It seems that in New York City, no one has been providing oversight of the New York City Department of Education Human Resources Department. We read about Diana Lam's husband being hired without the Conflict of Interest Board being notified, and now Joan Mahon-Powell. Who else is the NYC DOE hiding?

Former City Schools Official Admits Using False Credentials
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, NY TIMES, September 22, 2004

LINK

From humble beginnings as a substitute teacher in the late 1970's, Joan E. Mahon-Powell climbed through the ranks of the New York City school system, becoming a principal, a superintendent in Brooklyn, the superintendent of a citywide district for low-performing schools and then chief of staff to Chancellor Harold O. Levy.

Last year, Mr. Levy's successor, Joel I. Klein, hired Ms. Mahon-Powell as one of 113 local instructional superintendents, a new position in the reorganized administration. But yesterday she was arrested on two felony counts, accused of forging her credentials all along the way. Investigators say she was never even certified as a teacher.

Last night, in exchange for a sentence of 10 days of community service and a $1,000 fine, she pleaded guilty in Criminal Court in Manhattan to reduced charges of presenting a false instrument. She had faced up to seven years in prison on the original counts.

"She was successful for a long time, and really, it was a fluke that she got caught," said Richard J. Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for the city schools, whose office conducted the inquiry.

"It's very rare that there would be any cause to go back and re-examine a document that was produced once and accepted," Mr. Condon said, adding that it was rarer still to double-check the credentials of someone so high-placed for so long.

"This was old Joan," he said. "Joan had been there for 20 years."

Ms. Mahon-Powell, 48, was removed from her post nearly a year ago after questions were first raised about her New York State superintendent's license, and she was fired shortly afterward, officials said.

She last earned a salary of $135,200 a year, officials said, although at one point while working for Mr. Levy she made as much as $152,500. After she was chief of staff, Mr. Levy appointed Ms. Mahon-Powell as his liaison to the City University of New York, working to open high schools on college campuses.

Education Department officials said yesterday that they were considering legal options to prevent her from collecting a pension when she reaches retirement age.

After her guilty plea before Judge Patricia M. Nunez, Ms. Mahon-Powell strode briskly and silently from the courthouse, accompanied by her lawyer, Marvin Pettus, who declined to answer any questions.

In a conversation last year, shortly after she left her superintendent's job, Ms. Mahon-Powell said that she stepped down for medical reasons and was working as an educational consultant.

She presented herself as an enthusiastic advocate for the public schools and the city's children and as a proponent of strong ties between the schools and the city university system. She seemed younger than her years, spoke comfortably in the school system's jargon and clearly regarded herself as an insider, referring to many top school officials as close friends.

City education officials took credit yesterday for her unmasking, saying they "discovered this fraud in 2003" and immediately notified Mr. Condon's office and terminated Ms. Mahon-Powell.

In a statement, the Education Department's top lawyer, Michael Best, said: "She has been placed on the ineligible list and will never work for the department again. Improved background procedures are now in place to ensure that such a fraud will not occur again."

In a seven-page letter to Chancellor Klein yesterday, Mr. Condon laid out the details of the investigation, which included a tale of deceit stretching back to 1992, when Ms. Mahon-Powell was promoted to assistant principal after presenting another falsified document, a school supervisor's license.

The saga ended after city and state education officials double-checked the credentials of officials being hired for the new local instructional superintendent jobs.

But Mr. Condon also described a cloak-and-dagger drama as investigators zeroed in, including a missing watermark, a handoff of documents outside the Education Department's human resource division offices in Brooklyn and even a secretly recorded telephone conversation.

Investigators said that Ms. Mahon-Powell had forged the school district administrator's license by using a license belonging to Joan King, a retired school official who worked for Ms. Mahon-Powell in the late 1990's as a deputy superintendent in District 19 in Brooklyn.

Even as investigators pressed her, Ms. Mahon-Powell insisted that the documents were legitimate and that her original credentials had been damaged and replaced. Investigators said that although she had put her name on Ms. King's license, Ms. Mahon-Powell did not change the certificate number - apparently not realizing that it is the holder's Social Security number.

Investigators also said she had used the wrong font for her name. "The document is smaller than the authentic certificate and is slightly blurred, suggesting that it was scanned and altered," Mr. Condon wrote to Mr. Klein.

"She had forged these documents," Mr. Condon said in an interview. "In a sense it was identity theft, because she was using the certification of another woman."

But it was not the first time that Ms. Mahon-Powell had falsified her credentials, investigators said. And her dismissal last year also turned out not to be the first time she was fired by the city school system.

By her own account, Ms. Mahon-Powell grew up in Brooklyn and attended city schools all the way through college. She said she graduated from Hunter College in 1978 and took courses at Long Island University and the College of New Rochelle before earning a master's degree in education from Brooklyn College.

Michael Arena, a spokesman for CUNY, said officials could not immediately confirm Ms. Mahon-Powell's college or graduate school records.

But officials at Fordham University's Graduate School of Education, where she claimed to have completed the coursework to become a superintendent, told investigators that they had no record of her doing so.

Ms. Mahon-Powell began her career in the city schools in the late 1970's as a substitute in District 19, which mostly covers the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. She worked "per diem," meaning that she was based out of the district office and not assigned to a regular school.

According to school system records, she was appointed as a regular teacher in September 1981 but terminated in July 1988 because she had never earned a proper teacher's license. She returned to working as a substitute for the next four years, and then won an assistant principal's post in August 1992 at Junior High School 292 in Bushwick, apparently by using fake credentials.

Investigators said that state education officials had no record of ever issuing administrator's credentials to her. In 1997, she was promoted to principal of J.H.S. 292. In 1999, she was appointed acting superintendent of District 19 by Chancellor Rudy Crew, who generated controversy by firing her predecessor, Robert E. Riccobono. Later, Mr. Riccobono filed suit charging Dr. Crew with racial discrimination, asserting that he was fired because he was white and that Ms. Mahon-Powell was chosen because she was black, even though she had been principal of one of the district's worst schools.

In 2000, Mr. Levy named her superintendent of a group of the city's lowest-performing schools. In 2001 she became his chief of staff. Mr. Levy, now an executive with Kaplan Inc., declined to comment yesterday.


School Official With Fake License May Have Faked Degrees
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, NY TIMES, September 23, 2004

LINK

A former high-ranking school official who admitted falsifying her credentials over a 25-year career in the New York City public schools also lied about earning bachelor's and master's degrees, officials at two City University colleges said yesterday.

The former official, Joan Mahon-Powell, had been a high-level superintendent and served as chief of staff to former Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy, earning as much as $152,500 a year. But investigators said she never even had the proper certification to teach, let alone to serve as a principal or superintendent.

On Tuesday, Ms. Mahon-Powell pleaded guilty to presenting a forged instrument and was sentenced to 10 days of community service and fined $1,000. She had faced up to seven years in prison.

In the résumé that Ms. Mahon-Powell submitted to the school officials, she claimed to have earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1978 and a master's degree in education from Brooklyn College in 1987. While she took classes at both campuses, officials said yesterday, she never graduated.

"She was enrolled in a B.A. degree program, here at Hunter from 1974 through spring 1978, but she did not graduate," said Deborah Sack, a spokeswoman for Hunter College.

Ms. Sack that Ms. Mahon-Powell fell 25 credits short of earning her undergraduate degree but returned to Hunter in the fall of 1979 as a nonmatriculated graduate student in education. Over the next two years, she took four graduate courses in education, earning straight A's, Ms. Sack said.

But in the spring of 1981, her graduate student status was cancelled. "There is a marking on here, that her graduate status was cancelled due to no proof of B.A.," Ms. Sack said.

According to her transcript, Ms. Mahon-Powell's undergraduate coursework at Hunter concentrated largely on education, French and Spanish. In many classes, she received a grade of incomplete but in other courses she had a mix of A's and B's and one withdrawal, Ms. Sack said. Officials at Brooklyn College said she studied there for just one semester, in the fall of 1987.

"She only took two courses," said Pat Willard, a college spokeswoman. The courses were described as prerequisites for the graduate program in education, Ms. Willard said, and Ms. Mahon-Powell earned grades of B and C.

Ms. Mahon-Powell's lawyer, Marvin E. Pettus, did not respond to telephone messages left at his office yesterday.

People who worked with Ms. Mahon-Powell described her as confident but also said she was promoted despite unimpressive results at Junior High School 292, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she was principal.

Alfred S. Posamentier, the dean of the education school at City College, said he met Ms. Mahon-Powell at several meetings that she attended as Chancellor Levy's representative.

"She came into a room with an elegance and an authority," he said. "She had an aura about her, a confidence."

Asked about the case yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it was likely that Ms. Mahon-Powell, 48, would get to keep her pension when she reaches retirement age, but only because state law would prevent the city from taking it away. "And I happen to think the law is wrong," he said.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said yesterday that he deserved credit for uncovering Ms. Mahon-Powell's lies by insisting last year that state officials review the credentials of all officials being hired for new local instructional superintendent positions..

"I was the one who said that their credentials should all be checked in Albany," he said. "That's how this was uncovered. When we found out that she had faulty credentials, I terminated her.''

But Mr. Klein said such cases can be hard to discover. "Something like that could always happen despite your best efforts,'' he said. "We're doing the right things, but when people show up with forged résumés, sometimes you call the source and the source backs up their story. It takes a while."

SHEEPSKIN SCAM
By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter, NY POST, September 23, 2004

LINK

September 23, 2004 -- The former school superintendent who used bogus credentials to get promoted may also have lied about her education, according to records at two city colleges.
Education officials said they were led to believe Joan Mahon-Powell held a bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a master's degree from Brooklyn College - but neither school has a record of her ever graduating.

A Hunter College spokeswoman said Mahon-Powell completed a slew of education and romance-language courses from 1974 to 1978, but never finished her undergraduate studies there as she said she had.

Brooklyn College records show Mahon-Powell completed two education courses required to enter the graduate program, but never earned a master's degree as she claimed.

A Brooklyn College spokeswoman said Mahon-Powell entered the college in 1987 under a United Federation of Teachers program, presumably in an attempt to become certified and move beyond her long-time "substitute" status at IS 292 in Brooklyn.

Mahon-Powell proceeded to use forged state-issued documents to dupe city education officials into believing she was eligible to be a school administrator.

In the process of her meteoric rise, she potentially defrauded the city of more than $800,000, according to city Department of Education records.

Payroll data shows Mahon Powell grossed more than $1 million between 1992 - when she was promoted from substitute teacher to assistant principal at IS 292 - and 2003, when education officials caught on to her scheme. Had she never been elevated from a pay-by-the-day substitute teacher, Mahon-Powell could have banked in the neighborhood of $200,000, records show.

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday expressed outrage over the scam. They said the city was exploring legal ways to prevent Mahon-Powell from receiving a pension.

In court yesterday, Mahon-Powell was fined $1,000 and assigned to 10 days of community service in a transit-related field.

She could not be reached yesterday and her lawyer, Marvin Pettus, declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Laura Italiano and David Seifman


Phony educrat forges ahead
'Guilty' - but now denies lying
NY Daily News, September 23, 2004

LINK

A disgraced schools boss who bluffed her way to the top with bogus credentials insisted yesterday she had done nothing wrong - even after pleading guilty to forgery.
"I feel I'm being treated unfairly," Joan Mahon-Powell told the Daily News. "I don't know the reasons why this is happening."

Asked directly whether she had lied about her background, Mahon-Powell said: "I did not."

The denials came just a day after Mahon-Powell, 48, admitted to fraud Tuesday in Manhattan Criminal Court. Schools investigators claimed she stole her best friend's credentials and wrote her name on them so she would qualify for high-paying jobs in the system's upper ranks.

The denials also came as new questions were raised about her education.

While remaining defiant, Mahon-Powell, who will serve 10 days' community service and pay a $1,000 fine, said she's worried about what her former students think of her.

"I'm saddened that the students are reading this," said Mahon-Powell, who was also the principal of Intermediate School 292 in East New York, Brooklyn. "My students were given the gift of pride. I taught them that life-long learning should be their goal."

For more than 25 years, the one-time Brooklyn substitute teacher - who appears not to have been qualified even to work in a classroom - climbed to the system's highest levels, including as a $152,500-a-year aide to a former chancellor.

She was found out and fired in September 2003 but not criminally charged until this week.

Speaking to The News through a speaker-phone at the Manhattan offices of her lawyer, Marvin Pettus, Mahon-Powell also insisted during the half-hour interview that she has two education degrees to her credit.

She said she earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1978 before returning for a master's degree in 1987.

But Deborah Sack, a spokeswoman for the City University of New York, said records show that even though Mahon-Powell took undergraduate classes at Hunter from 1974 to 1978, she fell far short of the number of credits needed to graduate.

Mahon-Powell enrolled in four graduate courses from 1979 to 1981 but was booted because she had no proof she had earned a bachelor's degree, Sack said.

Even after she pleaded guilty to falsifying her credentials, Mahon-Powell still gets to collect a pension at age 55 - a situation that Chancellor Joel Klein called "deplorable" yesterday.

School officials said they want to slash Mahon-Powell's pension by basing it on her paltry substitute teaching salary rather than her six-figure earnings.

Pettus, her lawyer, said her pension should be based on "her work ethic and dedication to the children of New York, not just a certificate."

"There are no unsatisfactory ratings in my record," Mahon-Powell said. "I performed the job that was necessary."