When I worked in the first Bush Administration In 1991-92, McKinsey consultants were everywhere. Gaggles of very young, well-dressed people marched in and out of the White House with briefcases and plans. McKinsey has advised school districts, given them business plans to fix their problems. Does anyone ever check up on how their proposals turned out? Do they ever admit failure? I never figured out what they were doing or why they were there. Like Pearson, McKinsey is always there, although there is no evidence that they are education experts. What seems to mark the McKinsey brand is a sense of certainty that they know everything and know how to fix everything. To learn more about the corporate consultants who advise on how to do everything, I recommend this book, The Lords of Strategy. Education has been warped for the past 30 years by the inappropriate application of corporate strategy to schools and classrooms and children.
Their biggest disaster was their role in South Africa, where they received a huge payment to fix the state-owned power company. They didn’t but collected a huge fee for their failure.
In late 2015, over objections from at least three influential McKinsey partners, the firm decided the risk was worth taking and signed on to what would become its biggest contract ever in Africa, with a potential value of $700 million.
And a bitter irony: While McKinsey’s pay was supposed to be based entirely on its results, it is far from clear that the flailing power company is much better off than it was before.
The Eskom affair is now part of an expansive investigation by South African authorities into how the Guptas used their friendships with Jacob Zuma, then the country’s president, and his son to manipulate and control state-owned enterprises for personal gain. International corruption watchdogs call it a case of “state capture.” Lawmakers here call it a silent coup. It has already led to Mr. Zuma’s ouster and a moment of reckoning for post-apartheid South Africa.
Yet despite extensive coverage of the scandal by the local news media, one question has remained largely unanswered: How did McKinsey, with its vast influence, impeccable research credentials and record of advising companies and governments on best practices, become entangled in such an untoward affair?
McKinsey admits errors in judgment while denying any illegality. Two senior partners, the firm says, bear most of the blame for what went wrong. But an investigation by The New York Times, including interviews with 16 current and former partners, found that the roots of the problem go deeper — to a changing corporate culture that opened the way for an aggressive push into more government consulting, as well as new methods of compensation. While the changes helped McKinsey nearly double in size over the last decade, they introduced more reputational risk.
It was also the biggest mistake in McKinsey’s nine-decade history.
The contract turned out to be illegal, a violation of South African contracting law, with some of the payments channeled to an associate of an Indian-born family, the Guptas, at the center of a swirling corruption scandal. Then there was the lavish size of that payout. It did not take a Harvard Business School graduate to explain why South Africans might get angry seeing a wealthy American firm cart away so much public money in a country with the worst income inequality in the world and a youth unemployment rate over 50 percent.
Why did they do it? Greed? Arrogance?
It did not take a Harvard Business School graduate to explain why South Africans might get angry seeing a wealthy American firm cart away so much public money in a country with the worst income inequality in the world and a youth unemployment rate over 50 percent.”
Chances are, the Harvard business school grad would NOT be able to explain that — or even recognize it. They would see nothing wrong with the practice because that is precisely what they were taught at places like HBS: the sort of “milk the business for everything you can and then move-on” strategy that has plagued not only the third world but businesses here in the US. It’s no fluke that they all have BS in their ackronym.
How dreadfully awful….stealing money from poor people and children for profit. How low can you go?…
They did bad stuff in St. Louis school deform I believe
That was Alvarez & Marsal biz consultants who installed the CEO of Brooks Brothers as Superintendent of St Louis. They billed $5 million and cleared out after one year.
McKinsey & Co. looks for willing clients. It found a client in the US Department of Education thanks to Obama and Arne Duncan. Here you go:
“Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching”
The acronym was RESPECT, and it came from McKinsey & Company by way of Arne Duncan between 2010 and 2102.
There are still records about this scheme promoted as “National Conversations about Teaching: The RESPECT Project” all inspired by a 2010 McKinsey report: Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching An International and Market Research-Based Perspective September 2010. This report was not quite a version of Teach for America, but it was clearly based on a belief that test scores, including PISA tests, were the result of recruiting the “best and brightest” into teaching and that test scores could predict economic outcomes (with Chetty and others treated as experts). Retrieved from http:// mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_ talent_gap.pdf
USDE marketed the RESPECT Project this way: “All across the country, teachers are talking with the U.S. Department of Education (ED) about how they envision a renewed and transformed teaching profession in the 21st Century. This (website) page is designed for educators who are interested in participating in a National Conversation about the Teaching Profession and giving ED their feedback to inform future policy and programs, including a possible competition to transform teaching, which we are calling the RESPECT Project.”
The micro-managing began with the McKinsey & Co. line-by-numbered-line “discussion document” on how to upgrade the teaching profession, making it respectable. Although this document had no obvious author, the 2010 McKinsey & Co report is cited in three whisper-type notes on lines 24,114, and 204. Retrieved from http:// mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_ talent_gap.pdf
McKinsey and USDE were intent on micro-managing the “National Conversation” about the line-by-numbered-line “discussion document.” That managerial scheme was put into play, starting in 2012 with teachers enlisted as discussion leaders. In fact, teachers were not really trusted to lead conversations, so they were given documents for every stage of the project. Here is a partial list without the scripted version for each session, complete with timing the whole discussion.
TEMPLATES: Invitation template, Confirmation template, Thank you template, RESPECT Discussion Document (revised September 4, 2012), How to Lead a Conversation about Teaching, What to do Before the Conversation, What to do After the Conversation, How to Report Back to ED
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES: Video Page, Sign-In Sheet, Strategies for Teachers to Shape their Profession, Facts about the Teaching Profession, RESPECT Conversation Webinar and tools available online.
USDE managed to find discussion leaders. Some of the discussion leaders were state Teachers of the Year or National Board Certified Teachers, and some were Teaching Ambassador Fellows employed to work for USDE. USDE said that about 5.700 participants were enlisted in more than 360 roundtable discussions.
After all of that, USDE published a post-discussion version of the McKinsey paper: “A Blueprint for R.E S.P.E.C.T. Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.” This is a glossy 2013 report with big pictures of students and teachers, all happy, all in well-resourced classrooms, and with a scattering of teacher quotes gleaned from those highly structured conversations with teachers. This report also praised Race to Top grants, had 89 references to STEM as a priority, including a STEM Master Teacher Corps, and more. https://www2.ed.gov/documents/respect/blueprint-for-respect.pdf
In effect, the Blueprint left most of the ideas from the original 2010 McKinsey & Co. report in place, including a diagram on page 24. That diagram and the related text identifies tiers of teacher roles, none of these producing a tenured teacher unless the teacher was routinely evaluated “effective,” or “highly effective” for three out of five consecutive years.
This report also included recommendations for teacher compensation according to their roles, and their records of success in meeting criteria for effectiveness. https://www.ed.gov/teaching/national-conversation/vision/section-ix-appendix-sample-teacher-role-structure
I wrote about this scheme on this blog back, in 2016, May 15.
This Obama era program lives on in Teach to Lead, an initiative jointly convened by the U.S. Department of Education, ASCD, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, with current funding from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and Carnegie Corporation of New York. Teach to Lead has recently merged with the Teach Plus program that works in a dozen states and with “networks for school improvement.” John B. King Jr. is on its Board of Directors of Teach Plus. He is also President and CEO, The Education Trust and Former U.S. Secretary of Education.
Teach Plus has been selected by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a recipient of its inaugural Networks for School Improvement (NSI) grant. https://teachplus.org/who-we-are/our-mission-and-theory-change
In other words, the McKinsey & Co. view of teachers and teaching is alive and well and it is designed to get rid of teacher unions all the while enlisting teachers, willing professional groups and philanthopies to do that job.
How do you spell RESPECT?
How do you spell RESPECT?
With Common Core and VAM
With poverty neglect
And “public” charter scam
With NCLB waivers
And sleazy Deasy deals
With Billyanaires as saviors
And “civil rights” appeals
With marketing and hype
And testing till they drop
With Chetty study tripe
And Races to the Top
You spell it with a book
As far as I can tell
Should really have a look
A book by George Orwell
Check out the latest McKinsey scandal here: https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckinsey-millions-to-stem-jail-violence-instead-violence-soared
I just read that, but long before there was another project at Rikers Island, the very first pay-for-success also known as social impact bond for a program intended to pay big money to investors if it worked.
Results Released for Rikers Island Pay for Success Social …
https://payforsuccess.org › resource › results-released-rikers-island-pay-suc…
Sep 2, 2015 – The New York City Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience (ABLE) Project for Incarcerated Youth (the Rikers Island Pay for Success Social Impact Bond) did not meet initial targets for outcomes, and no outcomes-based payment will be made to investors at this time.
This early failure did not prevent other financial products from proliferating around the idea that investors can and should make money from social services “that work.” This general scheme is being used to fund early childhood education, notably in Utah where money is “saved” (for investors) by cherry picking students to eliminate those who have difficult special needs.