received from their education and compensate them for what they didn’t get.

But critics slammed the new rule as unfair since tens of thousands of Corinthian students have already received full loan discharge under the Obama administration. They said some students will not be able to get a full refund just by virtue of working a minimum-wage job in an unrelated field and making some income.

One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Jennifer Craig, borrowed $9,000 to attend a Corinthian medical insurance and billing program in 2014, but she never received her diploma because the school shut down in 2015. She was unable to get a job in her area of study because the school did not provide her with the necessary practical training. The Education Department only forgave 20 percent of her loan. Craig says that she and her husband live in poverty and are unable to pay off the remaining 80 percent.

The Obama administration cracked down hard on for-profit colleges accused of fraud and shut down Corinthian and other major chains and tightened regulations for the schools. The administration spent $550 million to fully forgive the loans of tens of thousands of students.

There are currently nearly 100,000 claims from students still pending at the department.
https://apnews.com/af5c2a81a19c4540aeb44855f2e63953

[82_28]

Funny. Corinthian comes up. Corinthian College.

[seemslikeadream]

Betsy DeVos Says Schools Should Call ICE on Undocumented Students

Photo of Luke Darby
BY LUKE DARBY
3 days ago
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Testifies To House Education Committee On Department's Priorities
MARK WILSON
The Secretary of Education is leaning hard into her brand of being uninformed and indifferent.

Betsy DeVos has spent her brief but disastrous tenure as secretary of education by fighting against students at every turn. Whenever she's had the opportunity, she's chosen to make education more hostile, more expensive, and now, more dangerous.
Earlier this week, DeVos appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. While there, she was questioned by Adriano Espaillat, a Democratic Representative from New York and a formerly undocumented immigrant himself, about what she thought schools' roles were regarding ICE. Per The Independent:
“Inside the school,” Mr Espaillat asked, “if a principal or a teacher finds out that a certain child is undocumented, or his or her family members are undocumented, do you feel that the principal or teacher is responsible to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to have that family reported?”
Ms DeVos replied: “Sir, I think that’s a school decision. That’s a local community decision. And again, I refer to the fact that we have laws and we also are compassionate, and I urge this body to do its job and address or clarify where there is confusion around this.”
DeVos is right, we do have laws—laws that forbid exactly what she's directing schools to do. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on their immigration status. That's because, despite what DeVos seems to think, even undocumented immigrants have protections under the U.S. constitution. Unsurprisingly, the specter of arrest and deportation is more than enough to keep children from school. The Huffington Post points out that schools see sharp drops in attendance after local businesses are raided by ICE. In an attempt to clarify DeVos' seeming ignorance of laws protecting students without actually retracting what she said, a spokesperson for the Department of Education told HuffPo, "Her position is that schools must comply with Plyler and all other applicable and relevant law."
Condemnation came quickly. Rocío Inclán, the former director of the Center for Social Justice at the National Education Association, told NBC News, "We are shocked, incredulous and we're really upset that the leader of our public schools, the Education Department, would be so uninformed and wrong." The ACLU released a statement the same day, with director of immigration policy Lorella Praelli saying:
“Let’s be clear: Any school that reports a child to ICE would violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court has made clear that every child in America has a right to a basic education, regardless of immigration status. Secretary DeVos is once again wrong.”
That's the legal angle, but consider the moral one as well. According to DeVos, every school should decide for itself whether or not to turn over students to an unaccountable, militarized police force that's abducting people off the street. She's empowering schools to put students into an overwhelmed and massively flawed system that had already lost track of nearly 1500 children before Trump directed Customs and Border Patrol to forcibly separate children from their parents. It's a system where CBP is accused of routinely abusing child detainees—verbally, physically, and sexually.
The best case scenario is that DeVos is as uninformed about ICE as she is about basically everything in her own department. The worst case scenario is that she knows the horror she's exposing students to and just doesn't mind at all.

[DrEvil]

After Trump himself I think DeVos might be the most dangerous person in this whole administration (along with Scott Pruitt). She's hellbent on destroying public education and putting it in the hands of private (preferably religious) interests, at the tax payer's expense. The long term damage could be enormous.