Over the past decade, since the adoption of No Child Left Behind and the introduction of Race to the Top, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: a proliferation of businesses that “consult” with schools, school districts, and states.
It started slowly, and then it mushroomed. I remember when NCLB started, and overnight there were hundreds of tutoring firms created to offer supplementary services. Some of these firms had never tutored anyone before, but they got clients by offering prizes and cash inducements to principals to send them students. Some of them submitted inflated bills. Some of them should never have been approved in the first place. See here and here and here and here and here.
Every time a new federal program was launched, a new bunch of private-sector consultants popped up to get a piece of the pie.
Race to the Top and the School Improvement Grants were a new jackpot or honeypot for consultants. In Denver, consultants raked in 35 percent of the federal dollars in School Improvement Grants targeted for the district. Think of it: 35 percent allocated by Congress to help schools improve–and it went to consultants. Did it do any good? Do Denver school officials lack the capacity to know what to do?
There are “turnaround” consultants who make millions even though they have never turned around a school in their life. There are consultants to tell districts how to implement the Common Core, and consultants to tell them how to do most anything and everything. This is big business.
I have seen evaluations of the NCLB supplementary education services programs that said they didn’t make a difference. Secretary Duncan said recently that tutoring “doesn’t work.” That’s not quite right. Sending kids to be tutored by unregulated fly-by-night private corporations doesn’t work. It is counter-intuitive to conclude that tutoring doesn’t work. It works if the teacher is experienced at the job of tutoring.
All of this leads me to wonder: When people say “we spend enough on education,” “we spend too much on education,” shouldn’t we be cutting out the consultants? Shouldn’t we cut the spending on the corporations that exist to tell principals and teachers how to do their jobs? If we hired good people from the get-go, why do they need to bring in consultants anyway?
So here is a thought: First, we need someone to do the research and create a database (yes, a database) of all the consultants who are fattening at the trough of public education, as well as a way of evaluating their track record; second, we need to know how much of our education spending is diverted to these corporations; third, if budget cuts happen, they should be the first to go–not the arts, not kindergarten, not guidance counselors, not school nurses, not librarians, and certainly not teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Right! Since public money is involved, then someone must be held accountable. We hear all about holding teachers and administrators accountable, well, how about holding the districts, states, and the federal government accountable for taxpayers money.
After reading the Arizona legal decision, it appears that charter schools and others are not accountable to the public in some areas. Have the state laws been waived again to implement this very expensive experimental endeavor? Citizens are at the mercy of the privateers. But, the greatest loss is to the children. When will this madness stop? This whole endeavor is taxation without representation! When are citizens going to revolt on that issue alone?
I can understand if cuts have to be made in these lean financial times. However, if I were in charge, I would slow down or outright cut many of the mandate$ that have been handed down to schools over the past few years. For the 2011-2012 school year, Florida cut $1.3 billion from the education budget (most of which entailed not replacing federal stimulus funding), yet districts were expected to invest in new, expensive evaluation systems. One such requirement of the evaluation system was all evaluators having iPads for instant feedback. Florida schools have to go to all-digital or nearly all-digital textbooks by 2015. In a few years, most if not all standardized tests will have to take place online. Where’s the money?
Exactly. We normally waste 2 days on the 140 minute FCAT reading test but this year we had to waste 4 days administering a 140 minute test because the 10th grade test had to be administered online and we didn’t have enough computers. Not only that, but the exact same test was given to the students who took the test at a later date. The results should have zero validity because students could tell other students what vocabulary was tested in advance. Instead, the state just brushed this concern under the table. Meanwhile these invalid test results are going to be used for teachers’ value added rankings which make up the majority of our evaluation.
I’ve had recent interesting conversations with corporate friends. They were talking about their in-house learning systems and presentations they were making.
I said, “Have you considered…?” and “You might try…” They had very little knowledge about how to present w/o PowerPoint or how to align outcomes with assessments.
They started talking to ME about consulting. Lovin’ the role reversal. I think we teachers ‘ought to band together, take some corporate money, and donate it back to the schools.
Just a thought :).
New York State sets the bar for consultants. To get around the sticky “accountability” issue, state education leaders pooled private monies and hired Regents Fellows – a euphemism for a small group of non-educators charged with setting public education policy and well beyond the scope and control of taxpayers, voters and legislators. Decisions are made top-down, in dead of night, with no input from educators nor administrators in the field. Sadly, the press also seems uninterested. As far as creating a database of consultants — good luck trying to track down these Regents Fellows. They are a stealth group unknown to most New Yorkers, yet they wield incredible, and in my opinion, damaging power.
I’m interested in how much of RttT, SIG & other US ED funded money goes into the classroom. Agree, lots for consultants however wonder how much for the creation of databases & vendors. Got a hunch a small percentage goes into the classroom.
As a teacher in a Race to the Top district, in a Race to the Top state, I can tell you I have not seen a single Race to the Top dollar in my classroom. I did receive about $300 of “merit pay” after not receiving a raise or step increase in 5 years. If teachers did not teach a core subject, they did not receive any “merit pay.”
This is so true in Rhode Island! Not to mention the proliferation of positions at RIDE(the state department of education.) Every piece is fragmented, everyone lives in their own silo, and when local school leaders are at a required training and see how tragically all of these pieces will play out for kids, families, and teachers, RIDE is nowhere to be found. Only “Intermediate Service Providers,” who have no power or knowledge beyond the training script. It’s fascism.
I’m puzzled by Arne’s statment that tutoring doesn’t work. I guess he would know. That’s how he got his start in education.
Duncan’s mother ran a tutoring program and his father was a professor at the University of Chicago. (Early one he tried to establish his ‘bona fides” with frequent mentions of working with his mother and tutoring- I guess he has a savior complex too, like so many reformers)
• After graduating with a sociology degree from Harvard in 1987 — where he was co-captain of the basketball team — Duncan spent four years playing professional basketball in Australia. (He went Down Under after first trying out for the Boston Celtics.) While in Australia, Duncan also tutored underprivileged students.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1863062_1863058_1867011,00.html #ixzz21qDgdWm3
After all the hoops Albany has teachers jump through to get their state teaching certification they go out and hire non-certified, non-educators to tell we, the certified, how to do our job? Then they charge top dollar on top of that? How about I get lawyer to fix my car of a surgeon to install my cable? It might get done but i’ll bet not correctly or effectively.
From my reading, I also find it interesting how if one system has hired a consultant to perform a task, before you know it, they are consulting for the system next door. Not only can one follow the money, one can follow the consultant.
The states and districts need to hire consultants to further perpetuate the idea that the teachers are incompetent. After all, why would you need consultants if your teaching staff is knowledgeable, motivated, and “distinguished?” As long as the teachers are bashed in the media, and forced to teach curricula and methods designed to promote failure, the more expensive ones will leave and, if not, will be easily forced out when the “evaluation” programs kick in. This will lead to teaching being a short term “career” for young, malleable, and never-to-be-tenured neophytes. It will also save lots of money, ensuring that public education will become the next teat for budget sucking governments and politicians who have run out of other troughs to ease their deficits while funding bloat.
The states and districts need to hire consultants to further perpetuate the idea that the teachers are incompetent. After all, why would you need consultants if your teaching staff is knowledgeable, motivated, and ”distinguished?” As long as the teachers are bashed in the media, and forced to teach curricula and methods designed to promote failure, the more expensive ones will leave and, if not, will be easily forced out when the ”evaluation” programs kick in. This will lead to teaching being a short term ”career” for young, malleable, and never-to-be-tenured neophytes. It will also save lots of money, ensuring that public education will become the next teat for budget sucking governments and politicians who have run out of other troughs to ease their deficits while funding bloat.
As a consultant who works with schools, I feel compelled to point out that we are not all incompetent, money grubbing fools.
The vicious combination of year-over-year budget cuts, poorly designed grants and inflexible personnel policies makes it difficult for many of our clients to staff grant-funded projects, and must instead turn to contractors.
For example, in California, schools serving high proportions of low-income kids can receive around $100K to provide school based after school programs. These programs are supposed to serve around 100 kids a day, for 180 days a year. A fully loaded district staff member costs around $100K a year once salary, fringe, pension and taxes are taken into account.
There are very few good after school programs that serve 100 youth a day with one adult staff member.
And so many districts turn to local nonprofits (consultants!) to run these programs under contract. By and large they do a great job and leverage hundreds of thousands of additional dollars the district wouldn’t have otherwise received.
How do I know they are doing a good job? By providing very reasonably priced, high quality evaluation services to the school districts that manage these grants.
There are many, many private companies out there who see the opportunity to make a quick buck by getting a juicy contract with a district or state department of ed, then hiring a bunch of newly minted BAs to do the work for (almost) free.
That’s not all of us.
Demand accountability and quality from your consultants! Anyone worth working with will welcome the challenge.
schoolconsultant,
“By providing very reasonably priced, high quality evaluation services to the school districts that manage these grants.”
What exactly do you do? Just curious as I can’t quite figure that out from the statement. Give us some detail, day to day activities, what it costs the district, how much you are paid, etc. . . .
Sure thing:
Site visits to 100+ after school programs per year, with a detailed report returned to the site level staff and district within 2 weeks. Training for all interested staff on the same tool and methods we use for site visits so that they can do their own rigorous assessments of program quality.
Surveys in three different grade levels and four languages for youth and parents – we process around 18,000 surveys a year.
Tailored summaries for each of the 100+ sites in the study, coupled with in-depth coaching on how to make meaning of the data we collect — along with the qualitative information the sites themselves have — in support of their continuous quality improvement efforts.
Ongoing Professional Learning Communities for program staff interested in enhancing their agency or site level evaluation beyond what we can provide, which is admittedly quite quantitative.
A district level report providing high level summaries of program quality and youth outcomes, presented to district staff, school board, etc.
For about $1,700 per site.
Every time I receive a board packet from my school district, I look for the excel spread sheet for contracted services. We spend millions every year on experts from outside of our district. When its questioned, we are told that it comes from “restricted” funds, which means that it is tied to federal/state dollars and that the district can only spend these funds on approved services. In the meantime, in Vallejo since 2004, we have “lost” over 6000 students, 400 teachers, and hundreds of classified staff. I would rather the millions of dollars in consulting fees be used on the teachers to further their professional development. I would rather that we maintain reasonable class sizes and that we would have kept four of our neighborhood schools opened. I don’t understand why the general public is not outraged by the “feeding at the public trough” that these consultants and their companies are doing. I guess because they are private companies, it somehow is not the same thing.
Unfortunately the public doesn’t know about these costs. This is something the local union should be tracking and publicizing. Information and knowledge are power.
All monies and contracts should be transparent. When consultant fees run high with poor accountability then the public should be able to void the contract. There are problems not just with consultants but with privatizing as well. Food firms that contract for lunches make contracts that require schools to pay even if students don’t eat and schools make decisions on bad weather hot days based on contracts not on needs of students. Custodians, bus companies, lunch programs all control the schools much more than you think.
Consultants should be hired by state and visit schools as needed. Costs would be kept to an acceptable scale.
I think in this time of fiscal crisis, money should first be spent on necessary resources, such as maintaining reasonable class sizes, keeping counselors, nurses and librarians (In Vallejo, we only have 1 librarian for the whole district), and maintaining programs that directly impact the learning of students. When those things are in place, then one can look at having the “extras” like consultants.
Amazing that so many private and parochial schools work well with NO consultants.
Of course in our new cradle to grave public school system where the schools now become the parents, the medical facility, the drug and alcohol treatment facility, the mental health clinic, the babysitters, is it any wonder they can’t manage public education?
Hard to find any focus on academic excellence in that recipe for disaster.
Amazing that so many private and parochial schools work well with NO consultants.
Ditto that!
Our typical son graduated from his Jesuit high school in June….a brilliant school with no consultants.
Disagree, though, that public schools have become parents, medical facilities, etc. That is not the case in my own very well funded school district ($29k per pupil).
In my experience, private & parochial schools are more likely to adopt a parental role vis a vis students than public schools. Our son’s Jesuit school has a strongly ‘parental’ culture, which I think can be fairly described as in loco parentis.
In contrast, our public high school frankly rejects any form of in loco parentis responsibility for students. Students are “young adults” who are expected to “learn from their mistakes.” This is the formal, directly stated philosophy.
If a student does not learn from his or her mistakes, that is sad, but it is not the school’s responsibility.
btw, one of the most useful books I’ve read re: education and parenting is Laurence Steinberg’s Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do.
Steinberg describes 4 modes of parenting (based in research going back to the 60s and 70s):
-authoritarian
-authoritative
-permissive
-disengaged
“Authoritative” parenting is by far the most effective, and the word “authoritative” applies to the culture of our son’s Jesuit high school.
“High joy/high discipline”: that’s the atmosphere inside the school.
To some degree, our high school’s ‘parenting style’ corresponds to permissive parenting. Permissive parents, like administrators here, believe that children should learn from their mistakes.
We pay a drug and alcohol counselor in our district. We do not allow failing to happen anymore. Students can take as many chances on an exam as they need. This has created more laziness among the kids who simply wait until they see what is on the exams before they decide to give it any real effort.
I only WISH they would allow the kids to learn from their mistakes here.
No dropping out either. It’s against the law.
Our district has spent tens of thousand of dollars on consultants while teachers are denied funding to attend conferences.
I find that my email address and name is being sent to lists of people and blogs without my permission. I have contacted some and asked that this be stopped. It appears something from them is being sent to you. None has permission to do this, so please discontinue any blogs until I can get this stopped. All the names and emails are attached to two lists but come to me together. I do subscribe to your blog, but that is it;none other.