Parents groups, NAACP to file ethics complaint over school district consultant
Members of two parent groups and the city's NAACP chapter plan to file a city ethics complaint Wednesday alleging that William Penn Foundation-funded work that a consulting firm did for the Philadelphia School District this year constituted lobbying.
For several months, the Boston Consulting Group studied the district's operations. It came up with an extensive set of recommendations on how to cut costs and restructure operations in a school system hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Parents United for Public Education, the Philadelphia Home and School Council, and the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP say William Penn, which paid BCG more than $1 million for its work, essentially wrote a check for BCG to lobby the district on a pro-charter-school agenda and to target dozens of schools for closure.
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The complaint comes after the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia completed an analysis last