Ethics Board responds to Parents United lobbying complaint
(Cartoon: Eric Joselyn, 2011)
[Updated] If it walks like lobbying and talks like lobbying, is it lobbying?That’s the question Parents United for Public Education and our partners asked a year ago to the City Ethics Board regarding an independent contract between the William Penn Foundation and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to re-make Philadelphia’s public schools. Our complaint was the very first challenge to the City’s new lobbying law which had gone into effect in 2012. The Ethics Board agreed with us that the written contracts between BCG and the William Penn Foundation “create the appearance that BCG was working for the Foundation, not the School District,” began a year-long investigation, and now we have a response.
In December 2012, Parents United and our partners – the Philadelphia Home and School Council and the NAACP – filed a lobbying complaint around the William Penn Foundation/BCG contract, to which the District was not a formal party. The BCG contract promoted charter expansion, third party management networks, the privatization of certain labor contract, and identified 60 schools for closing. BCG was presented to the public as a consultant who would study the District and make recommendations. Lo and behold, when the final “blueprint” came out, it was nearly identical to the contract that had been signed months earlier.
The William Penn Foundation solicited donors specifically for the purpose of paying for the BCG contract, and then oversaw a fund at a separate foundation that disbursed those donations directly to BCG. This structure