State review faults Missouri education department’s handling of CEE-Trust contract | The Kansas City Star

State review faults Missouri education department’s handling of CEE-Trust contract | The Kansas City Star:

State review faults Missouri education department’s handling of CEE-Trust contract

Missouri’s education department stumbled several ways when it hired CEE-Trust a year ago to propose a complete overhaul of the Kansas City Public Schools, a state auditor’s report said Tuesday.

The state’s contract with reform-minded CEE-Trust of Indianapolis was plagued with potential bias and conflicts of interest involving the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which helped fund the $385,000 contract, the report said.

Department emails and bidding documents, reported by The Star in December, showed how the foundation and Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro had been communicating for months in 2013 and had originally hoped that the department could hire CEE-Trust without a bid process.

Nicastro and the foundation were eager to spur ideas from CEE-Trust, whose past work in education promoted dramatic system redesigns featuring a network of independent public schools in which those that are successful can operate autonomously.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article1253591.html#storylink=cpy

The problem, Deputy State Auditor Harry Otto said Tuesday, was that when the state school board directed the department to go through a bidding process last summer, the way the department ultimately chose CEE-Trust did not properly guard against bias.

“We believe it was a flawed process,” Otto told The Star.

State officials who had been working with CEE-Trust and the Kauffman Foundation for months before the bidding process were involved in scoring the bids. The state awarded the contract to CEE-Trust even though a competing bidder with seemingly more industry experience offered to do the work at less than a third of the cost.

The state’s subjective scoring system did not adequately explain how CEE-Trust’s bid earned a significantly higher score for experience, reliability and expertise over the less expensive vendor, the report said.

There was a 56 percent difference in scoring of the subjective judgment criteria between CEE-Trust’s bid and the second-place bidder, the report said. The auditors reviewed nine other education service contracts the state awarded in 2013 and found that the differences in subjective criteria points

State review faults Missouri education department’s handling of CEE-Trust contract | The Kansas City Star:

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article1253591.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article1253591.html#storylink=cpy