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Jeb Bush plays innocent, looks guiltier:
Last week he wiggled away from Bloomberg and, before that, from the board of a healthcare company that has made a sweet fortune thanks to Obamacare.
Now, the Washington Post reports, he’s dumped all directorships, including his own education foundation and a for-profit education business that charges students for courses. That decision “culminated a string of moves he has made in recent days to shed business interests that have enriched him since leaving office in 2007.”
Jeb Bush must be feeling uneasy, if not guilty, about some of his interests since he’s thinking about abandoning his other businesses, including a Romneyesque “business advisory group” and a consulting firm.
What’s he been up to? Well, at least one of his “educational” gigs has a real Texas control-freak flavor, a business called “Academic Partnerships” that sounds more like profiteering than educating.
Bush’s financial stake in Academic Partnerships, the online education firm, has been relatively small for a millionaire — a $60,000-a-year fee and ownership of a small amount of stock, said Randy Best, the company’s founder and chief executive. Even so, Bush’s affiliation with the firm — which has contracts with schools in a half-dozen states and several foreign countries and has annual sales of $100 million — could complicate his effort to promote his record as an education reformer.
The company receives up to 70 percent of the tuition some students pay to public universities, and some faculty members say it siphons money from the schools while asserting too much control over academic decisions.
Best, a Texas entrepreneur and major political donor, said his firm has increased professors’ access to online students and helped schools attract additional revenue, while Bush aides say the former governor does not have business interests related to K-12 education, which has been his policy focus. ...WaPo< /blockquote>
He’s no martyr to his passion for education. He’s been making out like a bandit with that Academic Partnerships biz.
A 2012 report by the Texas Tribune said the company received $105 million in revenue from 24 public colleges and universities, including eight in Texas. Forbes magazine reported in 2013 that the company had contracts with 40 U.S. schools.
Bush and Best wrote a 2013 article for Inside Higher Ed predicting that online classes would make higher education more accessible. “Companies like ours — Academic Partnerships — are helping universities respond to this transformative movement,” they wrote.
On some campuses, however, faculty members have viewed the arrival of Academic Partnerships with suspicion.
When the company arrived at Arkansas State University in 2011, for instance, faculty members were concerned “about a loss of quality and control,” said Jack Zibluk, a professor of media studies who headed the faculty senate at the time. Additional controversy erupted, he said, when some school officials involved in negotiations with the company later landed jobs with an affiliated firm. …WaPo
Did he wake up this morning, January 1, feeling like Mr. Clean? Do we believe he is Mr. Clean?