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Storefront High

Gov. Jeb Bush and the Department of Education's bias toward private education offered cover for a Miami diploma mill.

There is a diploma mill in Miami where for $399 and a few hours with mail-order study guides any floundering high school student can make the grades required to play college football. Its graduates include one youth who, despite intensive tutoring, could never score higher than 53 percent on any test at his university and had to be benched for academic ineligibility.

"Education at your convenience," boasts University High School, whose founder and former owner served time for an Arizona diploma mill. "Our speed learning program is the easiest, fastest way to become a high school graduate.... No classes to attend. Study at home, at your own pace. Open book exams. No time limits."

The exposure of this racket, a public service performed Sunday by the New York Times , heaps disgrace on a host of willfully witless accomplices. These include the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which accepts University High School's transcripts despite its lack of any credible accreditation, and the 11 Division I universities, including Florida State, South Florida, Central Florida, Florida International and Florida, that awarded athletic scholarships to its graduates.

The most shameful failure, however, is that of the state of Florida for providing private schools with not even a minimum degree of oversight. Although the neglect that fostered a scam like University High School predates Gov. Jeb Bush's administration, his bias toward private education is an obstacle to reform.

The Department of Education serves in effect as a front for diploma mills like University High School, listing them side by side with credible private institutions that work hard to earn and keep their accreditation. The department's Web site reports what the schools claim by way of accreditation without a clue to the public whether there is substance or not. In University High School's case, one of its accrediting agencies appears to be a one-man shop run by a New Mexico Libertarian whose Web site disclaims any evaluation of a school's "materials, teaching staff or educational philosophy." Another agency that University claimed on its state listing told the newspaper that it does not accredit any high school. A third said that University had never applied for its accreditation. Yet the Department of Education broadcast University's pretenses to prospective students and parents without even a cursory check.

The department, which says the Legislature has given it no authority over private schools, has responded to the New York Times expose by asking the Miami-Dade state attorney to investigate University High School and by offering to help. But that's a day late and a dollar short. The department also needs to be heard from on how it could be empowered to prevent such abuses. The NCAA, meanwhile, is belatedly reconsidering its tolerant policy on correspondence schools, partly in response to a letter of concern from the Southeastern Conference, two of whose members had undertaken their own investigations of University High School. As an administrator at the University of Florida described it, University High was "kind of a storefront operation" that "didn't seem to have much in the way of an academic program." The University of Florida player in question transferred while his status was being reviewed.

The real victims of the scandal are not the colleges whose scholarship athletes may not make the grades to stay on the field. They are the struggling students who resort in despair to diploma mills for the illusion of the education that the state of Florida has failed to provide them. "Choice" is Bush's preferred remedy for perceived shortcomings in the public schools, but when "choice" merely provides cover for scams such as University High School, it becames as much a part of the fraud as the fly-by-night schools themselves. In that regard, the governor, the Department of Education and every indolent legislator are scarcely less culpable than the perpetrators.

[Last modified November 30, 2005, 02:15:38]