Connecticut wants to transform its state university and community colleges for the 21st century. Who gets the nearly $2 million contract to redesign the system? Why, the Boston Consulting Group, of course. They are management consultants who specialize in outsourcing, privatizing, and downsizing. Jonathan Pelto reduces that the high-priced prescription will destroy the community colleges.
As Jonathan Pelto reports, BCG helps public authorities devolve their responsibilities to private entities. The lead consultant from BCG points to Néw Orleans and Dallas [?] as examples of successful transformation.
Any one of us could have written an equally compelling report for $500 or $1,000, not $1.8 million. But then Connecticut wouldn’t have the BCG logo on the cover of the report.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What all these plans have in common is the goal of converting educational values into commodities that can be “owned” by commercial entities outside the teaching profession, a profession that is on the point of disappearing as such.
It’s the same old story, the alienation of values from those who create the values.
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Sounds a lot like the mortgage backed securities and derivatives that brought down Wall Street. Only Wall Street never really crumbled. That was reserved for Main Street. The same game played to dilute risk and obfuscate performance in the mortgage market will be used to bundle schools as an investment.
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I’m afraid it’s a much older game than that.
It’s the very same brand of “ownership society” that we fought the (First) Civil War to end.
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I’m not in education, and as an outsider one of the things that baffles me is how public higher ed has gone along with every bit of it.
Do they realize they’re next? That they’re next in line to be privatized? They get that this means adjuncts rather than real employees and a loss of tenure and collective bargaining rights for them, too?
I look at Michigan, where public colleges are eagerly joining in to privatizing public schools and I can’t help but think they’re delusional..
Once Michigan K-12 is privatized they’ll move to privatize Michigan higher ed. They’re all going to be adjuncts and 1099 contractors rather than employees when the same ed reform they eagerly and uncritically cheered for public K-12 reaches them.
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Chiara, I’ve been saying and thinking that for a couple years. You are so right about higher Ed sort of shrugging k-12 off.
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“How stupid and shortsighted the ruling class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision. The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an “opening”; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none — not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life.” ____Eugene V. Debs
If we want to dump BCG, Melloy and their ilk, we need to dump the Republicans and the Democrats and vote for what we want and what is right.
Bernie Sanders for President!
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What a great Debs quote! There’s some truth to it –many of the successful business people I know are uncultured, in the old-fashioned and dying sense of that term. In a way their lack of culture is an asset, because it frees up bandwidth for the sort of endless economic combat that I would never want to let dominate my mind. Lack of culture also numbs you to the bruises, bleeding wounds and deaths caused by the disruption you generate. My fellow citizens here deplore the disruption caused by Oakland protesters on their freeways, but how tiny their impact compared to the invisible slow-motion tornadoes of “creative destruction” spawned by Silicon Valley. When inner city folk do it, it’s called vandalism; when executives do it, it’s called innovation. It seems to me that capitalism is constantly –and recklessly –destroying the existing order (cf. what Chris Hughes just did to the New Republic).
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But capitalism just might also be what heels it and saves it.
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Capitalism had to be saved from itself in the 1930s by the regulatory and social programs of the progressives under FDR. I don’t see that happening today, certainly not from what passes for the Democratic Party. Greed will not cure what ails us.
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* Laying the policy foundations for education innovation
* Scaling up proven innovations that boost student outcomes
* Reinventing the local education ecosystem in cities and regions
You just combine and recombine the words “scaling up”, “innovation”, and “reinventing”
It isn’t just education. They use this exact language, the same words, in each and every sector in the US. It doesn’t matter of it’s education or health care or government or finance- we only have one set of words we use now and it’s faddish business terms.
You can do it yourself and (possibly!) make 2 million dollars. Take those three bullet points and replace “education” with “health care” and “student” with “patient”
I wonder if higher education will be harder to railroad, though. Public colleges have some political clout, unlike ordinary public schools. They have graduate networks who work in government and college presidents are influential, much more so than the thousands of public school administrators. I think ed reformers in government have more respect for higher education administrators and professors, and the ed reform rhetoric reflects that.
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The Boston Consulting Group, Harvard Business School (HBS), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation formed a partnership in 2013, as part of Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project, to research the role of business in improving the U.S. education system by more coordinated efforts (not just check-book philanthropy).
A few ideas here:. “For young Americans to succeed in today’s workforce, they must out-innovate and out-produce the world’s best.” ( Text raided by Obama for more than one speech)
“Business leaders in America have a profound stake, economic and moral, in seeing that today’s students are equipped with the skills to keep our companies competitive in the global market.” (The bottom line is profit. If we fail in the global market, it will be the fault of our students and those who have educated them. Notice that business leaders are portrayed as having a “profound moral stake” in education of a certain kind–skills defined by businesses).
The report highlights three kinds of actions that business “champions” can take to transform the education system in America:
“Join with educators and civic leaders to lay the policy foundations for education innovation; for example, by encouraging state and district leaders to implement the more rigorous, twenty-first-century curriculum standards known as the Common Core.” This promotional for the CCSS is based on marketing boilerplate. Businesses also like STEM.
“Help to scale up proven innovations that boost student outcomes, such as highly effective charter-school models or digital learning tools.” Proofs are not offered, but Rocketship is extolled.
“Collaborate with a variety of stakeholders—from school district leaders and local community organizations to parent groups and labor associations—to REINVIGORATE the entire education ECOSYSTEM in cities and towns.”
The buzzwords and catch phrases and cherry picked data and “exemplary” programs include– corporate funded tech-training programs, more coordinated data gathering cradle to career, and turnaround projects that change the “ecology” of education, and then “scale-up” the ecology of course. This “ecological change” language is being propagated by a number of foundations who are unfriendly to public education, but want to appear non-threatening. The visual equivalents are lots of circles in little groupings, some like Venn diagrams, some with networky arrows and so on.
Page 9 in the following report has one of these representations with “educators” still in the center along with other contributors to, sustainers of the new ecology, enabling elements, drivers of change, and lots of emerging jargon from folks who also think that business gurus make a huge contribution to improving education by being “ignorant” about education. Ignorance is portrayed as a real asset. Why?
You get to ask questions that nobody else talks about–like “Are teacher education programs accountable for the performance of their graduates?” (That came from a retired CEO of Proctor&Gamble).
This report has fabulous examples of the forms of innovation that are based on false assumptions, offer up solutions to beside-the-point “problems,” and allow consultants and “innovators” from business to walk away from their “partnerships” without having to live with the consequences of their actions or recommendations or their ignorance.
https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/public_sector_education_lasting_impact_business_leaders_playbook_supporting_americas_schools/
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“He adds, “Rocketship Education, a charter school network near San Francisco, with national expansion plans, is reinventing how learning takes place in the classroom, asking its students to spend 25 percent of each day in a “learning lab,” where they work on customized, computer-delivered material. During this time, the students are supervised by monitors, rather than teachers, saving significantly on costs.”
It’s so refreshing when an ed reformer speaks plainly. The Rocketship model is designed to cut costs. Maybe at some point they will achieve cost-cutting and also produce test scores, but let’s not kid ourselves with what replacing teachers with “monitors” is about.
When Jeb Bush began pushing screens on little kids he included cost-cutting as a reason to do it. That probably wasn’t an effective sales pitch to parents, so he rebranded it as “personalized learning”.
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The ultimate objective of educational “reform” by politicians is privatization. That should have been realized from the moment it began.
Why will it eventually succeed? Primarily because most local, state and national teacher’s groups do little or nothing to confront it. http://wsautter.com/
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“Primarily because most local, state and national teacher’s groups do little or nothing to confront it. ”
YEP!
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The teacher unions aid and abet the reformers.
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YEP!
(in a YEP! mood-ha ha)
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This is actually great news. The reformers may have bitten off more than they can chew.
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Interesting that the USDOE feels they have to explain this:
“From the start, we have kept students and their interests at the heart of every decision we have made about Corinthian, and charted a careful course through what threatened to be a major collapse of a large institution. We worked to avoid immediate closure of all Corinthian schools and prevent the sudden disruption of education for 72,000 students and the jobs of 12,000 employees. And, to defend student and taxpayer interests, we have put an independent monitor in place to oversee Corinthian’s actions as the company begins to sell and wind down its campuses.”
Allow me to translate.
They bailed out a for-profit rip-off college chain by selling it to a student loan processing company.
This should be investigated by Congress, but it won’t be, because both Republicans and Democrats are captured by the for-profit college industry.
It’s reprehensible.
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2014/12/a-bold-new-plan-to-protect-students/
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The above comments are great. Adding mine. The whole world has acknowledged the superior quality of our universities, sending their best students here to study – I might add, taught by professors who for the most part were educated in American primary and secondary schools. Unsatisfied with degrading those public schools they are now focusing on our universities. “When will it ever end, when will it ever end?”
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The Hunger Games….
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Same is happening with SUNY in NY. Stem is being pushed in lieu of liberal arts. Tenured professors are told if they do not like the changes, leave. Adjuncts are being hired and it is difficult for students to schedule classes they want or need to graduate. Schedules are determined based upon an adjunct’s availability due to other job obligations. All the while tuition continues to increase…
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