Tuesday, April 1, 2003

Kaplan Announces Plans to Move Into Teacher Education By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK Kaplan Inc. announced on Monday that it planned to open a school of education in the 2004-5 academic year, and that it had hired the former chancellor of the New York City school system, Harold O. Levy, to run it. Kaplan, which already operates a law school and 46 undergraduate colleges, has made no secret of its growth ambitions in higher education. Company officials said they hoped the new school of education would draw a student body made up largely of working adults and midcareer professionals, who would take most of their classes via distance education, with most of the "clinical" experiences taking place in schools themselves. "The goal here is to attract a higher-caliber person into teaching," Mr. Levy said in an interview. "There is a crying social need for more teachers and for better qualified teachers." "Right now, there are a lot of barriers to entry" to a teaching career, Mr. Levy added. "Some of them are arbitrary, like, 'Do you have the time to drive down Tuesday night to take the course?'" Many other institutions -- some nonprofit, others run by companies, such as Sylvan Learning Systems and Education Management's Argosy University -- also offer teacher-education programs via distance education. Like Kaplan, they view teacher education as a growth field: The U.S. Department of Education has estimated that the country will need an additional 2.5 million teachers by 2010. The curriculum and particular degree offerings that Kaplan's school would offer are still being developed, but Mr. Levy said the goal was to create "a full-service school of education" that could eventually offer associate, bachelor's, and master's degrees. It might also offer a doctorate and a management degree. The company declined to predict enrollment or tuition figures. Kaplan said it would seek approval for the school from its accreditor, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Mr. Levy said it was too early to say whether the company would seek additional accreditation, such as recognition by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Arthur E. Wise, the president of that body, said on Monday that he hoped Kaplan would try to meet the standards of his organization, which already accredits more than 550 nonprofit insitutions. Neither Kaplan's for-profit status nor its focus on distance education would disallow it, he added. "The University of Phoenix has made it very clear that it plans to seek accreditation from us." Many of Phoenix's students take their classes online. Mr. Wise said he was not familiar with Kaplan's plans but noted that Mr. Levy had developed a reputation for being concerned about the need for a better-prepared teacher corps when he was chancellor of the 1.1-million-student New York City school system. During his tenure, Mr. Levy created a Teaching Fellows program, which helped career-changers gain teacher certification, in cooperation with local colleges. Jonathan Grayer, Kaplan's chairman and chief executive officer, said that plans for the school were still being formed and that the company had hired Mr. Levy with the understanding that he would help complete them. Mr. Levy will be a senior vice president of Kaplan. Before serving as New York's chancellor of schools, from 2000 through August 2002, he had held various legal posts with a number of financial companies. He also served on the New York State Board of Regents. Kaplan's announcement comes four months after the company dropped plans to buy a small Boston-area management school. Mr. Grayer said Kaplan is still "absolutely interested" in opening a business school, and would either buy an accredited one or start its own. The education school will not affect the timing of that, he said. "We're lucky to have the resources" to pursue several ventures at once, he said. Kaplan, which is based in New York, is part of the Washington Post Company, and in 2002 it became that company's biggest division, with revenues of $621-million, pushing ahead of the newspaper. Within Kaplan, higher education has just eclipsed test preparation as the biggest source of revenues. The company's campus-based and online divisions generated just under $250-million for the company in 2002, an increase of nearly 51 percent over revenues in 2001. Revenues of Kaplan's higher-education divisions were two-and-a-half times greater than those of two publicly traded companies, Strayer Education and Whitman Education Group, but only about two-thirds the size of those of the two next-biggest publicly traded corporate players, the University of Phoenix Online (a division of the Apollo Group that trades as a tracking stock) and Corinthian Colleges. Background articles from The Chronicle: Kaplan Inc. Buys Accountancy-Training Company (3/28/2003) Kaplan Abandons Plan to Buy Business School (11/29/2002) Kaplan Moves Beyond Test Preparation With Purchases of For-Profit Colleges (2/15/2002) Expanding Its Reach in Higher Education, Kaplan Buys Chain of Commercial Colleges (7/7/2000) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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