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A report from Democrats on the House education committee on Tuesday accused Education Undersecretary Diane Auer Jones of going to “extraordinary lengths” to help Dream Center Education Holdings after two of its schools lost accreditation.
However, Education Department spokeswoman Angela Morabito quickly dismissed the report as “blatantly political.”
According to the report, Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based religious organization, in 2018 purchased more than 100 campuses from the for-profit Education Management Corporation with the intention of running them as nonprofit programs. During the transaction, two campuses, the Art Institute of Colorado and the Illinois Art Institute, lost their accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission, a regional accreditor.
As it has before during an investigation by the committee into the now-defunct chain, the report charged that Dream Center continued to tell its students and the public on its website that it was accredited for six months. During that time, the Education Department continued to make payments to Dream Center even though for-profit institutions can only receive federal student loan payments if they are fully accredited.
Dream Center then sought retroactive accreditation. But when the accreditor reached out to career Education Department staff, they were told that according to department policy, accreditation cannot be made retroactively.
However, citing emails newly released by the committee, the report said Jones reached out to HLC staff with "different ideas about [Dream Center]," said the career staff was wrong about retroactive accreditation and asked the accreditor to work "exclusively with her at the Department on this issue." Then, in July 2018, Jones signed a department guidance allowing for retroactive accreditation, the report said.
“Rather than cutting off their access to taxpayer money -- as the law requires -- the documents reveal that the Department continued to send these schools millions of dollars in federal financial aid, while also working behind the scenes to attempt to secure ‘retroactive accreditation’ for these schools, a process that would change history to erase Dream Center's misrepresentations to students,” Rep. Bobby Scott, the Democratic chairman of the House education committee, said in a statement.
Morabito, though, said, “This is a blatantly political attempt to blame Diane Jones for the actions of the Higher Learning Commission, which violated both Department regulations and its own policies by trying to remove accreditation from two schools. Diane acted appropriately to protect students who had been told they were enrolled at accredited institutions, and whose institutions were still accredited.”
