Chris Cerf, recently enthroned deputy Chancellor and former president of the leading for profit EMO Edison Schools, had been holding on to shares of Edison worth millions of dollars until the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council [CPAC] inquired into the matter, the New York Times reported last Friday.
After Tweed and Cerf had learned that the issue had been placed on the agenda of a CPAC meeting and less than twenty-four hours before the meeting, Cerf divested himself of his stock in Edison. When asked at the meeting if he owned shares in Edison, Cerf replied that “I have no financial interest in Edison of any kind. Zero.” He did not reveal that he had just sold his shares.
On Saturday, the Times blasted Cerf and the DOE with this editorial, “An Instructive Moment.” The editorial concluded:
Mr. Cerf, who has held the deputy’s post for only a few months, says giving the full story of his stock holdings would have been a “distraction.” He was wrong. An honest and open dialogue is less distracting for everyone than having parents feeling ignored and misled, and fuming on the sidelines.
A subsudiary of Edison, Newtown Learning, currently possesses a contract with the NYC Department of Education to provide tutoring for students in low performing schools. Further, Edison has publicly indicated an interest in assuming one of the partnership positions being created as part of the permanent structural revolution of Tweed.
Following on the school bus debacle, this is the second issue in recent days which reveals the less than seemly side to Tweed’s contracts and other dealings with private entities. On Friday, Edwize examined the case of a bankrupt corporation, Platform Learning, that had managed to take in $63 million on contracts that entitled it to $7.6 million. In the comments to that post, Jackie Bennett notes a most interesting connection to the subject of today’s post: the head of Platform Learning, Eugene Wade, is the former executive Vice President of Edison. [Update: commenter Institutional Memory points out that he beat Bennett to the punch. My apologies.]
It appears that Tweed is living up to its historical namesake.
4 Comments:
1 institutional memory
· Feb 12, 2007 at 11:38 am
CHOPPED LIVER FROM THE CORNER DELI?
With all appropriate (im)modesty, let me point out that my comment to Leo’s “Corner Deli” entry, revealing the heretofore-unmentioned Platform/Wade/Edison connection, preceded Jackie Bennett’s incisive piece by four hours.
Speaking of corner delis, whaddam I, chopped liver?
2 Leo Casey
· Feb 12, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Sorry, Institutional Memory, my oversight.
And at the expense of someone with a good sense of humor.
A free corn beef on rye for you.
3 institutional memory
· Feb 12, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Fuhgeddaboudit.
I’ll take mustard on both sides, please.
4 Jackie Bennett
· Feb 12, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Institutional Memory, I’ll give you the garland and the garnish.
But I still cling to one little leaf, and an interesting one at that. The SCI investigation on Platform started in September 04. Yet, the Department renewed the contract with them in September of 05. How did that renewal happen with a company that had already taken 40 million on a 5.6 million dollar contract and that had been under investigation for a year?
The SCI investigation was big and hard to ignore. If you want evidence of when the investigation began, see page 3 of the SCI report, here:
Eventually, that second contract yielded another 23 million, and then the bankruptcy lawyer, Wade, filed for bankruptcy (nice port in a storm).