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.

State Supreme Court to hear case of fired N.O. teachers after Katrina

State Supreme Court will hear the case of 7,000 teachers wrongly fired after Hurricane Katrina. 

"Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". -- American Enterprise Institute. 

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast exactly nine years ago, New Orleans school chief Paul Vallas saw the disaster as an opportunity to carry out his long-standing mission by replacing New Orleans' public schools with privately-run, union-free charter schools. He was brought in on the wake of  the firing of 7,500 teachers and other school employees -- most of them African-American -- and the crushing of United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), once Louisiana's largest labor union and its first racially integrated teachers' union and to deliver a crushing blow to the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), once Louisiana's largest labor union and its first racially integrated teachers' union. Vallas takes credit for installing the largest privately managed charter system in the nation.

His "grand experiment in urban education for the nation" worked, at least up until now and is seen by corporate reformers as a model for urban districts from Detroit to Chicago. The so-called Recovery School District (RSD)  has become the first district in the nation to do away completely with traditional public schools, replacing most of its older, veteran teaching force with younger, whiter 5-week wonders from TFA.

But a class-action lawsuit could finally bring some justice for the fired teachers. The case will be heard by the State Supreme Court on Thursday, Sept. 4th,  following lower court decisions that held the employees were wrongfully terminated. Teachers and their lawyers are expecting a positive decision.

Quinn chose Vallas as his running mate leaving thousands of IL teachers asking, why?

HE'S BACK...Now Vallas, the master of disaster and the king of school privatization, is gone from N.O., leaving behind a trail of lost, costly court cases and shattered public school systems from Haiti to Chile, from Philly to Bridgeport, CN. For some reason angry teachers will never understand, IL Gov. Pat Quinn has chosen teachers-union-buster Vallas as his Democratic Party running mate in his upcoming election against right-wing Republican billionaire Bruce Rauner. Good luck on that one, Governor.

Cross-posted at Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog

Billionaire corporate school reformer Mandel, buys a 'pipeline' to CT Gov. Malloy

Stephen Mandel, Jr. Net Worth $1.8 B (Forbes)

If you're a billionaire hedge-funder and corporate school reformer like Stephen Mandel, and you want a direct line to the governor's office, you buy one.

Mandel, the founder of the Lone Pine Capital hedge fund in Greenwich, is one of the biggest financial backers of CT Gov. Malloy, having  spent over $500,000 supporting the governor's agenda.

He's also chairman of the board of trustees at Dartmouth College and a member of the Harvard Business School’s board of dean’s advisers as well as member of the board of directors at Teach for America. Mandel, a one-time Goldman Sachs analyst, became a managing director at Tiger Management, a now-closed hedge fund whose especially high returns often made headlines. Business writers as a result often have referred to him as a “tiger cub” since his founding of Lone Pine Capital in 1997.

Gov. Malloy

His private foundation is paying three “fellows” to develop public policy in Malloy's office and two state departments. The foundation and its executive director, Meghan Lowney, has played a major role in shaping Connecticut’s education policy — particularly in the state’s failed takeover of the Bridgeport Board of Education.

That's the one that led to the illegal hiring and then un-hiring of Paul Vallas.  

Writes Wait, What? Blogger Jonathan Pelto:

Mandel and his aide, Meghan Lowney, played the pivotal role in the creation of Excel Bridgeport, Inc. the corporate funded education reform advocacy group that supported Malloy’s education reform bill, worked to pass Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch’s failed charter revision proposal to do away with an elected board of education in Bridgeport and has been the biggest boosters for Paul Vallas and Kenneth Moales Jr, the disgraced former chair of the Bridgeport Board of Education.

Lowney, together with Nate Snow, the executive director of the Connecticut chapter of Teach for America, had founded Excel Bridgeport, a proponent of the state takeover. One of the biggest opponents of that move, retired state Superior Court Judge Carmen L. Lopez, dubbed Lowney “the conspirator in chief”’ of the “coup that led to the illegal removal of a democratically elected Board of Education by the state.” 

The foundation claims its fellowship program is designed to select “emerging leaders from across the nation” so that they can have “the opportunity and support to further develop leadership skills while working in high-level projects in Connecticut.”

Those chosen receive annual salaries of between $50,000 and $70,000 plus medical and other benefits and function as “employees on loan, in-kind to the partnering public office,” according to the foundation. 

“Fellows work with senior officials on policy projects that address ever-changing issues and challenges,” it says, adding that they “may perform research relative to legislation, serve as an intermediary between different agencies or offices, or lead special projects.”

The foundation adds that one of its goals is to “develop a sustainable public leadership pipeline in Connecticut,” and that another is to “provide ad hoc support for the office in which they are placed.”

Yes, sustainable -- big time. 

Profiting off the 'deliberate starvation' of Philly schools

The district has never recovered from Paul Vallas' financial mismanagement. 

Yes, schools will open on time in Philly. But only by going further into debt to the banks. According to the NYT, ("A City Borrows So That Its Schools Open On Time") the situation is not as dire yet as Detroit’s. But the problem is so severe that the city agreed at the last minute on Thursday to borrow $50 million just to be able to open schools on time. Even with that money, schools will open Sept. 9 with a minimum of staffing and sharply curtailed extracurricular activities and other programs.

“The concept is just jaw-dropping,” said Helen Gym, who has three children in the city’s public schools. “Nobody is talking about what it takes to get a child educated. It’s just about what the lowest number is needed to get the bare minimum. That’s what we’re talking about here: the deliberate starvation of one of the nation’s biggest school districts.”

The district has been victimized by state takeover, which put the schools under the control of a corporate School Reform Commission. It was the SRC that brought in Paul Vallas as CEO and Vallas left the school district in 2007 in a state of financial chaos from which it has never recovered.

Look for Supt. Hite to try and take advantage of the crisis by forcing more concessions from teachers and the unions.

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

Indy is Vallas' latest privatization target

Legendary Ownership Society hustler Paul Vallas is at it again. His high-profile, high-profit target this time is Indianapolis. Here's a re-post of Diane Ravitch's August 13th post: "Saving School Districts Is Not a Full-time Job."

Paul Vallas is superintendent of schools in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is paid more than $200,000 a year. He also runs a private consulting business that just landed an $18 million contract to reorganize the Indianapolis school district even as he remains full-time superintendent in Bridgeport. The board that appointed Vallas has been declared illegal by a court in Connecticut, but they extended Vallas’ contract so he will be superintendent even if a new school board with a different majority wins.

I know that Vallas saved Chicago, and saved Philadelphia, and saved New Orleans, but it is astonishing that he is able to work full-time in Bridgeport and save Indianapolis at the same time.

ALEC finds a friend in the charter world

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an  extreme right-wing, anti-union, corporate front group that has worked successfully to pass pro-corporate laws in state legislatures across the country. They have been especially active in pushing legislation that supports school vouchers, privately-managed charter schools, and the outlawing of collective-bargaining rights for teachers.

Following the outcry over the group's pushing of  "Stand Your Ground" laws and racist voter-suppression acts, at least 15 major corporations, foundations, and other organizations have decided to end their funding commitments to ALEC.

Richmond

But ALEC has another way of financing itself that doesn't involve private corporations at all, writes Huffington's Zaid Jilani.  He reports that The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) is one of ALEC's members at least through 2009 and may well still be a member and is using public school money to support NACSA's work. NACSA's president and CEO Greg Richmond joined ALEC's Education Task Force around 2009.

Richmond's response:

 NACSA has worked with Democrats for Education Reform, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Aspen Institute, ALEC, and the National Governors Association, among many others, to impact charter school policy and practice.

Jilani writes:

"I followed up to ask if NACSA was currently an ALEC member. NACSA gave me no response."

Richmond is no stranger to Chicago where he worked under Paul Vallas. Vallas then brought him and NACSA to New Orleans to help establish a privately-run charter system there in the wake of Hurrican Katrina. I wrote about him and NACSA last December when they ran this great charter school hustle in Illinois.