Washington State Senate drops the ball

This was published in the March 3, 2005 Spokane Spokesman-Review. I was given permission to post the full text.

The Spokesman-Review
March 3, 2005

Bill to verify teaching credentials dies in Senate:
Degrees offered by diploma mills will be checked by districts, not state

Richard Roesler, Staff writer

OLYMPIA - Despite testimony that several teachers and school
administrators have used phony diplomas to collect tens of thousands of
dollars in extra pay, a bill to require state officials to check such
credentials died in a Senate committee last Wednesday.

"There's a principle involved, and we need to be principled in our
education," said Sen. Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, arguing for his bill
Thursday morning.

The state gives pay increases to teachers who get additional training or
degrees. But checking the legitimacy of those degrees is left to the
state's 296 school districts, some of them tiny. Schoesler's bill, SB
5634, would have required the state Superintendent of Public
Instruction's office to verify that the credits or degrees came from an
accredited college.

An investigation of about one-fifth of the state's school districts by
the conservative Evergreen Freedom Foundation last year found six
educators who'd claimed extra pay on the basis of credentials from
unaccredited institutions. Some, according to EFF, were so-called
diploma mills, offering people degrees for little or no serious
coursework.

A three-year audit of the Pateros School District this year determined
that one employee had drawn $35,365 in "unearned salary and benefits"
with a degree from an unaccredited foreign university.

Such people "are essentially cheating the system," Schoesler said. "It's
unfair to taxpayers and it's unfair to the vast majority of teachers who
earned their credits or degrees by playing by the rules."

His bill would have also ordered a $300 fine for anyone submitting
unaccredited coursework to get a pay increase. They would also have to
reimburse the school district for any salary overpayments.

Other states are looking at the same problem. In 2002, according to a
report last year by EFF, three Oregon teachers had their credentials
revoked after claiming to hold degrees from La Salle University in
Louisiana, a now-defunct diploma mill not related to the accredited La
Salle in Pennsylvania.

In an audit of 130,000 teachers in Georgia two years ago, 11 were found
to have degrees from St. Regis University, a Spokane-based diploma mill
that claimed, apparently erroneously, to be accredited by the African
nation of Liberia. A Mead woman, her daughter and three business
associates who run St. Regis University were named in a lawsuit in
December by Regis University, a Jesuit school in Denver who said its
reputation is being harmed by bogus St. Regis degrees. The 11 Georgia
teachers have been barred from teaching in Georgia.

Similar investigations, according to EFF, have been launched in Texas,
California, Hawaii, the United Kingdom, Australia and India. Using an
illegitimate degree to obtain a job or promotion is illegal in North
Dakota, Nevada, Indiana, New Jersey, Illinois and Oregon, according to
EFF researcher Sarah Carrico.

Schoesler's bill was opposed by the state teachers' union, the
Washington Education Association. Teachers are already required to get
their bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from accredited
institutions, said WEA lobbyist Lucinda Young. It is the responsibility
of school districts to check those credentials.

Teachers must also state that they received their credits from an
accredited institution, she said. Lying is a violation of educators'
code of professional conduct, which can lead to suspension or revocation
of teaching credentials.

The union agrees that teachers should go to accredited universities, she
said, but she told lawmakers that the bill is a heavy-handed approach to
a small problem. It could also have unintended consequences for teachers
who get their extra training through courses at local educational
service districts.

"We have very few school districts where this is happening," Young said.
"I'm not sure it (the bill) is necessary."

 

[sigh]

All I can say is that the degree-verifying personnel from those tiny, perhaps impoverished and understaffed school districts need to be reading these forums and learning how to check credentials using the kinds of meager but nevertheless free and always effective resources that we have learned to use here. It costs us nothing, and some of us have actually become damned good at it, haven't we?

 

Having seen some of those districts, it really is close to impossible for them to check credentials. Typically, there is one clerk for human resources and that person already has a full-time job. Unless the great state of Washington is willing to cough up more tax money, it would be difficult to accomplish.

However, we make laws all the time that affect entities of a certain size. I don't see why they couldn't institute such a policy for districts over a certain size. You would catch almost all of the fraud that way.



Tom Nixon

 

Seattle Times editorial

Teacher credentials should be verified, Seattle Times. March 7, 2005.

 

Re: Seattle Times editorial

Amen!!!

How is checking a degree's legitimacy and/or that of its grantor very much of a throw further than checking its very existence, along with all the other references that said HR clerk had better darned well already be checking...

...as part of the very job which you correctly point out s/he already has?

That's true... and therein may lie the solution. However, I know from the experience of having actually used them, that there are some pretty darned effective -- and, most importantly, relatively inexpensive -- pre-employment reference- and credential-checking agencies out there. Why couldn't the job and/or promotion posting include language to the effect that "sometime after we narrow the finalists down to a small group that includes you, and our actually making you the offer, we're going to need to thoroughly check your credentials, for which we will require a check from you in the amount of $??.??, in advance, which amount shall not be refundable even if you don't ultimately get the job."

This just seems like a no-brainer to me... and I just don't understand why everyone's pacing back and forth, shaking their heads, mumbling to themselves, and wringing their hands over it.

There is simply no reason why this could not be done; or why it should cost the candidate much more than around fifty bucks.

So, other than increasing the cost of the degree from $500 to $550 for those who got them from diploma mills; and increasing the cost of the degree from $5,000 - $25,000 to $5,500 - $25,500 for those who earned them from accredited institutions, where's the problem?

 

Oops.

Oops.

Should have been:

• "...increasing the cost of the degree from $5,000 - $25,000 to $5,050 - $25,050 for those who...

Was too much in a hurry. My bad. Sorry.

 

But surely, SURELY, each of these school districts, no matter how tiny, has access to the Internet at this point in time? After all the money that has been spent developing K-12 infrastructure in the various states?

So... how difficult would it be, really, for that HR clerk in a small school district to just do a simple Google search for the university in question, and then perhaps a subsequent search to each of the four regional accrediting agencies? If it were a foreign school, chances are lots of cross-talk about its legitimacy would already be present in the Google results if it were anything less than legitimate.

It is not a full solution, but certainly a place for those small school districts to start - with a simple, yet intelligent, procedure that asks the clerk to "think outside the box" just for a minute.

 

I live here in Washington state, and talked with my state senator about this very bill.

Apparently, the real thing that killed it is that the Washington Education Association (the teachers union and lobbying group) was not in favor of it. And the WEA puts a lot of money into the various state races of those candidates it likes.

Why did the WEA not like the bill? Some cynics have suggested that since teachers with advanced credentials get paid more, the WEA would not want to stand in the way of those teachers acquiring those credentials by whatever means necessary. The WEA could have come out against diploma mills or other less than reputable means of earning these credentials but chose not to. Interesting.

 

look away

I wonder what other organizations "put money into it"?