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Lisa Graham Keegan, the voucher proponent and former Arizona schools chief, has quit her job working for Maricopa County in order to work full time for John McCain. Does this mean we can soon expect an actual education proposal from the McCain campaign? As I've written, although McCain's ambitious $5.5 billion private voucher proposal was a centerpiece of his 2000 presidential run, he has yet to release a detailed plan this year. Keegan will be a big part of crafting what that eventual plan will be. The Arizona Republic reviews her record of pushing school privatization and profiting from NCLB:
The former Arizona legislator and state schools chief helped push Arizona into the vanguard of school reforms in the 1990s and led national education changes favored by conservatives in recent years. But Keegan also has left behind a trail of unfinished programs, questionable management and limited results. ...As President Bush entered office in 2001, Keegan was on his short list of candidates for secretary of Education.She did not get the job, and that May, she quit as Arizona's schools chief to head the Education Leaders Council, a non-profit, school-reform group. Not long afterward, the ELC began piling up $23.4 million in federal education grants for its "Following the Leaders" program, which was designed to help states and school districts meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.Keegan remembers the ELC's beginnings as a "golden moment in time," bringing together like-minded reformers. That moment faded, she said, as the program swelled beyond the capacity for a small organization and federal auditors began a protracted probe into the organization's finances. ...In a pair of 2006 reports, the inspector general for the U.S. Education Department said the ELC had used money inappropriately during the time Keegan was its chief executive. The ELC also had a poor financial-management system and inadequate written procedures for subcontracting, the reports said.Even before the report, The Arizona Republic reported that some ELC board members were alarmed about Keegan's $235,000 salary and six-figure deals for other executives. During a three-year span beginning in 2003, eight members of the ELC's board of directors quit, along with four of its top executives, including Keegan, the auditors wrote.--Dana Goldstein
