Byrd-Bennett, SUPES & Harcourt's goal in Detroit: Loot and then burn.

Byrd-Bennett's inner circle, Tracy Martin, Sherry Ulery and Rosemary Herpel, followed her from Cleveland and Detroit.

I'm glad that Chicago reporters are finally uncovering the depth and breadth of the SUPES scandal. Today, the trail leads them back to Detroit where Barbara Byrd-Bennett was brought in to run the district as a high-paid consultant after leaving Cleveland. In the end, I predict the trail will extend even farther and higher up, as the edu-criminals begin rolling over to save their own skins.
According to today's Sun-Times:

An FBI agent believed corrupt former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett worked to “fraudulently steer” a $40 million contract to one of the country’s biggest educational publishers while she worked for the Detroit schools.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following the case or to those of us who have been writing about the takeover of Detroit's public school system, which smelled of corruption and mismanagement from day one.

With the help of three accomplices brought over from Cleveland, including Tracy Martin and Sherry Ulery, to rig the bidding process, BBB funneled big contracts to testing/textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Turns out, she was on Houghton's payroll before and after Detroit. Martin, Herpel and Ulery then became part of BBB's inner circle at CPS and have now been named in the SUPES indictment.

Here's the FBI warrant on BBB from Detroit.

More from S-T:

The feds told the judge an “unusual financial transaction” took place about three weeks before the contracting process for the Detroit deal began. Records show the FBI’s “analysis of bank account belonging to Barbara Byrd-Bennett shows a deposit into her Money Market account on July 20, 2009 in the amount of $26,530.26 from ‘Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.’”

Before arriving in Detroit in May 2009, Byrd-Bennett had worked for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for three years for an annual salary of more than $155,000, according to court records.

 A couple of months after leaving the Detroit schools — where she was an independent contractor with the title of chief academic and accountability officer — Byrd-Bennett returned to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The company offered her $182,000 a year to work 21 hours each week, the FBI said.

The whole purpose of the Detroit takeover, as later admitted by BBB's successor Roy Roberts, in May 2011, was to, “blow up the district and dismantle it.” But to BBB and her SUPES friends, the goal was to loot first and then burn.

Before the succession of state interventions started in 1999, DPS had a $93 million dollar operating surplus, enrollment over 173,000, and academic gains. Six years of emergency management from Lansing since 2009 has widened the performance gap between Detroit’s students and their Michigan counterparts; enrollment has plummeted; and the district’s operating deficit and long-term debt have smashed all previous records.

Over the ensuing years, the Detroit Public Schools has been run into ruin, with over 200 schools closed, and many of the district’s buildings turned over to charter operators.

Note to Chicagoans: The BBB-HMH deal likely wouldn't have happened without the dismantling of the district's elected school board. That board regularly reported contract irregularities, but, stripped of their powers of oversight, they were neutered in the face of corporate "reform."

They call themselves a "global learning company."

As for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I have been writing about them for years. HMH is now one of the biggest text/testing publishers, right up there with Pearson and McGraw-Hill.

They have been among the most aggressive companies bellying up to the Common Core feeding trough. They have been buying up everything  even vaguely associated with Common Core. In April, they purchased Scholastic Corp.'s educational technology and services business for $575M. They've already acquired Channel One and Curiosityville. Last month they launched Netflix for Learning. They plan on launching HMH Marketplace, online tools and games for educators to use in the classroom, in 2016.

HMH was even intent on purchasing SUPES from BBB's indicted co-conspirators Gary Solomon and Tom Vranas.

Besides the Detroit deal, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was mentioned in September 2014 court records regarding the alleged kickback scheme at CPS. According to those records, there was a 2012 email in which SUPES co-owner Thomas Vranas told Byrd-Bennett: “If we are purchased by HMH [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], we will give you 5 percent of total amount we are purchased for.”

Nobody has been charged criminally in connection with the investigation of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Detroit deal. Why not?

SUPES IS BACK -- New names on the letterhead. Looking for more no-bid contracts from CPS

Joseph "Joey" Wise

“The primary leaders [Solomon & Vranas] of the former SUPES Academy have begun new endeavors and will not be joining us in this work ahead.” -- Joseph Wise

The federal investigation in Chicago of SUPES has obviously been sandbagged. Federal investigators have refused to comment on the investigation. Now even with Barbara Byrd-Bennett fleeing the scene and a grand jury supposedly in session, SUPES is trying to make a comeback.

After all, UNO did it with the feds on their trail, simply by shifting a few culpable leaders into different positions, changing the names on company letterhead, and relying on political powerhouses like Mike Madigan, Eddie Burke, and Rahm Emanuel to provide cover. So reported new SUPES owner, Joseph Wise figures he can pull it off as well, cashing in on the next round of no-bid deals CPS regularly hands out to connected consulting firms. Wise, whose companies have received at least $5 million in recent business from CPS, claims to have acquired "the best parts of the SUPES Academy."

Wise, who formerly worked for scandalized SUPES leaders Gary Solomon and Thomas Vranas, also wants to get more business from CPS by opening alternative schools under contract with the city school system. He runs a company called Acceleration Academies which hopes to open open eight campuses in Chicago, four of them starting next fall in Belmont-Cragin, Washington Heights, West Englewood and Bronzeville. Acceleration Academies describes itself as being run by Wise and partner David Sundstrom with two investors, Bryan Daniels and Steve King, who “have a deep interest in providing quality educational communities for underserved populations in Chicago.”

Obviously, deep pockets as well.

Wait, things get better. Wise is also "looking at the possibility" of Acceleration Academies working with Distinctive Schools, a Chicago charter school management company that he started with Sundstrom in 2011. Distinctive oversees the operation of four CPS-approved Chicago International Charter Schools campuses.

Actually, Wise is chairman of the board of Distinctive. He was the chief education officer for the company as of June 2014, tax records the company filed show. So I don't think he will have any problem "working with" them.

According to the Sun-Times, Distinctive Schools already gets about $18 million a year in taxpayers’ money to run the four charter schools as part of CICS. The charter network was headed until recently by Beth Purvis, who left after eight years to take a $250,000-a-year job as Gov. Bruce Rauner’s education secretary.

SUPES will now be called the National Superintendent Academy which is “wholly owned” by Atlantic Research Partners, a Florida company founded in 2007 by Wise and David Sundstrom.

According to the Sun-Times:

Wise said he first encountered Solomon in the late 2000s while working for what was then known as Edison Schools, a national operator of private schools that hired PROACT Search to help with hiring. Wise said they spoke by phone and met when he moved to Chicago...

...Solomon mentioned Wise in an August 2009 email to Byrd-Bennett when she was running Detroit’s public school system, where he was then trying to get business.“Joey Wise suggested to try again to connect with you”... Asked about that, Wise said, “I don’t remember that at all.

Wise likes to talk to the press a lot about "transparency". He tells S-T reporter Lauren Fitzpatrick, "You have to be really careful to make sure you’re transparent enough about what you’re doing. And we worked really hard to have that transparency and not misuse that relationship.”

But when asked, he won't say how much his company paid in the deal with Solomon and Vranas. He said the deal included a "confidentiality clause".

Feds looking for big fish in mother-of-all Chicago schools scandal

Rolling Over: Rauner claims it was Rahm, not his foundation, that brought SUPES into town and gave them a $20.5 million no-bid contract.

I told you...Once the feds start turning over rocks, there's a lot of things crawling around down there.

OK, BBB is toast. She's grabbed the money and ran. Left without a trace. Spending more time with the fam? Maybe she joined some secret underground group. No one seems to know. But she was small potatoes anyway.

Rahm is also MIA. He's become quiet as a mouse. Yes, he bought the election, but what did he really win? The city's credit rating is plummeting once more, making it almost impossible for him to continue borrowing against a gigantic mountain of debt, doing more debt-swaps, or solving the city's pension crisis.

Seems like every time there's a crisis, he ducks out of town and lets his underlings dangle in the wind. But Rahm is definitely scarred by all of this.

Now the feds seem to have set sights on the big boys in the world of power philanthropy, the Chicago Public Education Fund (CPEF). They're naming names. Subpoenas are flying and if they need a part-time server, I happen to be available.

The result has been exactly the one the feds wanted. Apply a little pressure and even Napa Valley Wine Club members like Rahm and Rauner will roll over on one another. Now Gov. Rauner, the Fund's biggest player and its former board president, is telling media, it was Rahm, not us (CPEF) that brought Solomon and SUPES into town.

"My experience with the public education fund has been mostly good. Although I will say this, the fund didn't make many of its own decisions as much as it was a facilitator for what the mayor or the schools or the leadership wanted to do," the governor said. 

No-bid contracts with kickbacks are no big deal in this town. It's like everyone has just discovered pay-to-play (the motto engraved over the mayor's office door on the 5th floor of City Hall. What's really behind the feds' invasion of Rahmville? Nobody I ask seems to know for sure. Lots of guesses though.

Rahm & Holder.

Is this Eric Holder's last hurrah, or what? Is revenge really a meal best served cold? (Think winter in Chicago).  It couldn't be something from way back in Rahm's White House days, could it? Remember Rahm telling him to STFU on gun control? Could it have something to do with being stonewalled by Arne Duncan in Louisiana?

Wasn't Holder just in town this summer, helping to kickstart Rahm Emanuel's re-election campaign, hailing the “amazing” turnaround in school safety? Obviously, he was doing a lot more than that.

Or is this the Obama administration making a preemptive strike on a Republican governor who seems bent on pushing the school system into bankruptcy and rewriting the state constitution? Will Illinois break another record for corruption by sending its fifth governor to prison? Or will Holder be content with naming the names of the entire Chicago ruling class before he backs off?

If you haven't done so already, check out Carol Felsenthal's piece in Chicago Mag. She writes:

Remember all the talk during the April 7 mayoral runoff of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent? It would be difficult to assemble a board that screams 1 percent louder than CPEF’s—from the schools its members attended to jobs held to marriages made.

Among CPEF’s board members:

Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, hedge fund genius, and widely reported to be “the richest man in Illinois.”

Penny Pritzker, billionaire heir to the Pritizker fortune, former member of the CPS board, now an emeritus member of the CPEF board, which she once headed as chair.

Susan Crown, principal of the family business Henry Crown and Company and chairman of the Susan Crown Exchange, “a social investment organization” with a focus on education.

Mellody Hobson, president, Ariel Investments and wife of billionaire George Lucas.

Helen Zell, philanthropist, executive director, Zell Family Foundation, and wife of real estate billionaire Sam Zell.

Jana R. Schreuder, Northern Trust Company COO—the first woman in that position—and a past Teach for American advisory board member.

There are educators on CPEF’s board. They include:

Tony Smith, Rauner’s just-appointed superintendent of Illinois schools, formerly head of the school district in Oakland, California, although never a classroom teacher and a long-time advocate of charter schools.

Timothy Knowles, Director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs, chairman of the Urban Education Institute. Knowles is also a former deputy superintendent of the Boston Public Schools and the “founding director of Teach for America in New York City.

Laura Bilicic, former classroom teacher, the co-founder and former head of a New York City private school for children with “significant learning challenges.”

Penny Bender Sebring, a former high school teacher and current senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

But there's still some big names missing from this Rogue's Gallery of power philanthropists and corporate-style school reformers. For some reason, none in the press will dare say his name. But I'll give you a hint. He's Gary Solomon's old partner. He just ran a losing campaign for Lt. Governor on Pat Quinn's ticket. He recently was run out of Bridgeport, CT. And his initials are PV.

More to come on him. I promise.

It's $20 million no-bid for Supes-to-Nuts with Gary Solomon in Chicago

The men who run Supes have, shall we say, a somewhat questionable track record. And all this in a city where major, well-respected universities already train principals, where 49 schools have shut down and others are losing teachers, classroom aides, clerks, lunch ladies and other workers and programs right and left, to the tune of $68 million in cuts -- or $82 million, depending on whose math you believe. -- Lorraine Forte at Huffington

A few principals attending the Chicago Supes training now in progress are texting me, telling me what a joke it is. It's not that the sessions are all that bad. It's that the principals themselves have taken it over. They are running it -- "sharing stories," they text me.

"Inmates have taken over the asylum," says one south-side principal. The joke is that BBB has given huckster Gary Solomon and his team a $20 million no-bid contract to run this thing. Supes, she says, brings nothing to the table. Any one of a number of local groups or university people could have easily facilitated.

Another text: We (the intellectually and skill bereft cohort) are now creating the sessions. 

So why does this Wilmette-based, Broad funded, pro-charter Supes Academy land the largest no-bid contract awarded in years for professional development?

Well, that's an easy one.  Byrd-Bennett worked for the company as a coach up until the time she came on board at CPS as a consultant. According to Catalyst, "There’s also conflicting information about Byrd-Bennett’s involvement with another company owned by the same individuals who run the Supes Academy."

Writes Catalyst's Sarah Karp:

Up until April 2012, Byrd-Bennett worked as a consultant to the Supes Academy. At that time, she was brought on at CPS as the chief education advisor to then-CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, a contract position for which she was paid $21,500 a month.

In addition, Byrd-Bennett is listed as a senior associate for a superintendent search firm called PROACT Search, in documents dated August 2012—four months after taking the position with CPS. PROACT is run by the same individuals who lead Supes: Gary Solomon, the executive director, and Thomas Vranas, the president. (Another Supes founder listed on its website, Tim Quinn, is managing director of the Broad Foundation; Byrd-Bennett worked as an executive coach for Broad through this past April.)

Byrd-Bennett is one of four contacts listed in the proposal for services submitted by PROACT in its bid to do a superintendent search for the Norwalk, Connecticut, school district. She has an e-mail address listed in the proposal. When PROACT won the contract, an official for the company was quoted in the local newspaper touting that Byrd-Bennett, who by that time had been named as Chicago’s CEO, was a contractor with the firm.

You can read the rest yourself. I'll defer to the new federal prosecutor to determine the legality of all this. But if the $96 million UNO charter deal was legal, and the Zimmerman shooting was legal, then this is probably legal also. Most of our cynical and corruption-hardened citizenry might just shrug offKarp's excellent Catalyst expose as just more-of-the-same, to go along with UNO charter chicanery, pension demagogy, TIF-type slush funds, and Rahm's DePaul basketball swindles of the taxpayers. And of course they'd be right.

But there are a few things I found unusual in this latest boondoggle. One, is the response by UIC's Steve Tozer, quoted in the article. You would think that UIC's ed school (of which I am a proud grad and former employee) would be upset that they didn't get the contract and that BBB went out of town to bring in her old cronies. Instead we have principal trainer Tozer saying things like $20 million “is an okay price to pay if Chicago can produce good leaders.”

Tozer says the University of Illinois, which has a well-regarded training program for urban principals, would have looked into bidding on the contract had the process been open. Tozer had not heard of Supes until the organization had already been hired. 

But Solomon has been hustling business here for years. He's a Broad guy who also worked with Paul Vallas and ran his Synesi consulting company which has been trying to get back into the city ever since Mayor Daley sent Vallas packing off to Philly.

Solomon ran Vallas' consulting company

The $20 million contract is the fourth awarded to Supes since October of 2012. The three other contracts include two for $2 million each and a third for $225,000 for consulting services. In 2011-12, the Chicago Public Education Fund paid for training of Chiefs of Schools and Network Chiefs.

Karp writes:

Solomon went on to be a sales associate and then a vice president for the Princeton Review, a test preparation company, and counted CPS as one of his clients.
In 2005, he ventured out on his own and created two companies, one focusing on consulting and the other on web development. In Philadelphia, he marketed the consulting company as using the “Paul Vallas method of school reform.”

Maybe Tozer is just being a team player, hoping UIC gets a subcontract down the road. After all, it doesn't look like Supes has the talent to handle this by themselves.

They could end up like the dog that caught the bus.

Cross-posted from Mike Klonsky's Blog