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The large-scale corruption that insinuated itself into the American educational system

Con Game Extraordinaire




One of the sorest subjects amongst conservatives in America is its public education system. In addition to being an ineffectual government bureaucracy, its educational model was crafted by dedicated Marxist elites in the eastern US, and had supplanting the family as one of its objectives as far back as the 1950s.
Then, there are the political games that have been played by unions, administrators, and political parties that served their varied agendas; suffice it to say that American children have suffered increasingly substandard education and experienced increasing levels of social engineering as time has worn on. There is certainly more wrong with the American educational system than this, as a feel-good curriculum replaced evidence based thought and diagnostic-prescriptive methodologies were replaced by anything goes. The large-scale corruption that insinuated itself into the American educational system remains a significant threat to education and the future of America as an ongoing and relevant concern to be sure, but it is fairly straightforward and superficial; that is, close to the surface. Concerted efforts on the part of informed voters could substantially ameliorate this problem over a short period of time. The corruption of educators in America – and in the West in general – has not been limited to implementing deleterious agendas within their academic infrastructure at home. Similar to the spectre of crony capitalism which helped to bring about the banking crisis in the US, fraud in the arena of international education has aided in compromising institutions of higher learning in the West.

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Once again, we will draw upon The People’s Republic of China for our study. New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. is the largest educational company in China, and the first Chinese educational institution to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. New Oriental provides educational programs from the preschool to post-graduate levels, textbook publishing, and training for overseas study. In 2001, they were sued by Educational Testing Services (a large US-based educational testing and assessment organization) for copyright infringement. ETS charged that New Oriental had copied, published, and sold its testing questions for standardized English examinations for Chinese-speaking students, netting New Oriental approximately $1 billion. In 2003, a Chinese court found in favor of ETS, and ordered New Oriental to pay the former approximately $1.2 million in damages. This was later reduced to around a half million dollars. Not a bad deal for New Oriental. We wager that the similarity here to the dubious penalties exacted upon millionaire insider stock traders on Wall Street won’t be lost on many Americans…

New Oriental had been training Chinese students not in English, but in how to pass the TOEFL

But this wasn’t all about money. The smoking gun lies in the reason ETS wound up suspecting Now Oriental in the first place. Early in 2001, ETS began noticing irregularities in the testing scores of Chinese ESL (English as a Second Language) students applying to universities in North America. As it turned out, in addition to cashing in on ESL’s program material, New Oriental had been training Chinese students not in English, but in how to pass the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) examination. This exam, published by ETS, is the international gold standard for ESL proficiency. Most universities accepting foreign students require this test, and it can be the greatest potential roadblock to study in the West. How could this come about? As one may imagine, the Chinese students who apply to the best universities in the US, Canada, and the UK are not plucked from random rice paddies and groomed for foreign study. These are students who come from money, or whom the government has deemed worthy of investment in their education. The Chinese are nothing if not adaptable (the dizzying success of a communist nation in the world of capitalism within a relatively short period is testimony to this fact), and the practice of bribery (as it is known in the West) is an integral part of getting things done in China. Money is essentially no object in such scenarios, and its influence doesn’t stop when a company like New Oriental sends its newly-minted “English speakers” off. What happens when groups of smiling, well-heeled Chinese students show up at the august gates of the most prestigious universities in the West not knowing a lick of English? Unable to function in the four modalities covered by the testing and yet producing documentation that presents them as having far higher functioning levels in reading, writing, speaking and listening , these students present a quandary to the institutions that have offered them entrance based on the scores. What does a University do when hundreds of foreign students demonstrate unequivocally that their language abilities as reported in the test results prove fraudulent? They have by this point in time paid their tuition fees, bought meal plans, textbooks (more about this later), secured dormitory space, bought vehicles, and added huge profits to the industries that live off the avails of the now prostituted business called education. If each of 100 students who entered Harvard for that first year were turned away, Harvard would loose approximately $4,000,000 in fees alone, but the spinoff effect on the local economy could be twice that amount. And that is only talking of a group of 100. What if the number is 1,000 or greater? Spread that across the entire United States world of academe and you have a pretty large chunk of change. So how do you deal with all this fraud if you’re among these institutes of higher learning? You do as every university and college in America has done: You bury it deep, never admit it, arrange tutoring for each student (a great way to employ grad students) and secure the future for the university, its faculty, grad students, and the surrounding economy. But never, never, blow the whistle on what really goes on. Accommodate, don’t invigilate. Make lemonade, don’t throw away the lemons. As one North American partner in a Chinese school lamented, “We are feeding totally wonderful and intelligent kids into the mill as fodder for the unscrupulous profiteers who will guide and push them along, milking fees and scamming them out of their money as they struggle valiantly to keep up. The trouble is that they should never have been given entrance in the first place, but the test scores showed them to be capable. A lie that we know only too well”. Do we dare to speak about the lowering of standards that this mitigates in favor of across America? Do we speak to the “accommodations” made by administrators, professors, and international departments, testers, marketers, recruiters and guidance counselors? How about the limited number of spaces available for American students who played by the rules and were shut out of their university or college of choice because there was no room? How many hopes and dreams of the indigenous student were denied because of fraudulent foreigners taking scholarships that really were never earned and commandeering the American’s spot? It’s pretty hard to address this serious issue with a straight face when the fellow currently occupying the Oval Office is said to be an archetype for just this sort of perfidy. Of course, to really address this we would have to determine if Mr. Obama was given entrance as a foreign student, and awarded a Fulbright Foreign Student Scholarship as an Indonesian, Muslim entrant or not. If he was foreign then, he would have had to show facility in the English language as demonstrated through scores on his IELTS (International English Language Testing System) or TOFEL examination. We don’t really even know the score in that game, do we? And that is just to get his foot in the door. The other steps that also need examination would be collusion of the sponsors, Registrar, school administration, and a bevy of other individuals all signing off on what is basically fraud. Couldn’t happen in America, now could it? We have safeguards against this sort of thing happening, don’t we? What if, however, money was there to be spread around to any who might stand in the way? In China this sort of “influence” is called guanxi (“relationship”), but essentially entails money under the table. As the good old cops in Dragnet would say, “Follow the money.” You thought we were going to say, “Just the facts Ma’am.” Fooled ya – and it’s hard to get at the facts if the records are sealed, or if the folks you need to talk to are dead. Do you remember the Arab dude who offered New York’s then-Mayor Giuliani $10 million towards a memorial to the victims of 9/11? Giuliani, having real backbone and a sense of honor, turned him down. Not so Harvard; they took a $20 million donation around the time that Obama was gaining entrance. Same Arab dude, different game. What was that money for again? To be continued – if we’re still alive next week...


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Erik Rush and Jim Garrow -- Bio and Archives

Crossing the Divide is the effort of a black American and a white Canadian to cross color, cultural, and sociopolitical lines, as well as those that reinforce ignorance of how things really work in our world.

Erik Rush is a New York-born columnist, author and speaker who writes sociopolitical commentary for numerous online and print publications. In February of 2007, Erik was the first to break the story of President (then Senator) Barack Obama’s ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright on a national level, which ignited a media firestorm that smolders to this day. His latest book, “Negrophilia:// From Slave Block to Pedestal ~ America’s Racial Obsession,” examines the racist policies by which the political left keeps black Americans in thralldom, white Americans guilt-ridden and yielding, and maintains the fallacy that America remains an institutionally racist nation. Links to his work are available itErikrush.com.

Dr. James Garrow, PhD. is a Canadian teacher and businessman. In 1968 he founded the Bethune Institute, the legendary schools in China named for the Canadian thoracic surgeon, Dr. Norman Bethune.


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