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* My Crain’s Chicago Business column…
Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and her indicted pals apparently were quite a group of grifters.
If the U.S. attorney’s office is right, they successfully concealed their graft from some pretty important and powerful people, including a mayor, a financial titan, a future governor and a future U.S. Senate candidate.
How could so many well-educated, successful people drop the ball so badly?
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former investment banker and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, flat out denies knowing anything about Byrd-Bennett’s nefarious activities. The Northwestern University alum says he never met her alleged benefactor, Gary Solomon, a high-flying education consultant who allegedly promised to pay “B-3,” as Emanuel affectionately called her, hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table for feeding him school contracts. Emanuel’s denials came after the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Solomon was involved in the hiring of both B-3 and her predecessor, Jean-Claude Brizard, by the mayor’s handpicked school board.
Solomon’s infamous Supes Academy training program for principals was started at CPS with seed money from the Chicago Public Education Fund, which has been heavily financed and even at one time was chaired by former private-equity investor Bruce Rauner. Rauner, who received his MBA from Harvard University and helped make Emanuel a millionaire, denied to the Chicago Tribune in April that the fund had a role in getting Supes the schools contract, saying that the fund was merely a “facilitator for what the mayor or the schools or the leadership wanted to do.”
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posted by Rich Miller
Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:03 am
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Amen Rich.
Comment by chi Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:12 am
It’s a really good question. I’ve heard differing accounts about what the board and Mayor knew and when they knew it. Time will tell.
Comment by Chicago Cynic Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:17 am
At some level, this has to be viewed as an indictment of the encroachment on Corporate America into governance.
Comment by JS Mill Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:22 am
BVR standard message: We provided the money, but we really had no knowledge or input in the part that went bad.
Might be true; but this is the third time we’ve heard that reaction to alleged illegal activities that had GTCR/Rauner money. Due diligence much?
Comment by walker Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:23 am
=At some level, this has to be viewed as an indictment of the encroachment on Corporate America into governance.=
It’s not that prior to the encroachment, everything happened on the straight and narrow. It’s just that corporate governance is no better at preventing ethical breaches/criminal behavior, and is usually worse on outcome.
Comment by chi Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:28 am
“I don’t know what I knew” worked for Daley. Will it work for Rahm?
Comment by Gone, but not forgotten Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:30 am
Wasn’t Solomon on Rahm’s transition team?
One of the big issues with education these days is the need to have a credential to do just about anything. The credentialing system seems as another limitation on competition or simply appointing smart, competent people with integrity. This is a bad development because, as RM noted, there’s very big dollars to be made off of education contracts these days. Maybe we need to start easing off of the need to credential everyone in education?
Comment by B-Man Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:37 am
==How could so many well-educated, successful people drop the ball so badly?==
It is possible they did not drop the ball, but simply did not want to know.
They may have thought something was wrong, but assumed it was just another ==deal== by someone who knew how things work in Chicago and knew how to cya. Ugh.
Comment by Formerly Known As... Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 10:43 am
“The credentialing system seems as another limitation on competition or simply appointing smart, competent people with integrity. This is a bad development because, as RM noted, there’s very big dollars to be made off of education contracts these days. Maybe we need to start easing off of the need to credential everyone in education?”
So businesses want to do away with smart people with credentials in the schools in order to make money off of education? This doesn’t smell right.
Comment by Mama Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:20 am
Makes me glad that we have not privatized prisons. Imagine what would happen if we set corporate America on a population no one cared about …. only a half measure of snark.
Comment by The Way I See It Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:20 am
“This is a bad development because, as RM noted, there’s very big dollars to be made off of education contracts these days.” It looks like big business are looking to milk the taxpayers who think they are supporting the schools, & everyone wonders why education cost is so expensive.
Comment by Mama Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:26 am
Maybe the problem is that grifters find swells from Ivy-league institutions easily to roll?
Perhaps Chicago needs an elected school board comprised of ordinary citizens with street smarts–graduates of the school of hard knocks if you will–to prevent these problems.
/s
Comment by Uptown Lawyer Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:34 am
B-3. Bribable, Busted, Big House.
Comment by pool boy Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:37 am
=It’s not that prior to the encroachment, everything happened on the straight and narrow.=
Right, it was never perfect and won’t ever be perfect. But the “government should be run like a business crowd” continues to fall flat on their faces. There is a general lack of understanding of how to run something that requires “legislative/democratic leadership” versus the less inclusive management that can exist in corporate America. I think that is the tougher learn for our Governor.
Comment by JS Mill Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:40 am
=credential to do just about anything. The credentialing system seems as another limitation on competition=
First, Illinois requires licenses not credentials. That transition occurred more than a year ago. The trend, not just in Illinois but nationally, has been to increase the requirements for entry into education not decrease them. And make them more stringent.
Applying “competitive” to education is different than in the business world. The people are wired differently, the inputs and outputs are very different. Educators are not looking to run their competitors out of business. By their very nature, and best practice they tend to and are encouraged to collaborate and share ideas and practices. That is just the starting point.
Barriers to just “appointing’ people to positions are there for very good reasons. Not only are we required to put specifically qualified people in the positions, who would want non-qualified/political/connected hires? That seems to be what happened at CPS and look ow that turned out.
Comment by JS Mill Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:49 am
== How could so many well-educated, successful people drop the ball so badly? ==
They can’t.
You have a contradiction here, so check your premises.
This whole BBB makes me physically ill.
Comment by Anonners Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:51 am
When does the investigation start on former CPS COO Sean Murphy, the accountant who gets paid over $300K per year as a “construction manager consultant” for a CPS contractor, who “took care of” the contractor with change orders during his tenure with CPS? That came out a few months ago, then disappeared. I guess he has better political sponsors.
This, of course, is nothing new. A colleague of mine was PM for a Chicago project for which there was a mandatory pre-bid meeting, and one of the Duff bros showed up in his golf clothes extremely irate. He actually came out and said, “This project is mine. Why are you wasting my time with this nonsense?”
It would also be interesting to look into why Hizzoner Daley would only let three general contractors bid on the $250 million per year in CPS renovation work. Of course, there was a list of “politically acceptable” sub-contrators they had to use for “diversity”. The AGC was always fighting to allow all qualified contractors to bid on the work, but Daley kept protecting the “Big Three” from competition. It was amazing how well the work seemed to be spread around those three contractors. No COLLUSION or BID
RIGGING, of course.
Gee, I wonder how much legal business they’re throwing Mr Daley’s law firm these days? We know he’s well taken care of by those who stole the parking rights from the people of Chicago after being sold out by Daley and the Alderman….
Comment by Arizona Bob Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:52 am
“And the rest of us have to stop buying the hype that our leading citizens know best.”
They might be over-educated marks who can’t identify the criminals in their midst, but at least they’ve got gravitas.
– MrJM
Comment by @MisterJayEm Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 11:55 am
A leap of faith.
Comment by Anonymous Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 12:08 pm
=They might be over-educated marks who can’t identify the criminals in their midst, but at least they’ve got gravitas.
– MrJM=
He shoots! He scores!
Comment by Carhartt Representative Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 12:15 pm
@ JS Mill
“Educators are not looking to run their competitors out of business.”
I guess you don’t pay much attention to CTU and their war against charters and the families they serve…..
Comment by Arizona Bob Monday, Oct 19, 15 @ 5:27 pm
If you have been involved with Boards and Councils be the public or the corporate side, some board members really try to read the agenda and attempt to ask questions of items they need to vote on. On the other hand, some are happy to show up at the meeting and rubber stamp anything being considered. And a few don’t show up at all due to “other commitments”. It would be interesting to note what the CPS Board attendance has been the last few years.
Comment by Bogey Golfer Thursday, Nov 5, 15 @ 3:13 pm