The state board of education in Colorado has decided to turn over schools in three districts to a for-profit management corporation that claims it can turn the schools around, at a cost of millions of dollars. Where there the firm has ever turned any schools around before isin doubt. The political connections of the firm are not.
Read here about the story and a deep dive into the history of MGT Consulting.
In all cases, the state board gave districts the go-ahead to pay millions of school district dollars for MGT Consulting, a for-profit management firm, to virtually take over the schools. The move has elicited hope from some that the company can improve student performance after everything the districts have tried has failed. But the contracts have prompted condemnation from critics who say the firm has a dubious track record and is diverting tax dollars to private profits at a time when every cent should be spent on student needs…
Leaders of the Florida-based MGT say they specialize in allocating public money more effectively while improving teacher effectiveness in the classroom and school culture. Its management process includes sub-contracting areas of school work to other companies, and it boasts completing over 10,000 projects in many states and abroad over several decades.
MGT is more than just a school testing consultant. The limited liability corporation also consults for other government agencies, including conducting impact studies of privatizing public prisons, according to its website. MGT’s current chief executive officer also co-founded a consulting and lobbying firm tapped into a national network of for-profit education institutions, Republican education reformers, the testing industry and charter schools.
That’s part of what draws controversy as public school academia question the motives of a company headed by pro-school voucher officials working to save failing public schools — for profit…
The group began its work in the 1970s but has been led in its current iteration since 2015, when Trey Traviesa first appears as MGT’s title manager in Florida state records.
Traviesa is a longtime Floridian and former Republican state representative for the Tampa Bay area. He became a lobbyist, venture capitalist, banker and charter school co-founder after serving in Florida’s House of Representatives from 2004 to 2008.
While serving in the state House, Traviesa sponsored legislation to expand Florida’s school voucher program. That program created incentives for corporations to pay for mostly low-income students to leave their school districts and attend private schools.
MGT was hired largely on the basis of its claims of success in Gary, Indiana.
Chalkbeat wrote about the situation in Gary, which is inconclusive and certainly not a demonstration of success:
It’s early to say anything definitive. In 2017, MGT won a four-year contract to manage schools in Gary, Indiana. The deal is potentially worth about $11.4 million, if the state funds the contract for all four years and if the company meets performance goals.
Gary’s school district has about 5,000 students enrolled this year, down from about 11,000 ten years ago. The students in Gary overwhelmingly qualify for free or reduced price lunch, a measure of poverty, like in Adams 14, but only a handful of students are learning English as a second language.
In Gary, the state ordered an emergency manager to come in not only for academic problems, but because the enrollment decline and fiscal mismanagement problems landed the district deep in debt. MGT took over the responsibilities of the superintendent and the school board, at the state’s request, and reports directly to state officials.
The work has been controversial. Some lawmakers called for removing the firm when it was discovered that Tony Bennett, who was state superintendent in Indiana from 2008 through 2013, is a partner in the Strategos Group, which acquired MGT in 2015. Lawmakers argued that the policies Bennett rolled out in his time as state superintendent contributed to Gary’s financial problems that led the state to require an external manager.
MGT has not been removed, however, and Bennett doesn’t have an active role in the management of the district. According to news reports citing state officials, since the takeover, the Gary district has decreased its debt, slowed its enrollment decline, and purchased new textbooks. The latest state rating of the district has also improved slightly.
In other words, MGT has been in charge of Gary (which former state chief Tony Bennett tried to destroy) for one year. It has not created a successful turnaround, there or anywhere else.
Was the Colorado State Board of education influenced by Governor Jared Polis, who has a long record as a supporter of school choice, having founded two charters himself?
This makes me CRY. Just so depressing.
Would someone please bring sanity back to education?
I am SICK.
This is so VERY familiar now. Money, the bottom line, not people.
Yet again; when money is more important than people at some point in time there will be a pile of money, most likely in the hands of a VERY few and no people. Priorities? How really stupid can people be. It seems to be answered all too often now.
Similar ,mentality. Homo Sapiens,; the only animal with sufficient intellect to destroy the basics which allow him to exist but seemingly lacks the intelligence not to do so.
Same basic Idea.
well explained
Dr. Diane: Your titles just keep getting better and better. They bring some comic relief to the grim Deformy debacles that you write about!
And you’re no slouch, Prof. Bob, with Florida rendered as Skull Island. I don’t know where that would place Texas, though.
Just wait. Give it a few years, and Texas and Florida will both be voting solidly Democratic.
Thanks. I love this one. It captures the sense of dread that I felt as I read about MGT, which is gobbling up millions based on no experience in school turnarounds.
If you would like, Diane, for a small fee of, say 300K, I can consult for your blog. Just tell me what conclusions you would like to draw about it, and I will give those back to you in a fine-looking report!
If I had 300K for a consultant, I would think of you first!
Awww, shucks. But, you know, Diane, I’m talking real data here, that would say ANYTHING YOU WANTED IT TO SAY! So, as you can see, I am the real thing, very, very consultant-y. Bain, McKinsey, and Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Florida Consultancy!
With data and stuff
I will hire you, Bob. Do you accept payment in Goo Goo clusters?
It is shockingly unsettling that any community would trust a for-profit corporation that trades in privatized prisons to manage three school districts in the state. Which three districts are targeted for this treatment? Are these majority minority communities? With such an abysmal track record in providing human services in private prisons, communities should be afraid, very afraid of such a reckless plan.
Maybe the MGT corporation will threaten to send the students to their private prison system if they don’t do their homework. It is a two-for.
A pioneering concept in the school to prison pipeline
ROFLMAO, Diane!!!
and what we might find if we had a way to look behind the “school reform” game: those most invested in charter schools also heavily invested in prions
prisons
I put up this post with 3 important comments that contain links… https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Colorado-Be-Afraid-Be-Ve-in-General_News-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Funding_Education-Laws-190819-218.html#comment742452
Here are the comments… but this blog does not. keep the links… go to the above address.. I will add only. a few here.
 Comment 1
The school privatization movement ( whose propaganda describes them as ‘reformers’ are winning, because THE Main Street MEDIA –LOCK , STOCK AND CABLE Channel — is NOT speaking a syllable about THE SCHOOLS, and are not addressing this tragedy. No one I meet knows of the war on our public schools, or that the privateers win because there are almost sixteen thousand separate schools SYSTEMS in 50 states. No one knows what is happening as the legislatures take over and give away the schools..and taxpayer money. We know who pays them, but our citizens are CLUELESS as the power-elite do the ONE thing that will END democracy, GET’EM WHILE THEY ARE YOUNG! (There is a reason why Saudia Arabia has their Madrases!!!!)
I am delighted and relieved, that Diane Ravitch the NPE and the activists, shine a light into the darkness that surrounds the utter demolition of America’s INSTITUTION of Public Education –but for me, IS ALL ABOUT THE UTTER SILENCE IN THE MEDIA! It is time for the MSM to describe the plot, and show how easy it is to GAME THE SYSTEM and HIDE not merely the robbery of our money– that should be going to public education– but the demolition of education in this nation.
Diane Ravitch, once the ass’t Secretary of Eduction, and the foremost academic historian in America, has revealed the destruction for decades, but this travesty is still not out there!!!
The largest system in the nation, NYC had already been destroyedby the ploy in the plot: take out the professional teacher-practitioner, insert a trained TFA novice, who is soon gone, and watch the institution collapse . There is a reason why people trust experienced professionals. Their ‘practice’ leads to successful outcomes.
Lenny Isenberg, who created Perdaily.com to chronicle the destruction of LAUSD and has shown that it is all about money Los Angeles, the 2nd largest system in the 15,880, has sunk into the abyss, taking with it thousands of teachers. He explains that for every tenured teacher fired, or any teacher not allowed to reach tenure, the district saves 60,000 in benefits. With the budget about to be overwhelmed by budget obligations, instead of funding public education, the bureaucrats and corrupt politicians backed by Eli Broad backed figured that thy could fabricate charges and remove teachers willy nilly, with clear civil rights violations –which they did as the media ranted about bad teachers.
The MSM said nothing. So, the power-elite which needs education to be in their hands, went on to the smaller systems! See my next comment for the simple ploy to end a school, or…any important institution that depends on professional expertise… like a hospital
Comment 2
I read an article in Medium that described how the journalists and reporters in this nation are coerced to ‘tow the line’. It is so relevant to why our people hear nothing about the Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s
Public
“It happens to be the CRUX of why we hear NOTHING…NADA… about the WAR ON PUBLIC SCHOOLS: “Former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen haspublished an article in Salon, where he details his experience with the way corporate media outlets keep a uniform pro-establishment narrative running throughout all their coverage ” Cohen’s expose’ follows the phenomenal segment recently aired on The Hill’s show Rising, in which former MSNBC star Krystal Ball and her co-host Saagar Enjati both detailed their experience with the way access journalism, financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer pressure were used to push them each toward protecting establishment narratives in their respective mainstream media careers. Ball said at one point she was literally called into the office and forbidden from doing any critical Hillary Clinton coverage without prior approval in the lead-up to the 2016 election, saying that in mainstream journalism jobs “you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for.”
That, my friends is how they get away with the removal of our top professional teachers…to ensure the schools could be labeled failing.
THE PLOY INTHE PLOT
THE ASSAULT ON TEACHERS led the way, and it happened to me, when I was a celebrated educator, the NYC cohort for the Pew research on Teaching Standards for Learning, and the NYS Educator of Excellence. See my author’s page.
With the real voices of the classroom practitioner, gone from the conversation about WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE and what is really ESSENTIAL FOR LEARNING TO OCCUR — we get Orwellian CONVERSATION about ‘choice’ of schools, and magic elixirs
When the legislatures take over, with not an educator on board that knows WLLL (what learning looks like) then monied interests like Koch, get to write the curricula…and re-write history…. and the power elite own this nation’s media.
Submitted on Monday, Aug 19, 2019 at 4:30:04 PM
Thanks for your insights. The dark money behind privatization does not want to alarm the public about the war on public education as it is a mobilized public that is one of the only forces that can stop the hostile takeover of public schools. Billionaires operate in the shadows behind closed doors.
a truly most HEARTBREAKING post….
A new study by Professors Wetts and Willer may shed light on Colorado.
Independent of the study, Boulder is described as the “trust fund baby” capital of the U.S. and, the city’s citizens pride themselves on a type of liberalism. Colorado’s Democratic politician, Michael Bennett, fashions himself as a liberal and he benefitted from a family fortune.
Back to the study. It identifies an important political group which is estimated at 3% of the population. The group is “liberals high in racial resentment.” The professors’ research doesn’t link the political group to Colorado nor to the takeover of inner city schools but, a study of correlation might not surprise us.
The takeover of schools robs minorities of their democracy
From the Denver Post- “…and low-income earners feel least welcome in Boulder”…a few common reasons reported…race…”
I would encourage you to reach out to union leaders in these districts. The state board of ed did not merely approve MGT, they forced the hand of districts to bring in outside management companies. And they have been promoting the expansion of charters since even before Polis was in office. Polis is definitely not our friend but I don’t think this was because of him. The state board of ed is horrible in it’s own right. Inwould love to see you keep throwing light at this important issue in our state. Thank you for all you do!
Thank you for watching us in Colorado. Sadly we are a hotbed for corporate reform from both sides of the aisle. And sadly our state board of ed is just this bad with no help of our pro charter governor. They did not merely approve MGT, they are the ones that forced districts to pull in outside management. Talk to union leaders in these districts. Adams 14 tried to partner with another public school district and the state board of ed said no. And they have been carrying out this pro privatization agenda for years, long before Polis. Please keep digging and working on what is happening in our state!