Missing Royalties

As reported here, in January, Superintendent Jerry Weast told the MCPS Board of Education:

"All of our technology partners know they are not permitted to use MCPS testimonials in advertising." Superintendent Jerry Weast, January 7, 2009 answer to Question #9.

In response to the report on this blog, the MCPS logo was removed from the IQinVision advertisement. The testimonial remained, but the logo disappeared.

But this isn't the first time that the MCPS logo has been used in the advertising of a technology partner. Below is the Wireless Generation press release from 2005. Note the prominent MCPS logo. And note this sentence:

In addition, MCPS also will receive royalties on all sales of the software to other school districts nationwide.

Royalties? How much has MCPS received in royalties since 2005?

Multiple inquiries by national education activist Peyton Wolcott to Superintendent Weast as to the details of this royalty agreement have gone unanswered.

Have these funds been brought to the County Council for appropriation?

Anyone at the County Council, Inspector General's office, or State Attorney General's office paying attention?
Montgomery County Schools Partnership Rls 6.3.05

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Word of the Day: Brought to you by . . .

Remember Sesame Street? Each show was 'brought to you by the letter . . . '
Today's words of the day are brought to you by the letter "C."

Contagious cheating.

I couldn't decide which word to choose, so I used a little bit of the logic my kids learned from Public Broadcasting, with a little bit of assistance from Newsweek and Bernie Madoff.

I should also add consequences.

How does this relate to MCPS?

Bernie Madoff is off to jail, for conducting the largest Ponzi scheme in recent history. A piece by Newsweek explores why folks like Bernie cheat, and asks, is cheating contagious?

According to a study done by researchers at Duke University, how others act influences whether someone is more likely to cheat and think he/she will be successful. The more a person is exposed to cheating and unethical behavior by others, the more likely that person will cheat. Thus, cheating can be contagious.

That's why its time for the residents of the county to ask Dr. Weast and MCPS to stop. Stop the procurements that don't follow the rules, stop acting in self-interest, cut the (honeybaked) ham and travel to showcase and endorse commercial products that put money into other accounts, at the expense of our kids, but most of all, stop spending money as if the citizens of Montgomery County have an endless supply of cash. We don't. What we want our school system to do is provide the free public education we expect for our kids, pay for their textbooks, and provide the type of quality education that our neighbors in Howard and Fairfax offer.

We expect our kids to obey the law, become well respected adults, and not cheat. Don't we have the same expectations of our leadership - even if these values aren't shared by the state government in Baltimore and Annapolis, and our local officials in Rockville who decline to provide oversight of our county school system.

Lets be glad someone finally put Mr. Madoff where he belongs. Those who abuse financial power and trust in our county should not be so cavalier to think they can continue to abuse our resources without consequences. Think about the role models you want for your children - because what they see around them will influence how they act as adults.

Howard Co. to provide free public education

Schools to eliminate activity fees

Parents had complained of wildly varying charges

Columbia Flyer By Jennifer Broadwater Posted 3/12/09

Howard County school officials have decided to eliminate “activity fees” charged to parents. The fees, used to pay for materials such as craft supplies, calculators, magazine subscriptions and spelling workbooks, previously varied wildly from school to school and had prompted complaints from parents. In addition to eliminating the fees, officials have drawn up school supply “menus” in order to make supply lists at different schools more consistent...

The changes follow a moratorium on activity fees and all other requests to parents for supplies imposed by Superintendent Sydney Cousin last fall.

“We wanted to be sure there was some consistency, and more importantly, we wanted to be sure we weren’t asking for things the school system should be supplying,” Cousin said in October. “Free and public education is what the state says we should be supplying and that’s what we’ll do.”
continues here
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How did Howard County Public Schools look at the exact same laws and the exact same letter from the Maryland Attorney General's office and come up with different conclusions from Superintendent Weast?

Word of the Day: Looting

My son's school does a word of the day, to help the kids in their vocabulary. Today's word, brought to you courtesy of the NY Times, is "Looting."

Earlier today, this NY Times article, "The Looting of America's Coffers," caught my eye.

The article summarized an earlier article by Akerlof and Romer (Akerlof went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics), in which they found several financial crises in the 1980s resulting from private investors taking advantage of the government, by borrowing huge amounts of money, profiting when times were good and then leaving the government to absorb and make up their losses. If they were honest, according to these economic experts, the investors would have acted differently, and not without regard to the future likely consequences.

The author of today's Times piece then draws a comparison to today's economic situation, and distinguishes between moral hazards and looting. In sum, when the government plays a central role in the process, the tendency is to encourage looting, not market forces, because the government will always bail out those who take the risks for private gains.

Sound familiar?

Montgomery County appear to be headed towards a similar financial crisis, with the school system seemingly syphoning off public funds. Every day this blog posts more public contracts and deals from the public schools- whether smart board/promethean board technology, artificial turf partnerships, security cameras, credit cards, misdirected student and textbook funds, to list just a small purchases, that do not follow standard procurement practices, fiscal management or even routine audit standards. No one seems to care - not the County Council, State Board of Education, Inspector General, or State Attorney General. We hear from the state that MCPS is a county entity, we hear from the county folks that its a state entity, and we hear from Dr. Weast that "old laws" don't apply.

Call it what you may, but if no one is responsible, money is limited, and we are in a true economic crisis, this sounds like looting to me. In the end, the taxpayers and the public are ultimately responsible for bailing out the system, when fiscal realities catch up, and the current players in MCPS's Central Office have left the county for greener pastures.

Looting. Think about it.