In an earlier post today, I wondered about the Boston Consulting Group. I knew this was a major management consulting organization, one of those companies that helps corporations do strategic planning. I knew that they advised the Philadelphia School Reform Commission to privatize a large number of its schools and gave the same advice to the planning committee for Memphis.
This bothers me because public schools are supposed to be instruments of the local community; they are supposed to be run along democratic principles, attuned to the needs and aspirations of their local community, employing professionals to carry out professional responsibilities on behalf of the community. But along come the hired guns to rearrange the schools of the community and give them to private corporations. I wondered, who are these guys? What is the source of their expert knowledge of public education?
A faithful reader did the research and she found an article that answers most of my questions. The post went up only hours ago! This reader, who posts anonymously, wasted no time.
I read the article. It is jaw-dropping. It deserves a post all to itself. It is not just about BCG. It is about Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, North Carolina, Delaware, and many other places where the corporate reformers are taking over public education for fun and profit. It’s about the close ties between BCG and KIPP.
Please read it. If only half of it is true, we are in deep trouble. If all of it is true…well, what can I say. Read it.
And this article details the influence of consultants in general and BCG in particular. You begin to understand why so much of the federal funding gets siphoned off by consultants, the biggest growth industry. One analysis concluded that 25-35 percent of federal funding for School Improvement Grants went not to the schools but to consultants.
One thing that becomes clear is BCG’s interest in cutting costs. Another is in opening the path to for-profit corporations. Not much about any interest in education or learning or curriculum or teacher morale or such.
These guys should not be flying under the radar. Let them be known by what they advocate and what they do to our community schools.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
“Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been around the block or two when it comes to corporate schooling, even though it profits from other consulting and includes as alumni Mitt Romney, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and hedge fund manager John Paulson. Along with Broad Foundation support, the consulting firm worked on Delaware’s Vision 2015 for a longer school day in 2007, designed a business plan for the North Carolina New Schools Project, and have left footprints in Cleveland, Arizona, Seattle, Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. BCG, as Daniel Denvir has noticed, recommended “that New Orleans, which has decimated its teachers’ union and put most schools under charter control, create the exact same species of achievement networks in 2006” as the ones proposed for Philly.
“Since at least 2007, BCG has been working on linking teacher pay to student test scores and so-called academic achievement for the Dallas Independent School District. Under J. Puckett’s Texas office leadership, BCG has also struck a deal with Uplift Education, where Jeb Bush’s son, George P., sits on the board of directors. Puckett and Phil Montgomery, Uplift’s founding member, both sit on the board of Commit, an IBM, Bank of America, Bank of One-funded school group. Puckett was also a player in the Exxon Mobile/Gates Foundation-hyped National Math and Science Initiative (page 27, PDF box).
“BCG heavily promotes online learning in K-12 and college. In “Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education,” the consulting firm calls for an “aligned set of educational objectives, standards, curricula, assessments, interventions, and professional development,” all centered around online technology. Deeming charter schools the leaders of internet schooling, the “study’s” authors quote online profiteer and Democrat for Education Reform’s Tom Vander Ark, praises Rocketship for hiring low wage non-teachers, and thanks their senior advisor, Margaret Spelling, Bush’s U.S. Secretary of Education. The” report” also praises the conflict-of-interest-laden School of One in NYC and KIPP’s BetterLesson program.
Thanks to you and your reader, Diane, for finding and posting about my article at the Common Errant on the Boston Consulting Group, Gates, Philly, etc!
Astonishing research. Keep following this story. Connecting the dots.
We MUST stay informed and inform others: neighbors, parents, politiicans, newspapers, bloggers, etc.. Save and log all these articles.
Print them out…leave them in the teachers’ lounge, the doctor’s office, church pews, everywhere. Send these posts to friends, neighbors, colleagues, relatives.
An informed, educated, relentless, vocal, intelligent, persistent citizenry cannot be manipulate and used forever.
Make Diane’s research, writing, posting available to everyone. We MUST stop this insantity (I wanted to write something else, but it would be obscene and Diane would be mad, maybe).
Please stay informed, keep reading and be alert.
Diane, I went back into my Boston Consulting Group article and added around 15 or so new hyperlinks, in order to connect the dots better for the reader and to show exactly where my information comes from. There’s one BCG document which details all of the group’s school reform projects I mention, but the link to the document is dead now. I will try to open the link again tomorrow. If not, I’ll post a citation in the notes. I still have a hardcopy printout of the pages in the document which deal with the school reform projects. Thanks!!!
Please make sure to read the article at the link below. It is authored by the same Doug Martin writing the BCG article starting this thread.
http://btownerrant.com/2012/05/03/teaching-as-cia-cover-gulen-charter-schools-dan-burton-and-state-secrets/
It links charter schools to al-Qaeda.
I have no love for BCG and cannot tell if their work in education has been effective or not. However, I am naturally suspicious of people who see Mc Carthly-like conspiracies everywhere they look.
The article at the link above also manages to link charter schools to bin Laden and the CIA. I thought I was reading The Onion.
You can’t deny what the Boston Consulting Group is up to, so don’t try…not buying it here. Read the earlier post today in reference to BCG and NYC..money, money, money…
Boston Consulting Group’s “product” is advice. It offers this product for money. If their product is not measuring up, people will stop buying.
I don’t indict them just because they are a company and because they are competing for more business.
It’s perfectly fair to indict them if they are getting poor results and it’s fair to indict the people hiring them if, after BCG gets poor results, these people continue to pay them and listen to them.
What is their experience in education, teaching and learning to even give advice? What do they know other than how to make a profit? Do they bring a team of teachers with them or just more vultures? By the time it is positive they are useless they will have made millions and moved on to some other venture to pick over. We don’t need or want them in our state.
Thanks. Are you aware of any factual inaccuracies in his description of BCG? If so, let me know and I will make a correction on the blog.
The NY Times had a front-page article about the Gulen movement that portrayed it in unflattering terms and mentioned its charters only in passing. The Gulen charters are the largest charter chain in the country.
Thanks Diane. When people are raving about charter schools, the CIA, al-Qeada, and bin Laden and suggesting there is a connection there, I’m just going to tune it out as well as the person writing it. The only reason to put all those in the same piece is to suggest a link among them. It is sensationalism at its worst. A link between charter schools and al-Qaeda?
I’m sure someone someday will post an article here suggesting a link between, say, Satan and tenure or between Nazis and teacher unions and I will just as vigorously call out the author as lacking credibility and not worth reading.
There are plenty of sources of relatively unbiased information to choose from that legitimately call into question whether BCG’s work is helping or hurting public education and American students. There’s no need for the wacky ones.
Ed, in the Gulen piece, I am merely mentioning testimony from Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI linguist. 60 Minutes and several U.S. legislators deem her a trustworthy informant. I don’t know if what she says about the CIA and Gulen is true or not. In the article, I am assuming it is trustworthy information, but what she mentions is not common knowledge to the pubilc. If you find anything in either of my pieces that is not based on documentation, which I try to provide in links and notes, yes, please let me know and I will remove those sections. I ran the Gulen piece by Sharon Higgins, who is an authority on Gulen, and she found nothing questionable in my piece. At least she never mentioned it to me, if she did.
Also, for my Gulen piece, I interviewed Mary Addi, one of the guests who appeared on the recent 60 Minutes piece on Gulen, and she found nothing factually incorrect about my article, either. She is married to a former Gulen member, and there were things she told me that I could not verify, so I left those bits of information out of the article, even though I believed her.
Thank you for this post, I have read the links, connected the dots and now realize I am staring at Cerberus. I was particularly insulted when I learned the BCG “consultant” for my school district had a BA and it was not associated with education. Most of my teaching peers have at least an MA or MEd, to me they are the real consultants.
Now I understand where some of the money is going…
Reblogged this on Capitan Typo's Adventures in Education and commented:
Part two of Diane’s posts about the Boston Consulting Group.
Ed Turley says “Nuh uh,” and sticks his tongue out at DM’s work. What does he counter with? Blather. Who are you Ed Turley and why do you come here to say nothing?
Perhaps you too are an Ed Consulting operator working for Gulen. Beats me, but my guess is you’re motivated by an interest that you haven’t shared here.
What is fascinating about what Martin shows is the level of Gulen Love that has pervaded academia and government. Here’s a link to some of that love gushed forth by a Prof at Rice University in Texas, Jill Carroll: http://www.rtbot.net/play.php?id=StGOMdtvtQM
She’s also written a book sharing Gulen’s wisdom and though she didn’t title it “Why I Love Fethullah Gulen” it is a rather shocking hagiography to this “leader”–with chapters devoted to placing Gulen among the major philosophers and state/religious leaders of the world such as Kant, and Mill and Confucioius, Plato, Sartre…
The interview presents us with a proselytizer. Not rigorous, not academic but rather “church member.”
Hi there, this weekend is pleasant for me, for the reason
that this occasion i am reading this great educational article here at my
residence.
A group on reddit called superstonk is exposing wall street and the connection to BCG.
It started with a lawsuit against GameStop for $30,000,000 for unpaid “consulting” fees.