Revelations of corruption in business and government are becoming an everyday affair, with example after example of people in leadership positions using elevated status for personal gain rather than for the public good. The deluge of stories about lying and cheating politicians, industry lobbyists, and corporate executives can lead to easy cynicism about how things work in business and politics.
But what about when corruption flourishes in public schools?
A recent series of investigative articles I reported for Our Schools, an education project of the Independent Media Institute, found numerous instances of school purchases and personnel being steered toward decisions that rewarded opportunistic leaders and well-connected companies rather than students and teachers. And even though a number of such exposés suggest systemic corruption, media accounts generally frame these scandals as singular examples of corrupt behavior.
A recent investigation found numerous instances of school purchases and personnel being steered toward decisions that rewarded opportunistic leaders and well-connected companies rather than students and teachers.
But take, for example, former superintendent of Kansas City public schools John Covington, who suddenly resigned his position there to run a state-operated school district in Detroit. He took with him an employee Mary Esselman, and their relationships with a software company called Agilix, its “Buzz” learning platform, and the consulting firm, School Improvement Network. Detroit Metro Times journalists Curt Guyette reported that the software was barely functional and increasingly angered teachers forced to use it. But Covington and Esselman worked to get the Buzz software platform “expanded”—not only in Michigan but across the country.
Superintendent of Seattle schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, was accused by board members of having numerous ongoing conflicts of interest and ultimately fired when an audit found that $1.8 million in contracts awarded through a program she administered “provided no public benefit or were questionable.” Covington hired her for his Michigan gig, too.
In Los Angeles, superintendent John Deasy’s tenure was overwhelmed by scandals with private contractors, including the rollout of a new student records system “widely described as ‘disastrous’” and a nearly $1.3 billion failed iPad program, which Deasy personally brokered with Apple and the Pearson publishing company.
In Clarke County, Georgia, which includes the city of Athens, Superintendent Demond Means was accused by a parent group of having a conflict of interest with Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), a private nonprofit offering a consulting and training program. Local news outlet Flagpole Magazine reported that Means recommended “the board spend $511,000 to send teachers for [AVID] training” without disclosing that he had an ongoing business relationship with AVID in which he received $500 for a day’s work. Although Means was eventually cleared of the charges, controversies continue to swirl around Means’s business dealings.
Another concerning pattern Our Schools found was a tendency for education-related businesses to employ circular business models that allow businesses hired by schools to rehire themselves to the school for other contracts.
For instance, businesses that carry out searches for new superintendents or other leaders, also often offer other support services for those newly hired school leaders. This arrangement, Our Schools found, can influence the school hiring process so it’s geared to hiring leaders who can aid the business’s future sales.
Businesses that carry out searches for new superintendents or other leaders, also often offer other support services for those newly hired school leaders.
Our Schools found multiple cases in which search firms were involved in superintendent searches that recycled favored candidates—despite numerous flaws, including falsified academic or professional credentials, documented evidence of financial mismanagement, and incidents of conflicts of interest.
In multiple districts across Illinois, Our Schools found examples where superintendent search firm Hazard, Young, Attea, and Associates (HYA), based in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, rotated administrators into and out of leadership positions while HYA’s associated firm, the ECRA Group, subsequently sold those districts an array of services.
One district, Oak Park Elementary District 97, used HYA to hire Albert Roberts. During his tenure, the district hired ECRA to produce an analysis of the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students in the district. When Roberts retired, the district used HYA again for a superintendent search that resulted in hiring Carol Kelley. Kelley currently appears in ECRA’s marketing literature touting the firm’s Strategic Dashboard.
Another popular scheme involves organizations that serve as intermediaries between school districts and businesses that sell school-related products and services. The result is a pay-to-play scheme in which school leaders are paid to meet privately with companies who then receive inside tracks to strike lucrative new deals.
One of these intermediary firms Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI) made national headlines when the New York Times reported how the company paid superintendents “honoraria” to travel to attend conferences at luxury resorts where they met with company representatives. Companies underwrote the conferences by paying ERDI. (ERDI recently issued a press release in which it said honoraria paid to school leaders will be paid “on their behalf to the nonprofit/charitable foundations or organizations of their choice.”)
In the Youngstown City School District in Ohio, CEO Krish Mohip was a paid consultant for ERDI while the district had a $261,914 contract with a partner company of ERDI. Beaufort County, South Carolina superintendent Jeff Moss became the subject of an FBI investigation because of contracts with ERDI and thirty other companies connected to the firm while he worked as a paid consultant for ERDI.
In Pittsburgh, reporters found the school district spent more than $14 million on dozens of no-bid contracts to firms connected to ERDI at the same time superintendent Anthony Hamlet served as a paid consultant for ERDI. In Baltimore County, Maryland, Shaun Dallas Dance was convicted of perjury when it was discovered that during his time as superintendent he had concealed $4,600 he’d been paid by ERDI for participating in confidential meetings with vendors at an ERDI conference.
When suspect deals come to light, school board members who signed off on purchasing decisions are often the first to get the blame.
But the deals are often brokered in secrecy or presented to local school boards in ways that make insider schemes appear legitimate. Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Our Schools there are multiple ways superintendents can keep board members in the dark about the inner workings of contractor relationships and district operations.
Superintendents can also stock their administrative staffs with associates from their previous employers in order to show a unified front to the board, and they sometimes hire consultants to help them “train” the board.
Our Schools discovered multiple examples of school chiefs prohibiting district employees from speaking to school board members, declining to answer board member questions, stirring up controversies to distract from the issues at hand, and even flat-out lying to board members.
Frogge also pointed out that a school board member position is customarily a part-time job paying very little money, and board members are elected to serve as representatives of parents and voters, not to be experts on school finance and administration.
Public school districts will continue to be vulnerable prey for careerists and exploitative businesses as long as “education is still viewed as a gold mine,” Thomas Pedroni, an associate professor of curriculum studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, told Our Schools.
Pedroni laid much of the blame for the growing corruption in the school leadership arena on an education reform movement that has exhorted schools to operate more like businesses and mimic corporate leadership hiring processes.
Even when opportunistic school leaders and exploitative businesses have horrible academic results, as they often do, they still make a lot of money in a short amount of time, Pedroni warned. And taxpayers—and school children—are worse off for it.
“School board members need to become better informed and more savvy about profit motives and organizations that seek to influence their selection,” Frogge said. Avoiding conflicts of interest with school leaders and outside firms is “critical,” she said, because decisions that are driven by these insiders “can lead to catastrophic outcomes for students and staff.”