Resignations cripple school-reform group

Education Leaders Council, a pro-Bush administration group that touts education reform as its priority, is collapsing amid mass resignation of national directors who say the group has “lost its moorings” as senior officers have mismanaged federally funded programs intended to improve academic achievement.

Four ELC directors resigned Monday, telling board Chairman Jim Horne, Florida’s education commissioner, in a letter: “We cannot continue to be associated with an entity that has lost its moorings and whose credibility has been seriously damaged by issues that could have been solved had action been taken in a timely and responsible manner.”

Those resigning were William F. Goodling, a retired 13-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and former chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee; William J. Moloney, Colorado’s education commissioner and former ELC chairman; Abigail Thernstrom, member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; and Cheri Pierson Yecke, Minnesota’s education commissioner.

A fifth director, Henry L. Johnson, Mississippi’s superintendent of education, resigned Friday, and a sixth, Carlos A. Cervantes, a former member of the South Carolina state board of education, withdrew earlier.

In an e-mail yesterday, Mr. Cervantes said, “My enthusiastic participation in ELC was predicated on the belief that ELC could lead, activate and support a successful education transformation movement in this country.”

“Unfortunately, I no longer hold that belief,” he wrote.

In all, those resigning make up half of ELC’s 12-member board of directors.

The four directors who withdrew this week had pressed Lisa Graham Keegan, ELC’s $235,000-a-year chief executive officer, to resign from the board after auditors questioned the propriety of her board membership and employment status under an automatically renewable consulting agreement signed by former subordinate John Schilling. Mrs. Keegan hired Mr. Schilling as ELC’s $150,000-a-year chief of staff when she joined the council in June 2001.

Mr. Schilling had worked for Mrs. Keegan, formerly Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, at the state education department in Phoenix.

Mrs. Keegan fired Mr. Schilling in July after the audit and during a management review directed by the board that found a host of management problems, including improper reporting of time spent by Mrs. Keegan and other ELC staff members on two federally funded projects.

The council had said that 14 highly compensated ELC staffers spent 19 percent of their time throughout 2003 on a $7.7-million Education Department contract to implement an alternative teacher-licensing program and 42 percent of their time on a $10 million school technology program funded by Congress called “Following the Leaders.”

But auditors concluded in May that the council had kept improper time sheets and their accounts of time spent on the federal projects could not be validated.

The problem had not been resolved by the time of the July management review, according to the directors who resigned.

Mrs. Keegan, who still lives in Arizona and comes to Washington only occasionally, resisted directors who wanted her to step off the board and return to a reform-advocacy role, Mr. Moloney said.

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