Listen up, friends! Your own school district might hire McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group, and you need to know that they have a template for “right-sizing” the district. The template has nothing to do with improving education. It is all about cutting costs.
Fortunately for us, Peter Greene has read the 200-page document prepared for the Boston Oublic School district by McKinsey. Here are the highlights:
Close 30-40 public schools.
Cut back or eliminate special education by putting more (all?) students in inclusion classes.
Save on transportation costs by having children walk greater distances to catch a bus.
Increase revenues by having more students eat school food.
Centralize school lunches so everything is cooked in one place and delivered to schools.
Slash central office staff.
Outsource as many functions as possible. (This usually causes costs to rise, since private companies that win contracts have to show a profit.)
Here’s a thought. How about if a committee of educators get a $1 million contract to study the operations of McKinsey and suggest ways to save money. No more expense accounts.cNo more private offices. Share secretaries. Cut salaries to match teacher salaries. There must be many more ways to economize at McKinsey.
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“There must be many more ways to economize at McKinsey.”
Don’t hire them and/or pay for their services.
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I cross posted to this at Oped,
with this comment which (at the site) has many links back to Diane’s site”
If you read my series here at Oped,you will discover the lightening speed of the destruction of our public schools through privatization. Or put ‘PRIVATIZATION’ https://dianeravitch.net/?s=PRIVITIZATION into the search field at the Diane Ravitch Blog, ( or get the daily feed there and DISCOVER how public education is under assault by the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.)
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
Put Legislature in the search field at her site,
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=legislatureand see how many states have already handed over the public schools to charter schools.
Put charter school failure in the search field
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=charter+school+failure and judge for yourself what is happening.
AND IF YOU ARE READING THIS, send people who want to know the TRUTH AND REALITY of the destruction of our INSTITUTION of Public Education.
Nothing is as insidious as this hidden war on our people!
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” Sir Michael Barber was a partner there before he went to run Pearson, and David Coleman worked as a consultant at McKinsey before he spearheaded the Common Core. McKinsey has also plucked some employees from the world of Eli Broad– a McKinsey manager was in the first class of the Broad Academy. McKinsey actually pre-dated Broad in the practice of embedding their own people in the Los Angeles school district.”
It’s very diverse and innovative,ed reform. It’s literally the same 25 people over and over and over.
There must be some limit on “Sir Michael Barber”, right? Surely he can’t run worldwide education systems alone.
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The same 25 reformers – and they have been completely, 100% incompetent. Not one single. workable solution has been generated by any of these FAILURES.
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Chiara,
Reformers always fail up. Notice that there’s always a soft landing in a cushy job. Deasy to Broad; Barbic to Arnold; King to Secretary of Education; Duncan to Emerson Collective and Brookings.
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“Reformers always fail up.”
Beautifully said. Tragic and true.
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I agree with Lloyd. If districts don’t spend money on McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group, they will immediately save money. While greater efficiency may result in savings, there are items in a school budget that a business group cannot understand like special education. Inclusion is not the best answer for all classified students. It is an ignorant assumption.
The lure of privatization is cost savings. It often winds up costing more for much worse service due to high management cost, duplication of existing services and, of course, profit. If we care about public education, we must be willing to provide the type of education that will enable all students to realize their potential.
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I’m skeptical that McKinsey’s work has the deep practical understanding to make these sweeping changes without disruption that would diminish student learning opportunities. Poorly done change, even if the intentions are good, impacts the most vulnerable students most.
That said, a goal to move from 57% to 80% of students with disabilities in an inclusionary setting would not be viewed as a radical move in many district provided support and a good co-teaching model came with the shift. Inclusion doesn’t mean cutting special education. It’s a change in how students are supported. Students with the most significant learning, behavioral, and medical disabilities are generally better served in a self-contained setting, but in my experience most students with disabilities have more positive learning and social experiences in school in inclusionary placements with appropriate support.
If the report is to be believed, there are 35 schools where no students were referred for special education and others where 100% of those referred were classified with a disability. If that is not a typo, that is very disparate.
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Inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean cutting special education, but if they’re trying to save money, it WILL means cuts to special education. In my state, we’re pretty much full inclusion with little to no support, and it’s an unmitigated disaster, both for the teachers, the special education students, and the general education students.
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Inclusion without support would be a disaster. I’ve heard about that in some states. In our area, inclusion generally means either a co-teaching arrangement (usually clusters) or special ed para support in gen ed with students going to resource teachers instead of homeroom/study hall/an elective.
But as you say, if their main goal is reducing costs it is likely they would shortchange whatever inclusion model they claimed to be implementing.
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“I’m skeptical that McKinsey’s work has the deep practical understanding to make these sweeping changes without disruption that would diminish student learning opportunities. Poorly done change, even if the intentions are good, impacts the most vulnerable students most.”
What makes you think they are trying to avoid disruption? Or, for that matter, that they have good intentions? This is McKinsey, for pity’s sake. They’ve worked with Saudi Arabia to make it more efficient to destroy Yemen. The only intentions are profit.
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Dienne, glad you are back. You are no longer in moderation.
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Taken to the logical extreme, outsource education to the suburbs. Urban cores have no economic interest in spending on public education, or low cost housing, or taking care of the elderly.
I think this is in a small way what is being seen with this “cost cutting”. Not pretty, but an economic adaptation of a economic unit to shed societal costs to some other group.
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Yes — we went through this in Philly. A few other things to watch out for: a) the consultants will not locate themselves next to district experts b/c that might lead to collaboration; instead, they set up in the Supt’s or Board’s office both to influence decision making and also to keep their district detractors out of this office. I had a 23-year old consultant ask me why I needed to see our CFO.Oh — just because I have enrollment information that is an input to the five-year plan, is all… b) consultants who take your data and make it say whatever serves their plan, not the interests of the district;c) in the last few weeks of the contract they will invent a new need for themselves to try to get their contract extended. In our case, it was a dashboard. This project is intended to be attention-getting and uncompleted so that their contract will be extended; and d) (as mentioned above) recycled plans (and even the same Power Point slides !!!) from other districts. If their plan doesn’t sound like it was created for your district, that’s because it wasn’t!
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Suppose that you have a draconian measure that you want to implement. You want, for example, to close a bunch of neighborhood schools and consolidate them or to replace them with for-profit charters, or you want to outsource your call centers and accounting to India or China. So, you hire a consulting group to tell you what you want to hear, and then you can push the responsibility off onto them. Well, we brought in the experts, and this is what they said to do.
And, the problem is never with top-down control, it’s with top-down controllers not having sufficient or timely “data.” So, create a dashboard. Any dashboard will do–any sort of numerology–because by the time it’s being used, the consultants will be off to the next gig.
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cx: control; it’s
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