This story was first reported in the Los Angeles Education Examiner by Sara Roos.
I mistakenly attributed the initial reporting to parent advocate Carl Petersen .
Roos reported that Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker, has brought management consultants Bain and Company to provide strategic guidance to the district.
With Governor Cuomo assigning the task of “reimagining” education in New York, and Austin Beutner calling on Bain and Company, it bears mentioning that none of these people are educators.
Los Angeles has an elected school board.
Why is the superintendent turning to a management consulting business with no experience in education to guide the district in these troubled times? Why isn’t the school board, which is Beutner’s employer, making the strategic decisions?
This is “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein’s apt term) at its worst. This is another instance of the Pandemic Shock Doctrine.
Beutner works for the board. They should stop him before he outsources the district management to unaccountable and unqualified “experts.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am trying to stay upbeat, but will not survive this.
Let no crisis go to waste. There is a movement afoot to effect the deformy depersonalized education software takeover of U.S. education.
REMOTE LEARNING. Gerund phrase. A purported educational environment in which, in reality, there is only a remote chance that any learning is taking place
Let no one forget that Austin Beutner is superintendent because Refugio Rodriguez refused to give up his board vote until he was able to to plea bargain for felony money laundering, and Nick Melvoin secretly plotting with the Charter School Association the whole time. How does Beutner have even a leg to stand on, let alone get away with this? We need our school board to step in, put down the corruption, and save public education in Los Angeles.
That was VERY funny, Mr. Shepherd – I laughed right out loud. Good one.
Refusio Robriguez refused to give up his board vote.”
Fixed .
Refusio Robriggedus
LCT,
You will make noise. You will resist. You will work with UTLA to repel the invasion of know-nothings.
With everything I have. With everything we have.
It is just like a chapter from “Slaying Goliath.” The opportunistic vultures attack the weakened prey.
Yes. Vultures.
The Invasion of the Plotty Hatchers
More like a scene from Silence of the Lambs
Vultures are scavengers. I would say they are more like Wall Street sharks having a feeding frenzy on still living prey. The only way to stop sharks in a feeding frenzy is with larger predators, orcas. And the only way to turn ourselves from endangered humpbacks being eaten alive to orcas is with collective action. It’s too easy for Wall Street sharks like Beutner to intimidate board members using budget deficit aggrandizement, without union and union supporting orca activism backing the board. Red4Ed is not dead. Democracy is not dead. Keep them alive.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted an official seal that pictured an indigenous American with a cartoon-like thought banner next to his mouth reading, “Come over and help us.”
Yeah, they helped the indigenous. They started by giving them diseases that wiped out 9/10ths of them. Then, in the early morning hours of May 26, 1637, at what is now Mystic, Connecticut, they burned down a Pequot village, killing 700 elderly, adults, children, toddlers, babies. And so it began, the genocide that swept across the country from sea to shining sea.
“Come over and help us.”
Oh, yeah, Bain will be helpful. They will help themselves and a lot of slimy edupreneur oligarchs to lots of cash. They have always been helpful in those disruptive, deformy ways.
Bring on the depersonalized education software, the test preppy curricula and pedagogy, the Orwellian databases of student “data” (numerology)–the whole dystopian deformy package. Oh, and the reports. Tons of high-sounding, cutting-edge-sounding PR poppycock and palaver–what you get when EduSpeak has an illegitimate child with consultant jargon/businessese.
And call it what it is. Corporate colonialism.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/centcom-dxs-ts-kpis/
I’m reminded of Paul Thomas’ excellent collection of essays, “Beware the Road Builders.”
The road builders arrive in a village to sell the vision of a beautiful road and all the wonderful improvements it will bring.
The village is persuaded.
The road builders demolish the town.
And there is James Thurber’s line about people cutting down trees to make room for a mental institution for people driven crazy by the cutting down of trees.
Love this comment
The Bain of our existence (2)
Bain will burn
The Pee-on Village
Bain will turn
To rape and pillage
Bain will leave
With loads of cash
Bain will thieve
With great panache
Bain arrives to help gain access to public dollars. That’s the only help that can be expected from them.
Being lesson on muddying the waters to make them look deep. . . .
“Management consultants steal your watch and then tell you what time it is.” –Martin Kihn
“Let me speak, for a moment, from a 50,000-Foot-Perspective,” said T, laser pointer in one hand, projector remote in the other, “While Six Sigma DMAIC and DMADV deployment has certainly Bootstrapped the Operational Efficiencies of the Today’s Armed Services, you can’t just throw a fundamental Disruption, a New Paradigm, Over the Wall and expect people to Drink from the Firehose. A NOC is more than infrastructure and architecture. That’s the Low-Hanging Fruit. Maybe this is what Porras and Collins call a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, but I say Best-of-Breed is the only way to go. You’ve got to Implement Cascaded Key Performance Indictors—KPIs—to ensure Stakeholder Buy-in and Alignment and Accountability, not only Along your Verticals but Along your Horizontals as well because what we’re after, here, I’m sure you will agree, is the creation of a COE—a Center of Excellence employing Best Practices. And what do I mean by Best Practices? Why, Scorecarding, of course—that goes without saying—but also De-Siloing, which, as I’m sure you know, is the whole point of Cross-Functional QFD, uh, Quality Functional Deployment, not to mention Matrix Management.”
T surveyed the blank, uncomprehending faces of his audience. He had them just where he wanted them. “And those KPIs—those keys to Alignment—have to be Dashboarded Real-Time and not just floated up into the Adminisphere whenever some Prairie-Dogging GM gets some good news and wants the boss to Bobblehead his bonus. And that’s the Value Proposition of Security-Heightened Information Technologies: we act as Change Agents, not only Architecting the Roadmaps and the Enterprise-Enablers, the Communications Plans and Transformation Plans, but also Facilitating and Fast Tracking the Action Items over the Event Horizon. That’s our Value Add, and if it’s not your Core Competency, and of course it isn’t, that’s the whole point, right, of Privatization? of letting you stick to the business of containing the terrorists? If it’s not your Core Competency, it is ours, and, that’s what we Bring to the Table.
“I know what you’re thinking: of course, there’s always Diminishing Returns on any Hype Curve, but getting the Analytics right isn’t just another Consultancy fad—it’s the Real Deal, it’s what you have to do in Today’s Business Environment, with its Discontinuities and Black Swans. We’ve Ridden the Experience Curve on this one. We’ve done the Knowledge Capture and have the Thought Leaders and the Bandwidth to Knock This Out of the Park—to create a Blue Ocean, if you will. In short, we serve as your Envisioneers. We begin with Capturing Asks, the Voice of the Business and the Voice of the Customer, to Validate the Requirements, and then we Baseline and Benchmark; Map the As Is and To Be; do the Want/Got, the Trending, and the Gap Analyses; establish the Risk Management Parameters with a Failure Means and Modes Analysis. But we don’t stop there, with Shelfware. We actually do the Knowledge Transfer, the Mindshare and Cross-Fertilization, if you will, making sure that your Implementation Team has the Face Time with our PMPs and SMEs to Source it all properly and Queue up the Pipeline so you end up with a Plug-and-Play, Turnkey, truly Disruptive Solution. And we can Leverage our firm’s Strategic Relationships all along the Value Chain to add further value, with only a modest Incremental appropriation, both to Increase Throughput and Reduce Cycle Time from design to Go Live. And to make sure this is not just some sort of Fire Drill, we Health Check the whole process through the final Toll Gate with our Proprietary Activity-Based Costing.”
T took a deep breath and changed to the next slide. “And if the cost is an issue, let me remind you of the projected ROI. I mean, if the numbers are big at the top of the page, they’re a whole lot bigger at the bottom, and remember that, in the long run, Quality Is Free and pays for itself. And to sweeten the kitty, if this is done properly, you should be able to Demass and Delayer some of those Horizontals I was talking about earlier, so everybody goes home happy. So, the question comes down to whether you need to Run This up the Flagpole or whether can we sign the Incremental S.O.W. right here and now. Or maybe, Colonel Frank, you’d like to Take that part of the discussion Offline.”
The colonel sat back in his chair and thought a bit. After a long while, he smiled. “Son,” he said, “that was some presentation.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said T, “but this was not my presentation alone. It has the full force of Security-Heightened Information Technologies behind it.”
“No. No. Take credit where credit is due. As I said, that was some presentation. I, for one, have found your remarks enlightening. And in return, I have something to share with you. As I’m sure you know, CENTCOM is a multi-service force, a unified command running operations all over the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa. We’ve got people from every service working here—a band of brothers running the war effort around the globe. I’m Army, myself—cavalry, if you can believe that—came up in the Horse Cavalry Detachment of the U. S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division—we still keep that detachment in operation, for ceremonial purposes, mind you. One thing about the kind of training I got in the 1st Cavalry—I’ve been around horses long enough to know horses**t when I stumble across it.”
And that is how T came to find himself temporarily unemployed. But, as they say, you can’t keep a good man down, and T wasn’t about to remain unremunerated. T was, after all, like so many up and coming young executives, Coin Operated.
Copyright 2009. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/stories/my-experience-in-corporate-america/
Proper credit should go to Sara Roos and the Los Angeles Education Examiner.
Proper credit should go to Sara Roos and the Los Angeles Education Examiner.
Red Queen rules!
See update. Sara Roos is properly credited for this important and shocking story.
The board needs to rein in Beutner.
How do I click on Love This Comment?
I would like to properly credit Carl Petersen for being a mensch and a moral guy and a model Dad. Thanks for the straightening out, Carl (and Diane).
Another businessman using up taxpayer dollars to not use the people that will have the best ideas. Having been a teacher at LAUSD retired for 5 years they keep doing the same thing over and over again.We know that never works. And regarding sanitizing schools for students to return there is no way that will happen. We were lucky to have floors waxed once a year and restrooms cleaned almost daily. But there will be no money got any of that. Yet, he can go out and hire a consultant team.
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Here’s how consultancy works, typically: management wants to do x, which will be extremely unpopular. So, they bring in a consultancy to issue a report calling for a much of initiatives, including x. Someone else to blame. A “study” to validate it. And lots of spinoff contracts benefiting the friends of the upper-level managers and of the consultancy. The latter can cover any “pro bono” part of it.
OK folks, who wants to help here? Who is outraged and terrified at the same time?
Because remember, everything can get worse and here …. it will … IF … it will if LAUSD board member 3, Scott Schemerelson, loses his election to the charter candidate, a charter school PR know-nothing.
[…Sorry, didn’t mean to hit post…]
[….darn it…?!]
I really apologize for computer glitches here, I don’t think I can edit or clean up my mistakes and hope Diane will….
OK, I don’t seem to be able to use my return key so this will have to be one long paragraph. THIS IS HOW TO MAKE SURE BAIN DO NOT GAIN GROUND:…. It is IMPERATIVE that board member Scott Schmerelson not lose his election to the chartery candidate, a PR flack from a large, proselytizing CS. If Schmerelson loses in LAUSD3, there will be a CS majority on the board once again and Bain will be entrenched and Beutner, too. If you would like to help the effort to secure Schmerelson’s seat, you can make phone calls as easily from Virginia, say, as South Dakota as west LA …. please be in touch and your fear and concern will be put to good use. Promise. [now I’m going to experiment again with that return carriage]
So many have either contributed to or stood by while this country was made to serve corporations and not the people, a takeover that was ignored because so many goodies came with giving in, including the promise of a path to material comfort for conforming. In the schools, conforming has meant that teachers do the bidding of their corporate masters and teach what they are told to teach and they are told to teach that which helps to produce passive citizens who accept what they are told and do what they are told to do without making a fuss. Compliance gets one good evaluations and compliance gets on good grades and, even though few feel gratified for what they have done or been given for doing what they are asked to do, to resist, to rebel, to argue against causes too much discomfort, too much uncertainty for there are sacrifices that must be made if one is to stand up for what is good and right, sensible and humane.
in reality, teacher compliance has no guarantee of getting that teacher any sort of evaluation protection: the entire test-score-evaluation structure is set up to fail certain populations
Jackie Goldberg.
Bain’s method of “business turnaround” is to borrow money like there is no tomorrow, saddle the business with massive debt, fire everyone (because “austerity is required”) and collect millions of dollars in fees before you abandon the ship.
Bain is how The Mittster (Mitt Romney) made his fortune.
If you are a business employee, Bain is not your friend.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-183291/
I know some people now hold up Romney as some sort of hero, but it ain’t true.
The Bain of our Existence
The Bain of our existence
A Crapital idea
The point of their enlistance
Instilling firing fear
Los Angeles has an elected school board.
Are these people educators?
Do they have “experience in education”?
What part of “experience in education” includes the malpractice of GAGA testing?
What color is the kettle?
DOE is using Accenture consultants at a cost of $1.2 million to advise of pandemic planning.
DOE can’t figure out what to do without paying someone $1.2 million to restate the obvious?