Nancy Bailey, writing with her usual perspicacity, calls out the consultants McKinsey and Company for a recent report encouraging schools to get tough with students to make up for the time “lost” during the pandemic.
For years McKinsey & Company has had a premier seat at the school reform table for the U.S., England, and worldwide, despite faulty reporting. Because of Covid-19, plans are being put in place to get tougher on students to make up for lost learning time. They use terms like high impact and high dosage tutoring. These plans often echo how students must learn for the future economy. But such pressure, after a year like no other, could be devastating to children.
The narrative goes like this: poor children of color from Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities have fallen behind in school due to Covid-19, so the country needs to ramp up instruction.
McKinsey & Company’s report “COVID-19 and learning loss—disparities grow and students need help,” outlines their ideas of equity and what they think should be done with students falling behind. They partnered with Chiefs for Change for the study.
Chiefs for Change, of course, is Jeb Bush’s outfit that promotes accountability and choice and digital learning.
To learn more about the report, open the link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They never go away! The Reformers let no crisis go to waste when it comes to their Agenda.
Quote:Beyond access and quality of instruction, students must be in a physical and emotional state that enables them to learn.…
As a result, school systems need to create a step change in student learning if we are to catch up on what has been lost through this pandemic. Systems can start now to create acceleration plans using evidence-based strategies that support students with more time and more dedicated attention, all founded on exposing students to grade-level learning.…
The most effective programs strive to reinforce core learning, be culturally relevant, and limit groups to eight to 12 students…
A proven catalyst for accelerated learning is one-on-one support for students. That requires bringing more talent into the system to provide “high dosage” tutoring and coaching…
When helping students catch up on lost learning, it’s critical for instructors to keep them immersed in grade-level content.
………………………………………………………
So let’s all blame teachers for NOT being smart enough to expose their students to grade-level learning. [I heard of a district years ago, that made teachers use grade level reading books. Some kids were numerous reading levels behind.This is a facade to make administrators happy.] Make sure your classes are not more than 8-12 students AND bring more talent into the system.
National Institutes of Health:
RESULTS Poverty was associated with smaller white and cortical gray matter and hippocampal and amygdala volumes. The effects of poverty on hippocampal volume were mediated by caregiving support/hostility on the left and right, as well as stressful life events on the left.
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
The finding that exposure to poverty in early childhood materially impacts brain development at school age further underscores the importance of attention to the well-established deleterious effects of poverty on child development. Findings that these effects on the hippocampus are mediated by caregiving and stressful life events suggest that attempts to enhance early caregiving should be a focused public health target for prevention and early intervention. Findings substantiate the behavioral literature on the negative effects of poverty on child development and provide new data confirming that effects extend to brain development. Mechanisms for these effects on the hippocampus are suggested to inform intervention.
more tutoring is usually a good thing
Here’s the complete quote about tutoring:
A proven catalyst for accelerated learning is one-on-one support for students. That requires bringing more talent into the system to provide “high dosage” tutoring and coaching. These programs were pioneered by Match Education in Boston and scaled by Saga Education in Chicago to provide students who are behind grade level in mathematics with an individualized 50-minute class period every school day. Tutors work with two students at a time in each session and cover content that not only meets students where they are but also links back to what is being taught in the regular math classroom. These types of student–tutor ratios may seem unachievable, but costs are kept (relatively) low by using paraprofessionals (for example, recent college graduates) to provide the tutoring. Although certified classroom-teaching expertise is required for teaching a class of 25, trained college graduates can effectively tutor a group of two students. The results are impressive: participating students learned one to two additional school years of mathematics in a single year.
Thank you. Tutoring is awesome. I always said about teaching that the major problem was that there were always too many kids with too many problems and not enough time.
we know it as “Grandma’s rule”. Practice makes perfect; Or, the 10,000 hours (if you want to learn piano, or basketball or. whatever..). Time on Task… those have always been good ideas — add an adult or a mentor and call it “tutoring”? It largely depends on the curriculum that is chosen and the strategies of an experienced person. I told my nephew who is a grandfather “Papa School” is a good idea . He has some wonderful pictures with his granddaughter that I call “Rockwell moments” because they capture inspirational teaching.
Wonderful, Jean!
#BustEDPencils Live tonight at 7pm Central.
McKinsey: “Learning Loss” as an Investment Opportunity.
https://tinyurl.com/ychfgoaq
Special Guest: Nancy Bailey
Call: 844-967-2789.
Listen live anywhere talk927fm.com/listen-live/
Bailey mentions the limitations of on-line instruction and also that the “remedy” for bridging the gaps will most likely be more on-line instruction. Few of so-called foundations and think tanks existed before education became monetized by brain dead politicians. So-called reformers keep churning out the same old clueless mistakes and lies of the past and act as though they are offering something “innovative.” They have no ability to discern the hypocrisy of what they continue to peddle.
I spent my entire career helping ELLs bridge tremendous language and academic gaps. There are no magic bullets in the process. Politicians and profiteers keep believing in false “miracles.” There are none. There are simply understanding, dedicated professional teachers that may be able to save a little more time for learning through making fewer transitions and perhaps compacting curricula. This is basically emphasizing significant content and leaving some of the extraneous aside. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an education. We need to stop believing that our students belong on our man made treadmill.
Learning is a continuous a continuous process, and it does not depend on artificial standards. Even as adults we are continuously learning. It may take students some time to adjust to a normal classroom routine, but they will manage. They will also be happy to return to human instruction. In addition to learning a new language and culture, most of my ELLs overcame tremendous academic gaps over time, and almost all of them graduated on time with their peers if they entered in elementary school. If poor students for whom English is their second language can do it, poor and working class American students can do it too.
Time to get tough with local, state, and federal government for their failure to ensure a thorough and equitable education for all students! Enough blaming the victims!
That. Plus teacher union leaders should make McKinsey’s involvement in anything -especially education- publicly toxic. Ex-McKinsey insiders like Buttiegig & insider Dems won’t be happy but lawmakers respond to public pressure.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know the one thing my classrooms have always lacked has been a corporate business consultant who has never set foot in a classroom as an educator, and who knows nothing about child development, content areas, or pedagogy. One of McKinsey’s drones, I don’t doubt at all, will help me fully realize the potential of my teaching practice.
LMAO!!!
[Consultant arrives. Blathers about “rigor,” “accountability,” “outcome-based education,” “dashboards.”]
MARK: Hey, Bob. You ever seen an indoor snowstorm before?
BOB: Yeah. Seen a lot of consultants in my time.
MARK: Going to need a shovel.
BOB: And boots.
Pretty much, yeah. I interviewed with a principal in Brooklyn the other day who sounded like one of these guys. He ended up telling me that he found my “intellectual approach” to teaching “off-putting.”
OH NO!!!! Intellectuals!!!! People who know things!!!! Can’t have that!!! They might be having ideas and showing initiative, either of which is, ofc, grounds for dismissal!!!
Hahahaha! Weirdly, I found the encounter demoralizing.
That’s good! You are supposed to become so beaten down that you will gritfully apply yourself to whatever inane task your overlords assign to you.
Well, that really is what this amounts to, isn’t it Bob. I begin to wonder if I can continue to teach. I mean, I have to believe that there is a school somewhere with a place for someone like me. Some days, though, I wonder. And, yeah, I have at times felt beaten down.
markstextterminal: I interviewed for a teaching job once with an administrator who said he did not believe teachers should ever take off from work if they got sick. He never took off and expected the same commitment from anyone he hired.
Fortunately, I wasn’t offered the job. I wonder if this fellow is still working? Hopefully, he is by now long retired.
How in the world can he expect teachers to work efficiently when they’re ill and to not infect children?
An “intellectual approach” to teaching “off-putting.” What’s Orwellian for Orwellian? That principal is definitely on-putzing.
since I have had the “pleasure” of being micro-managed by reform-demanded coaches, facilitators, supervisors, managers and misc. district bigwigs, I can tell you right now that they will help you get to the full potential of your teaching practice simply by sinking their teeth into some arbitrary educational practice — like kids working in groups — and NEVER ever let go
Would Isaac Newton have ever been about the figure out all that celestial mechanics stuff if he hadn’t worked small groups? And how about that great small-group painting project, “The Starry Night,” and that exceptional small group writing project, War and Peace? I was planning on making breakfast this morning, but what with Covid and all, I don’t have my small group to complete this task. The showering in small groups used to be great fun, however. Sure do miss it since the pandemic ended.
All kidding aside, you bring up an important issue. A good teacher has an enormous toolkit. Bad administrators have one or two.
cx: since the pandemic started. LOL.
Been there, done that, Ciedie. It’s why I’m not teaching now.
Ha 🙂 Been there too! Can relate. And that practice they sink their teeth into will change the next year, and then the next and by the 4th or 5th year of yet again, something new – teachers as a group say “hold on…. this is what we think……” …. then the teachers are called “resistant to change.”
Not an exaggeration.
so exactly said: Teachers who are honestly trying to teach get labeled as problematic so very quickly in reform-invaded schools
Agree – I have seen colleagues, who would be my choice to teach my child…. retire early because their experience, expertise and voice (which is pro-child and learning) is dismissed or squashed.
Here come the consultants!!!! Hang onto your wallets and purses!!! The consultants, ofc, will tell you a) what the bosses hired them to say because those bosses didn’t want to say it themselves or b) whatever will generate more revenue for the consultants themselves or their partners (what you really need is to hire us to create balanced scorecard dashboards for you; what you really need is to outsource your accounting to our friends at ______).
In my business life, I’ve dealt with a lot of these people. Pimply, clueless kids, just out of business school, with their clipboards, doing interviews to a) find out who’s expendable or b) scrape up evidence to support their bosses’ foregone conclusions. A long, long way from what ought to be happening–consulting firms full of highly experienced professionals deeply knowledgeable about the particular business, near the ends of their careers, perhaps semi-retired, and sharing their accumulated expertise.
There used to be a little dive down by the interstate called Jack’s. You could get a really good burger there that was made on the spot with fresh ground beef packed together by the sort of clean hands of the owner. Unlit and smoky, it was one of those places where a particular group of people went. A friend of mine met a consultant there one night, and he got an unvarnished version of what that job entails.
This guy told him he hired himself as a consultant for factories that wanted to increase production. He donned a hard hat and coveralls and walked around asking the people who worked there what they thought could be done. These suggestions he wrote down. Then he dressed them up and presented them to the management in his three piece suit.
For this he was paid some big bucks.
Moral: When a political leader tells you we need a business person to run our government, beware.
Martin Kihn famously quipped that “Management consultants steal your watch and then tell you what time it is.” But what these McKenzie people are doing is even worse. They are going in with the foregone conclusions of the Ed Deform community and imposing those. They certainly aren’t listening to what people in the consulting world call “The Voice of the Customer,” or VOC (students), or “The Voice of the Stakeholders,” or VOS (parents), or “The Voice of the Workers,” or VOW (teachers). Consulting has its jargon, and doubtless those who practice this particular grift feel quite at home in the jargon soup of Ed Deform.
Consulting jargon: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/centcom-dxs-ts-kpis/
These VOX studies can be extremely valuable, if they are actually about listening to people on the line.
Great piece, Bob. Did that really happen in 2029?
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
I look forward to it!
“Chiefs for Change” It seems like such a modest goal. Change. Pennies, dimes, even quarters. Why can they not go for dollars? Only chumps go for change. Of course, dollars make very little noise, and, in this age of electronic transfer, it is difficult to see who is getting the money. But I bet we could all guess. We know who is not getting the money. Tennessee continues to outpace its projected intake from sales tax and its covid list, which includes teachers on ventilators. And nobody is talking of a teacher raise, which was put on hold in the spring due to anticipation of dropping tax revenue.
You have to love the moneyed elite. They never let a crisis go without benefit.
Unbelievably shortsighted recommendations by of course, non educators. We will need to hold our students gently as they begin to emerge from the cloud that was 2020. Let the teachers themselves do what they know best- teach their students with hear!!
That cloud will extend far into 2021. We aren’t even near the end yet, despite all the main stream blatherings about the vaccines.
Duane E Swacker: 36% of nurses say they would NOT voluntarily take COVID-19 vaccine
The American nurses foundation reports there is a lot of hesitancy among front line medical workers about the coronaviurs vaccine.
Author: wusa9.com
Published: 5:47 PM EST December 2, 2020
Updated: 5:43 PM EST December 2, 2020
https://wusa9.com/embeds/video/65-eaa1e4d4-21d9-429a-bf78-c0873765c91a/iframe?jwsource=em
The Fordham Institute for Ensuring Big Paychecks for Officers of the Fordham Institute is all in for punishing kids as much as possible post-pandemic. No recess for you! More Common Core-y online worksheets for you! More bubble tests for you! Bubble tests while you eat lunch! Bubble tests while you go to the bathroom! Bubble tests while you sleep! Gotta catch up!!! Otherwise, Armageddon! Remember how after the 1918 pandemic, the United States totally collapsed and was erased from history! (Oh. Scratch that. If we don’t test all the time after this pandemic, the United States will totally collapse and be erased from history!)
Completely agree with everything except the word “unbelievably.” From past experience, anything less short-sighted would have been surprising.
What is the difference between McKinsey, the Fordham Institute, and the Soup Nazi?
What the Soup Nazi is selling won’t make you sick.
OK, while I’m telling jokes: McKinsey.
No, seriously, McKinsey.
OK. Jokes.
What are Batman’s superpowers? Well, he’s a) rich, b) white, and c) male.
What is the difference between Donald Trump and the Hindenburg? Both are inflated, flaming Nazi gasbags. One is a dirigible.
And the other is an incorrigible.
McKinsey is where we got David Coleman from. Yeah, that worked out well-NOT.
McKinsey and Gates. Kind of like getting a little hemorrhagic fever with your colon cancer. Lord, the damage!
Don’t forget Sir Michael Barber.
Pear$on, Not Per$on$!
GERM Über Alles!
All watched over by machines of loving grace.
Don’t forget Buttigieg who just became Secretary of Teleportation.
Beam me up, Petey!
But a little McKinsey in your cabinet is hunky dory. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/15/politics/pete-buttigieg-transportation-secretary/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_content=2020-12-15T19%3A13%3A15&utm_source=twcnnbrk&utm_term=link
So much for all those experienced and qualified cabinet picks….
Expertise demonstrated in his management of the massive South Bend transportation system.
I really wanted to see him choose physicists for Energy and for Transportation. The two things Pete B brings to this job are wonkishness and an understanding that anthropogenic climate change is real. Those, at least, are an improvement on the Trump maladministration, though improvement on that is a pretty low bar.
Not sure what to make of this but I found it interesting.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/pete-buttigieg-dot
Thanks for sharing. Yes, the piece is fascinating. If Pete can be the outside guy who pushes us toward the end of the personal vehicle and toward universal driverless Ubering, which will be so much safer and so much cheaper and more time and energy efficient, that would be freaking great.
I have this dream of a small city that serves as a demonstration project for the universal, publicly operated electric, driverless Uber-type transportation system, like the first cities that switched from gas to electric lights. Imagine a partnership with a company like Rivian to do this. The door-to-door, driverless vehicles are based in a few transportation hubs that they take themselves back to for maintenance and charging. Perhaps there are some lots on the periphery of the city where people with personal vehicles park them when visiting or doing long-haul deliveries.
McKinsey……..that’s rich. I wonder what Goldman Sachs has to say about it.
They’re selling garbage credit recovery software that no one would tolerate before the pandemic. Just found out Ingenuity is going to be used in Los Angeles this winter to replace teachers when students fail classes this week. Ingenuity is worthless. The students can google the answers and get credit for learning nothing.
Aw, autocorrect got me twice in one post! It’s Edgenuity, not Ingenuity. I mean that in two instances and also in two ways.
Nancy Bailey probably knows that the author of the McKinsey report, Jimmy Sarakatsannis jumped straight to McKinsey as an expert in everything about K-12 and teacher education from his job as a science teacher for three years at Sousa Middle School, a charter school with “scholars” in DC.
Sarakatsannis has held exactly one job in education and there is every reason to believe that he left Sousa Middle School in 2008, in the midst of a major meltdown at that charter school. A tyrannical principal created chaos there. http://thewashingtonteacher.blogspot.com/2010/07/tyranny-of-dcs-sousa-middle-school.html
ABOUT JIMMY FROM THE REPORT’S WEBSITE: “Jimmy is a partner in McKinsey’s Washington, DC office and a leader in our Education and Private Equity Practices.
Jimmy’s work in education straddles the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and spans every stage from pre-K-12 education to higher education and workforce development. He serves school systems, educational services providers, technology companies, and educational non-profits, as well as private-equity firms and philanthropic foundations that invest in education.
Much of Jimmy’s work focuses on how technology can be used to transform teaching and learning both within and beyond formal education. He also has deep expertise in the improvement of human capital within education systems, investment in education, and the development of successful organizational and business models for companies working across the public and private sectors.
Among his recent client projects, Jimmy has:
• advised an online learning company on developing a strategy to raise its student success rates
• supported professional development for teachers in some 20 US school districts
• helped a major technology company define a strategy to enter education, including product development, team building, and a go-to-market strategy for the new business
• led our support of a new non-profit in K-12 education, helping to design and set up the organization with an independent sales force and operations team
• worked with a national system of technical and vocational colleges to create online and hybrid programs to expand access and provide better educational experiences, reaching more than 50,000 students to date
Before joining McKinsey, Jimmy taught middle school science in the District of Columbia Public Schools. He is the author of a number of papers on educational topics and a regular contributor to our knowledge building in this field.”
That is a perfect example of corporate gibberish too easily sold to school districts.
I looked up Jimmy’s publications in Google Scholar. In those five entries he is never a solo author. All publications are from McKinsey, including COVID-19 and Student Learning in the United States – The hurt could last a lifetime.
Do not believe hype about the wisdom of McKinsey, least of all in education. Arne Duncan was a friend of McKinsey and by 2008 had engaged USDE with an “uplift” education campaign conjured by McKinsey. The project, was called R.E.S.P.E.C.T. an the acronym for “Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.”
The project was nothing more than another scheme to make pay-for-performance the norm, get rid of collective bargaining, set up tiers of qualifications for teachers. Each teaching tier was offered an initial contract. In order to get a continuing contract you had produce more than a year’s worth of gains in test scores year-to-year for multiple years.
There are still records about this scheme. It was reportedly 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. That report called for recruiting the “best and brightest talent” into teaching because they could produce the highest test scores and those high tests scores could predict economic outcomes (with Chetty and others treated as experts). I wrote about some of these schemes on Diane’s blog back, in May of 2016. Diane has also devoted some blogs to the McKinsey’s corporate follies.
Thank you, Laura. You added a lot of interesting information here. I did not know all this about Jimmy Sarakatsannis and have been looking to see if he came from Teach for America. It seems to me that they try to blend in with real teachers these days dropping their affiliation in their write-ups. I’ll be looking back to find the additional info. you wrote about.
When McKinsey came in,
school got more Cored,
the teachers bot-ed,
the students bored.
Parents revolted.
Some of them bolted.
But stalwart McKinsey,
seeing such frenzy,
dismissed those conniptions
and wrote a prescription:
no recess, no play,
a 12-hour school day,
more fees and more grit,
would surely fix it.
When McKinsey is involved, everyone becomes human capital. It doesn’t matter to them if education helps or hurts students. To them it only matters if you make. them. more. money.
It seems that McKinsey read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism as a blueprint rather than as a rebuke of neoliberalism. hubris + ignorance + depraved indifference + greed make for a terrible and cruel combination. Children need to believe that they belong, that they are valued, that their existence and their voice matters. They do not learn this from mindless drills on endless digital (mostly multiple-choice) modules where their data is hoovered up to do dastardly harm when AI creates their profiles. Give them art, drama, music, poetry, and dance. Encourage creativity and curiosity. Assert humane teaching for young humans. If you have the time, here is a blog post I wrote about four years ago on this topic. https://resseger.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/after-chool-tutoring-and-the-neoliberal-agenda/
Great piece, Sheila! I particularly loved from it this material that you shared from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.:
[A reading stragegies-based] approach implies, according to the education theorist E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that reading is “just a set of maneuvers that can be transferred, as if students were learning to type. This emphasis of structure over substance, he writes, is fundamentally anti-intellectual and shortchanges children from acquiring the actual knowledge they need to truly understand what they read. In a classroom that focuses primarily on sounding out words and comprehension strategies, it can seem like reading is more of a basic arithmetic problem instead of a starting point for exploration or thought.”
Yes, this is a sick perversion of reading that leaves out the very reasons that we do it. And the Common [sic] Core [sic] in English is little more than a list of those skills, or “strategies.” Appalling.
Thanks for sharing, Sheila. There’s so much about this that is troubling. This stands out:
“When I questioned the head of the after-school program about this, I was told that we were not there to teach reading comprehension, but to teach strategies (such as main idea, cause and effect, compare and contrast, etc.), so it shouldn’t matter the grade level of the materials! ”
I wonder if this person had a background that involved studying how children learn, or if they were simply brainwashed to follow what they were told.
Just this morning an article from “EdWeek” came into my school email about reading. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-three-cueing/2020/12
These types of articles with a mishmash of information can make people jump to conclusions and think they understand the reading process for elementary students. The article mentions Reading Recovery, cueing and running records – which takes years to really understand how it all works and how to use these tools. And the assumption is running records is not used in combination with phonics instruction or visual ‘decoding” skills.
My connection to this post is with the reference to that article is…. the implication seems to be that phonics and decoding instruction is “tough” and rigorous. While understanding a cueing system and taking running records (which is not a program… just part of a toolkit to understand the types of books to put in children’s hands and where to take your instruction next) is soft and part of a “whole language” approach. As a teacher of reading…. believe me phonics instruction is much easier for teachers. A more nuance approach is more rigorous for teacher – for sure.
“nuanced”
What I get from the report, other than a perfunctory attempt at estimating costs and seemingly pushing for funding, is whole lot of punitive and separation techniques and recommendations. Nothing about robust SEL, nothing about how Visual and performing arts are perfectly placed for providing that rigor and concentration, nothing about how the language and the programs that are needed to support kids – overall – after this pandemic will not make them feel, inferior and responsible for something they had absolutely no control over. Despicable!!
One the one hand, Jimmy Sarakatsannis is saying that we need greater investment in our schools and an emphasis on educating the whole child. Great. On the other, he is pushing educational technology and mastery-based learning, which he describes as being ten years old. Well, Jimmy, no. It goes all the way back to the Behaviorists of the early 20th century and WAS AN UTTER FAILURE in all its instantiations. See, for example, the programmed learning language lab phenomenon of the 1950s-1970s. A failure that we should have learned from, and the reasons for that failure should be quite instructive. The current generation of standards-based ed tech is just that old programmed learning stuff but with graphics. Old vinegar in new wine bottles. Drinking it will make you sick.
Evidently, using the words “drinking” or “sick” will put one’s post in moderation. Checking that.
Well, I guess neither of those words was the trigger. I used the word “naked” in a comment the other day. That worked to get me in moderation. LOL.
McKinsey would have recommended launching the shuttle in freezing weather.
They’re a broken record for go till you explode.
I appreciate ALL the interesting comments here. Many provide added information. Thank you.