Mercedes Schneider describes a new consulting team that is selling its services to states and districts. Most of its partners are protégés of Jeb Bush and learned his strategies of high-stakes testing, school choice, test-based accountability, and harsh treatment of teachers.
She writes:
Need help with your public or private business venture? Well, NY- and DC-based Ridge-Lane Limited Partners (LP) offers “venture development at the apex of public and private sector…”
Schneider reviews the bios of the firm’s principal actors, which are not reassuring.
She writes:
So, if you want to dip into some of this Ridge-Lane LP K12 “significant experience” (not in the classroom, mind you, but in Jeb Bush reforms, such as school grading, and Common Core, and PARCC, and pension funneling), then get your (or the taxpayer’s) proverbial checkbook ready so that these once state-ed superintendents can spin an income advising you out of those edu-dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Jeb Bush and company are trying very hard to appear relevant. Anyone that would hire this team of opportunists does not care about their pubic schools. Nothing the deformers has supported has improved public education. None of their claims are true. Data collection, testing-punishment syndrome and endless disruption are not success strategies. The main goal of this team of grifters is to dismantle public schools and transfer public money into private pockets,
Nailed it.
Consulting is all about the obfuscation. Promise them the moon in scientific-y-sounding language. Here, from an unpublished novel I wrote a few years ago, a short course in that, in speaking Consultese:
“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 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 horseshit 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 2010. Bob Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Jeb Bush and his mob are domestic threats to the US Constitution.
Just noticed that Jeb Bush doesn’t look like a Bush but more like a Koch family member.
Overlooking the grammar and punctuation errors in Ridge-Lane LP’s mission statement, what a bunch of corporate gobbledygook! Do these bozos even try to make sense?