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Reply to "New curriculum selection process delayed— new RFP must be issues now"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/potential-conflict-of-interest-derails-curriculum-rollout-in-md-school-system/2018/05/25/d28c96c2-5e9f-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?utm_term=.1e96b4f5ab8c

WP’s article on the Discovery issue [/quote]
No. Titling this a “potential conflict of interest” instead of a conflict of interest is the first clue that this article is a soft marshallow instead of dispassionate reporting. How Discovery or Lang or Fliakas can claim that all this just caught them by surprise (oh my!) and that as soon as they “realized” they rushed to report it is flatly unbelievable. If you are involved in public procurement, you just don’t go around marketing yourself to private vendors and then get religion the day you get a job offer. You just don’t do that and call it ethical. Lang may be a very personable guy, but this isn’t ethical behavior. There are plenty of personable and friendly people who lack ethical judgement. Dixon is right. There should be some very clear laws about this in MCPS.[/quote]

MCPS already has very well-defined conflict of interest rules. The very first part of these rules says, very specifically, that employees are supposed to know these rules! For these two veteran staffers to suggest that they were somehow unaware of the ethical thin ice on which they were treading is simply, and literally, unbelievable.

Besides being recused from the now-delayed bidding process, did these guys face ANY consequences for their costly “mistake”? The story doesn’t answer that. In fact, the story mentions nothing about an actual investigation into this and the elected school board is AWOL. MCPS eats up about half of the county budget. It’s time for an independent Inspector General to have some oversight. Clearly, MCPS can’t police itself and the BOE either doesn’t care or lacks the capacity to really ride herd. I’m also starting to get a sinking feeling about Smith. He may be in way over his head and he doesn’t exactly have a squeaky clean history from his previous superintendent job.[/quote]

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