Peter Greene has done an amazing investigative review of the Boston Consulting Group. What is BCG? Why do reformers in so many cities hire this management consulting firm? What is its connection to the Gates Foundation and Arne Duncan?
Greene writes:
“Word went out today that immediately after Arkansas decided to make Little Rock Schools non-public, the Walton family called a “focus group” meeting “in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. This is worse than finding the slender man in the back of your family portrait. For a public school system, this is finding the grim reaper at your front door. And he’s not selling cookies.”
Greene reveals BCG’s business strategies, which are totally inappropriate for education but beloved by reformers.
“Bottom line? Say a little prayer for the formerly public schools of Little Rock, because BCG is in town and they’re sharpening their axe.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They shovel this stuff in business schools like a religion. Rare is the course that invites critical thinking regarding the fundamental flaws of the modern model of business. Even rarer is the executive willing to look beyond the charts and matrices. Business can produce much good when properly managed. But business can be chaotic, myopic, and exploitive to the point of self destruction. 5 year plans are a mythical construct. Education, by contrast, seeks stability, long term goals, and preserves the idea that not everything important in life must or can be measured. Students need stability, not disruption. Curriculum focuses on graduation, not stock price or quarterly results. Learning is an individual journey, not a one sized fits all metric. When we “run the schools like a business”, we lose something important.
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I’d keep an eye on this:
“The groups want parents at 1 p.m.; students at 2; administrators, counselors and curriculum instructors at 3:30, and teachers at 4:30 p.m.”
They’re dividing them into groups because they will then set this up as one group’s interest versus the other(s). It also makes it difficult for the various groups to discover where their interests intersect, and then create any kind of coordinated dissent.
One of the weirdest and most corrosive parts of ed reform to me is the idea they always plant that parents and teachers are adversaries, scrambling for individual self-interest and (limited) resources. I attended public schools and my children attend public schools and I never once saw it that way. I think it’s crazy to take people “out of context” in this manner. It doesn’t make any sense in an organization. Parents and teachers interests intersect. Not always, but I would argue most of the time they do. It’s always presented to parents as “US v THEM”. We have to demand accountability from THEM. That’s an odd way to look at an organization, a system, a whole- as a bunch of separate interests that never intersect.
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Great comments, Chiara. I think they have to make parents adverse to teachers to get any of this to pass and remain. Parents are the sole interest group capable of counteracting the massive amount of money behind the Reform Movement.
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I heard it even in the Senate debate. Who or what is this opponent they’re fighting? Where does all this stern language on “accountability” come from? That’s not a cooperative or collaborative posture. It’s adversarial.
I’m not your opponent, and I resent these very powerful people setting this up that way. I think they’re using me to advance an agenda and assuming I share their goals and priorities. I don’t.
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This story worked perfectly for me in a thread I was writing in St. Louis….I googled boston consulting group st. Louis…..and found a job recruitment notice from last April…..from Washington University……which is the sponsor of a new charter school in St. Louis…..all girls, training them in leadership……given the source of sponsorship it should include a class in how to deal with women who make too much noise…like Anita Hill. With John Danforth’s daughter in charge, it might be mandatory.
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It’s all about turning public schools into market commodities, stuff that can be owned by private corporations, things that can be bought, sold, and traded on Wall Street.
But education is the very life of a person — and so we have, one more time, a market on which human lives can be bought, owned, and sold for all the market will bear.
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To a free market zealot with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Free markets are a great thought exercise, but left without adult supervision, free markets deteriorate into anarchy, slavery, and self-destruction. Why America wants to destroy what may be the last sanctuary of democracy and freedom – local public schools – is puzzling.
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Excellent report, and as usual done with compelling imagery and story line.
I am glad that Peter mentioned Cincinnati’s STRIVE initiative in his list of Boston Consulting Group clients.
The flows of money into these consultancies is hard to track. Also, the local talent pool on behalf of efficient management in organizations inclues specialists lent to community groups from Proctor and Gamble, and General Electric among others. So far, the school board and business community has supported community schools that include coordinated wrap-around services, but there are some foundations hell-bent on marketing so-called personalized learning as a panacea with pass through money from Gates to promote that agenda.
The foundation is KnowledgeWorks. It is addicted to future scenarios that treat education as a matter of survival of the fittest…but without recognizing that as the underlying premise. Wild enthusiasm for choice and for the proliferation of entrepreneurial specialists who have the know-how and savvy to make a living by guiding students and their families through a maze of educational choices. Teachers are viewed as marginal players in these sceneries.
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Too bad there is no mole on the inside to track their nefarious moves. The only way to fight them is to understand them and be one step ahead. Some sympathetic legal help is needed to rein in their assault by filing suits against their moves. It would slow them down so pro-public ed. can garner more public support. The public is slowly catching on to the fact that they will lose comprehensive public education if they don’t get involved.
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I’d also like to drop the myth that this is somehow “cage busting” or “innovative”.
They hire the same 150 well-connected people to do the exact same thing everywhere they parachute into. Cleveland is no different than Newark which is no different than Little Rock, which isn’t surprising because it’s the same 150 people.
The ed reform claim of “individuality” and “innovation” never fit with their other claim of “scaling up” and national ambitions and uniformity and scaling up won that fight.
Where are all the unique and local and “progressive!” charter schools we were promised? We got chains that are the same in every state and city. The bigger organizations will drive the smaller out because of economies of scale and we’ll end up with 4 or 5 giant operators. That’s the Wal Mart model.
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Chiara:
TARGO!
And that is exactly why I call it “a business plan masquerading as an education model.”
Thank you so saying so much in so few words.
😎
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Agree. As an example, those SLOs now required in at least 27 states have been marketed since 1999 by the Boston-based Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC) a non-profit sustained in part by fees for services.
CTAC placed student growth objectives at the center of Denver’s pay for performance plan in 1999 and has recently foisted that scheme on the state of Maryland.
According to William J. Slotnick, Founder and Director of CTAC, and master saleperson for a version of Drucker’s 1954 “mangement-by objectives,” the intent was to “add science to the art of teaching.”
He should have said pseudo-science. After a decade and a half of selling his product and process, there is no research to support the reliability or validity of SLOs for any purpose except securing the compliance of teachers with a ridiule-worthy set of requirements for a writing assignement–then rating them on how clever they are in playing Slotnik’s game. Snake oil.
There is Nno evidence at all for improved student outcomes. There is much evidence of badgering teachers and distorting their work and a bunch of lazy state departments of education who just took the Denver model and copied it–notably Ohio and New York.
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My friend used to work for BCG and yes they have been planning this for quite some time and it’s not just these struggling schools that they plan to take over!
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If the fees in Philly are anything like the fees in other districts,
it sure looks like skimming of public tax dollars.
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AWFUL.
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