GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A Department of Education official broke ethics rules when he told the principals he worked with that he planned to join a different organization that also supports city schools, according to a ruling out today from the city’s Conflicts of Interests Board.

The ruling highlights a fundamental tension in the Department of Education’s controversial “network” structure for providing support to schools.

Under the five-year-old structure, dozens of networks compete against each other for schools to hire them to provide instructional and operational support. Nonprofit groups outside of the Department of Education are allowed to compete, in an arrangement that is meant to keep networks mean and lean — and also lays a minefield of potential ethical violations.

Robert Cohen was leading a department-run network, Children First Network 104, last year when he got a job offer from CEI-PEA, a nonprofit group that works with dozens of schools through five networks of its own, according to the report. After he told the principals he supervised about the offer, they all applied to switch from the department-run network to CEI-PEA’s. That meant they would give their schools’ network fees to CEI-PEA, instead of keeping the funding within the department. (more…)