Randy Best Has a Plan

Sunday, April 5, 2009
Randy Best Has a Plan (from stophehcorporateplundering.blogspot.com)
Public colleges of education are under assault. For decades, under the auspices of free market economic theory, public education in the U.S. has been portrayed as a failure. Of course this portrayal has been heavily promoted by policy makers with a very public agenda to privatize public education and create another marketplace for profiteers. It was just a matter of time before higher education would be tapped as another source of revenue by private industry. What is surprising, however, is that the blatant manipulations of Randy Best have been successful in light of his very recent history of corruption with Reading First and his commercial reading program Voyager. As a matter of fact, he sold Voyager at the height of congressional investigations into charges of conflicts of interest, cronyism, and corruption and turned his attention to colleges of education. He used the profits from the sale of Voyager to launch Higher Ed Holdings and enter the wide open market of higher education.Randy Best is not an educator. He is an entrepreneur. He does things in a big way. It would be hard to overestimate the magnitude of his quest. Higher Ed Holdings represents the newly formed Whitney International University -- a network of for-profit online colleges for international students; Early College for high school students; and the American College of Education (ACE), a for-profit online college. In 2006 Best declared: "Our dream is to be truly the first national college of education."http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/052906dnmetbestplans.d8b4622.htmlRandy Best's most problematic efforts have been reflected in his infiltration of established universities, by contracting with them to provide a "delivery platform" for online programs in exchange for their NCATE accreditation. It's unbelievable that universities would fall for such an obvious ploy with the potential for wreaking havoc with faculty, students and stakeholders. University of Toledo successfully, through faculty and student action, prevented the signing of a contract with HEH. Arkansas State University's faculty members were not so successful. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/24/hehHEH represents a threat to universities and any stakeholder in public education. Randy Best has a track record of making profit; however, as he did with Voyager, he has a track record of having little regard for integrity and accountability.