In the media

Ohio Auditor’s opponent in the state attorney general’s race said that he should immediately have referred to authorities a whistleblower’s allegations that the state’s then-largest online charter school intentionally inflated attendance figures. The Education Department previously found that the school significantly over-reported its number of full-time-equivalent students and owed the state $60 million for the 2015-2016 school year. Another $19 million penalty was assessed for 2016-2017.

KXAS-TV was awarded a 2017 Peabody Award for its extensive NBC 5 Investigates series, “Big Buses, Bigger Problems: Taxpayers Taken for a Ride”. NBC 5’s investigation exposed a web of corruption, staggering financial mismanagement, hidden personal relationships and conflicts of interest inside Dallas County Schools, a public agency responsible for transporting more than 75,000 school children daily in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The University of Kansas and North Carolina State University have become embroiled in the college sport inducement scandal after federal prosecutors in New York elected to expand the case, which involves German sportswear manufacturer Adidas. In September, a senior executive from Adidas, along with four assistant basketball coaches from the University of Arizona, Auburn University, the University of Southern California and Oklahoma State University, were arrested on federal corruption charges relating to the payment of inducements to star athletes.

Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.

Universities in the United States should close down their Confucius Institutes – teaching and research centres funded directly by the Chinese government – says a report by the National Association of Scholars or NAS. The wide-ranging report includes additional insights on the institutes’ often-secretive operations gleaned from the contracts signed with a dozen US universities, obtained through freedom of information law requests. The report, Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and soft power in American higher education, says unless contracts between US universities and the Hanban can be renegotiated to include more transparency, financial and hiring autonomy for US host universities, academic freedom guarantees and other safeguards, the institutes should be shut down.