Hell, school board members routinely have conflict-of-interest problems with relatives being employed by school districts, by having been school employees previously, let alone have anything as egregious as what Cortines did.
Conflict-of-interest and other forms of corruption are routine in public school districts:
Now, there's no denying that Cortines is an experienced educator, one who knows a lot about instruction, and who would have much valuable input to give a publisher of school texts. But it's obviously inappropriate for the chief of the second-largest school district in the nation, which just so happens to have done $16 million worth of business with Scholastic over the last five years, to continue to sit on the board of a vendor and receive a six-figure salary.
Cortines did the right thing by stepping down. Too bad it was for the wrong reasons. A superintendent who is both savvy and ethical would have recognized long before getting outed in the media that such an arrangement had potential danger in his current position, and have nothing to do with it. But not Cortines. Nor,
for that matter, the school board, which failed to investigate Cortines' outside employment before promoting him to the district's top job, and then shrugged off his relationship with Scholastic.
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