Education council’s CEO ends contract

The chief executive officer of the federally funded Education Leaders Council (ELC) is giving up a $235,000-a-year renewable consultant contract that she arranged for herself three years ago as a board member, because the arrangement violates federal ethics rules.

Lisa Graham Keegan “is in the process of completing the paperwork necessary to become a full-time ELC employee,” with the apparent intention of stepping off the ELC board, Brian Jones, the council’s chief operations officer, told the Education Department on March 25 in response to a department probe.

In the past year, eight ELC directors have resigned because Mrs. Keegan rebuffed their requests for management changes after the council’s auditing firm flagged her contract.

Directors who resigned also wanted ELC to get more of its money from private sources and to reduce its dependence on $10 million in annual federal appropriations.

Conservative education advocates founded ELC in 1995 to push for school choice, higher achievement standards and other reforms at the federal and state level against the teacher-union-led education establishment.

As the department disclosed ELC’s woes, Eugene W. Hickok, the department’s No. 2 official, expressed personal dismay and anguish over “apparent chaos” within the ELC, which he helped establish as Pennsylvania’s education commissioner under then-Republican Gov. Tom Ridge.

“I have not had much to do with the organization other than watching it from a distance since I came here,” the department’s acting deputy secretary said in an interview Friday.

“I’ve got to say that, from where I sit, from what I read in the paper, it distresses me to see the organization I helped create and care so much about going through what it’s going through,” Mr. Hickok said.

“I can’t pass judgment on who’s to blame. I can’t pass judgment on the group politics. I don’t know all that stuff,” he said. “But when you start something, and you see it catch [among grass-roots people] who really care about education, it hurts a little bit to see an organization going where it’s going.”

Several ELC board members who had criticized Mrs. Keegan resigned over the ethics concerns while the Education Department probe was under way, unknown to them.

William F. Goodling, a retired 13-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, was among four ELC directors who resigned Wednesday.

The former chairman of the House Education Committee blamed ELC Chairman Jim Horne and less active board members who supported Mrs. Keegan but rebuffed directors who raised ethics and financial questions.

“Had Lisa taken this advice a year or year-and-a-half ago, none of this would have happened and we’d have a solid and sound ELC committed to reforms that would give a quality education for all,” Mr. Goodling said in an interview.

The department investigation was in response to a Jan. 23 article in The Washington Times that Mrs. Keegan negotiated her $235,000-a-year “consultant agreement” with ELC in April or May 2001 as Arizona’s state superintendent of public instruction and a member of ELC’s board of directors.

Story Continues →