On the first question, I do not think that the question is the character of Chris Cerf. I think it a good practice to assume the best of people one does not know, and Cerf falls into that category for me.

But a public trust requires that there be no appearance of impropriety, as well as no reality, that there be no conflict of interest that could be exploited. That is why public figures in positions of power and responsibility use such devices as ‘blind trusts’ while they are in office. We should not have to decide whether or not we can trust public figures to not exploit conflict of interests — remove such conflicts, and the question is mute.

I’d say yes, absolutely, and especially by the second contract. Why couldn’t anyone do better than estimate 1.9 million on contract number two when 40 million had already gone down the hole in contract number one?

Besides, this is a company under investigation for giving bribes and kickbacks — to principals, parent coordinators, kids, a paraprofessional. An awful lot of money seems to have been floating around.

Where was the oversight?

The same DoE that so blithely wrote these checks also parsed the transportation rules, throwing kids off buses — all to save, what? Not one quarter of this.

Why such oversight on little kids and working moms and dads? Why none for Platform Learning?

Well, maybe I’m naive.

Contracts over estimate are one thing. Renewed contracts nine times over estimate for companies under investigation for those kinds of activities — yeah, I’d say that’s bad.

Like many, I love the use of the internet to go after potentially corrupt activities and I am happy to see you making that effort.

With regard to Cerf, I think his responses to a couple of questions were deceptive. He was put in an awkward situation — in fact it looks like he was completely set up, but I only get that sense from what I have read — but he handled the situation poorly. On the flip side, one important point is that he is giving up for no compensation warrants that might have been worth millions of dollars. I think he did this for some combination of two reasons:

1. He knows the warrants he gave up were probably not worth nearly as much as the numbers you and others quote.

2. He very much wants to work in NYC public education and it wasn’t worth the time and distraction to fight the issue.

In any case, based on my knowledge of the situation, I think it is far-fetched that Cerf hoped to use his position in government as a means to enrich himself. Is that what you are suggesting? Or just that it looks bad? If you dig deeper, I would be surprised if your honest conclusion was that Cerf was planning on using his position to enrich himself.

With regards to Platform Learning, I would break the issue into two components:

1. Is it bad that Platform received funds well in excess of the initial estimated amount?

2. Is it bad if Platform conducted business in an inappropriate manner?

#2 is clearly a bad thing and I hope we get to the bottom of the situation.

I think Joe Williams was questioning #1. I have the same question. I think Platform got paid based on the amount of work they did and they did much more work than was initially estimated. This could be a bad thing, especially if they did this via inappropriate practices, but in and of itself it is not necessarily a problem. Indeed, if they were doing a high-quality job, it could be a good thing. Does that make any sense?

Ken