Archives for category: Boston Consulting Group
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What and Who Is EdVoice?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2012 //
12

A group called  EdVoice filed a lawsuit to compel the teachers of Los Angeles to comply with 40-year-old legislation (the Stull Act), requiring that student performance be part of teacher evaluation. The Los Angeles teachers’ union has opposed the suit, and they are currently in litigation.

The issues are supposed to be resolved in December. There are many ways to demonstrate pupil performance, not just standardized test scores.

There are so many of these “reform” groups that it is hard to keep track of them.

What and who is EdVoice?

Here is an answer from Sharon Higgins, an Oakland parent activist who is a relentless researcher, and who maintains two websites, one called “charterschoolscandals,” the other called “The Broad Report.” Higgins is an example of the power of one voice, devoted to facts:

Here are a few more specifics about EdVoice, the education lobbying group.

EdVoice was founded in 2001 by Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix, Microsoft board member, Green Dot founding funder) and John Doerr (venture capitalist, investment banker), along with and former CA state Assembly members Ted Lempert and Steve Poizner. Eli Broad and Don Fisher (deceased CEO of The Gap and major KIPP supporter) once served on EdVoice’s board.

EdVoice has received a ton of money from all of the above as well as from Carrie Walton Penner and Fisher’s widow, Doris. Penner lives in the Bay Area and is a Walton Family Foundation trustee. She also sits on KIPP’s board, as does Reed Hastings, and the Fishers’ son, John.

Back in 1998, Hastings also co-founded Californians for Public School Excellence with Don Shalvey. This is the organization that pushed for the Charter Schools Act of 1998, the law that lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in the state.

Don Shalvey was involved with starting the first charter school in California, just after the passage of the California Charter School Act of 1992 (CA was the second state to pass a law). He is also founder and former CEO of Aspire Public Schools. Reed Hastings has been a major source of Aspire’s financial backing, including its launch. In 2009, Shalvey stepped down from his post at Aspire and went to work for the Gates Foundation, but for a while he stayed on Aspire’s board. The Gates Foundation has given generously to Aspire.

In 2011, Hastings and Doerr pumped $11M into DreamBox Learning, an online education company started by a former Microsoft executive and the CEO of a software company. It was acquired by Hastings with help from the Charter School Growth Fund.

BTW, EdVoice co-founder Lempert is currently president of an Oakland-based org called Children Now; he occasionally teaches at Cal. Poizner, a conservative Republican and wealthy Silicon Valley high tech entrepreneur, was defeated by Meg Whitman in the June 2010 gubernatorial primary, and is now the State Insurance Commissioner. For several years he worked for Boston Consulting Group as a management consultant.

More conniving fun and games.

Categories Boston Consulting Group, California, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Outrage in Philadelphia!

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2012 //
3

The $2 billion William Penn Foundation has funded the Philadelphia Student Union for 17 years.

However, the student union does not support the foundation’s radical plan to privatize large numbers of public schools in Philadelphia.

Surprise! The William Penn Foundation will no longer fund the Philadelphia Student Union.

William Penn, the large-hearted man for whom the foundation is named, would not approve.

It’s a shame that the richest members of society use their money to stifle dissent from the plans that they are foisting on the poorest members of society.

The youth of Philadelphia should be listened to, not just the Boston Consulting Group.

 

 

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization

Privatization, Profits, and Politicians

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2012 //
8

A reader noted the similarity between Governor Chris Christie’s plan to privatize low-performing public schools, and Governor Rick Snyder’s reform plan in Michigan. Other readers have commented on the irony of conservative Republican governors–allegedly committed to small government–aggressively using the powers of government to undermine local control and privatize schools.

The similarity goes beyond Christie and Snyder. The same ideas–privatize low-performng schools, close low-performing schools–are embedded in Race to the Top, also in the Boston Consulting Group’s plan for Philadelphia, the Mind Trust plan for Indianapolis, the Bloomberg reforms in New York City, Mayor Frank Jackson’s plan for Cleveland. None of these plans ever works, other than by pushing out the low-performing kids and sending them to other struggling schools. It makes you wish that these guys would take a peek at evidence or actually care about the kids. And it also makes you wonder why none of them ever has an original idea. They just copy one another ad infinitum. And the more they copy stale, failed ideas, the more they praise themselves as “innovators.”

When you see how popular these ideas are among conservative Republicans, it shows how far to the right the Republican party has gone, when the principle of profit trumps the principle of local control and respect for tradition:

This sounds very eerily the same as what Gov Rick Snyder has already done here in Michigan. The Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) is set to operate the lowest performing 5% of Michigan schools starting in the 12-13 school year. Here is a quote from the michigan.gov website explaining the EAA ” It (EAA) will first apply to underperforming schools in Detroit in the 2012-2013 school year and then be expanded to cover the entire state.” Is this not a state takeover?
Categories Boston Consulting Group, Michigan, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Privatization

Astonishing News from Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2012 //
11

As readers of this blog know, the School Reform Commission of Philadelphia has recommended a vast expansion of charter schools.

It is acting on the recommendation of the Boston Consulting Group, business management consultants with no deep knowledge of education but a deep love of privatization.

The business leaders of Philadelphia are pushing hard for the privatization plan.

But today, the U.S. Attorney for Philadelphia charged a major charter school leader in Philadelphia with multiple violations of the law:

A charter school mogul was charged today in a multimillion dollar fraud case by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Dorothy June Hairston Brown, who received accolades for students’ test scores and gained notoriety for collecting large salaries and suing parents who questioned her actions was indicted on multiple counts of wire fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

Brown, a former Philadelphia school district principal, founded three small charter schools in Philadelphia: the Laboratory which has campuses in Northern Liberties, Overbrook and Wynnefield; Ad Prima in Overbrook and Planet Abacus in Tacony.

In addition, in 2005 she helped create the Agora Cyber Charter School, which provides online instruction to students from across the state in their homes.

An article in another paper says that $6.5 million was misappropriated.

Really, in light of the latest charter school scandal in Philadelphia, can the city’s leaders continue to demand the creation of even more unregulated, privately-managed schools? 

Categories Accountability, Boston Consulting Group, Philadelphia, Privatization

Who Is Paying to Privatize Public Schools in Philly?

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2012 //
2

The William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia paid for the services of the Boston Consulting Group (the group that spawned Bain).

BCG recommended privatization of a large number of schools in the city, allegedly to save money. But as we know, charters don’t save money and on average, they don’t get better results. But they do manage to compete with public schools for limited public funding.

Now we learn that the foundation was not content to bring in the hired guns of BCG, it also put $160,000-180,000 into PR to promote the recommendations to the citizens and legislators.

These guys will do whatever they can to make sure public education does not survive in Philadelphia.

To whom is the William Penn Foundation accountable? Who elected them to rearrange the lives of the people of their city?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Philadelphia, Privatization

A Glimmer of Hope in Philadelphia?

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2012 //
7

Thanks to the reader who sent the link to this editorial in the Philadelpia Inquirer.

The editorial warns that charter schools are no panacea; that many of them are no better than the public schools they replace; that opening charters does nothing for the vast majority left behind in public schools for which there is no plan at all.

Opening escape hatches that skim off the most motivated kids solves no problems.

Most children will be left behind. Remember them?

And it will cost a bankrupt district $139 million to open new charters.

Where is this heading? Has anyone thought this through?

The Boston Consulting Group has not.

What’s the end game?

The editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking good questions.

Does the School Reform Commission have any answers?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Philadelphia

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
6

Lance Hill of the Southern Institute of Education and Research reflects on the evolution of charter schools in New Orleans.

Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most profitable students affects other schools, though it is hard to detect in systems with few charters.  The systemic effects are easier to see in a “closed system” as we have in New Orleans in which 80% of students attend charters.  Every high-performing charter creates a chronically low-performing school somewhere in the system. The students that charters reject, who are high-needs and high-cost, become concentrated in a separate set of schools.  These “dumping schools” concentrate students with enormous skill deficits and disruptive behaviors, making it impossible for educators to teach and also creating an intractable non-compliant student subculture.  Privatization creates good schools by creating even worse schools.

The evidence of this “rob peter to pay paul” phenomenon is not difficult to find.  As charter schools increased in relative performance the first few years in New Orleans, the remaining state-run public schools were locked into chronic failure.  For four years in a row, the direct-run state schools posted an average 80% failure rate on the 8th grade math LEAP progression test.  This, despite the fact that the state had doubled the expenditure per pupil for a period of time and all these schools were directly run by Supt. Paul Vallas who selected the “world class” school administrators, contracted to staff the schools with the “best and brightest” teachers (TFA), and controlled the curriculum and hours of instruction.  It was clear that the every year charters would skim the best students from the remaining schools and dump the low-performing students forced on them by the lottery.

In 2007, the highest ranking official in the state takeover of New Orleans schools said in a meeting that I attended that some charters were systematically dumping challenging and low-performing students into the remaining public system. Six years after the takeover, only 6,000 of the total 42,000 students remain in non-charter dumping schools:  100% of those students are in state-run schools that the state graded as “D” or F” in 2011.  It is a wonder that New Orleanians can’t figure out why we have the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation, and school-age teens are the principal perpetrators of the most reckless of the violence.

Creating excellent schools is not the same as creating excellent school systems.  The free-market has one goal: profit.  It did not come into existence to create innovative and equitable public services.  The New Orleans Model ensures that successful schools are created at the expense of the system as a whole; one student advances at the expense of another.  If other school systems opt for the New Orleans Model, they need to do so knowing that the result will be a separate and unequal system of “college prep” and “prison prep” schools.

Lance Hill, Ph.D.

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, New Orleans

More About the Boston Consulting Group: Read It and Weep

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
17

In an earlier post today, I wondered about the Boston Consulting Group. I knew this was a major management consulting organization, one of those companies that helps corporations do strategic planning. I knew that they advised the Philadelphia School Reform Commission to privatize a large number of its schools and gave the same advice to the planning committee for Memphis.

This bothers me because public schools are supposed to be instruments of the local community; they are supposed to be run along democratic principles, attuned to the needs and aspirations of their local community, employing professionals to carry out professional responsibilities on behalf of the community. But along come the hired guns to rearrange the schools of the community and give them to private corporations. I wondered, who are these guys? What is the source of their expert knowledge of public education?

A faithful reader did the research and she found an article that answers most of my questions. The post went up only hours ago! This reader, who posts anonymously, wasted no time.

I read the article. It is jaw-dropping. It deserves a post all to itself. It is not just about BCG. It is about Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, North Carolina, Delaware, and many other places where the corporate reformers are taking over public education for fun and profit. It’s about the close ties between BCG and KIPP.

Please read it. If only half of it is true, we are in deep trouble. If all of it is true…well, what can I say. Read it.

And this article details the influence of consultants in general and BCG in particular. You begin to understand why so much of the federal funding gets siphoned off by consultants, the biggest growth industry. One analysis concluded that 25-35 percent of federal funding for  School Improvement Grants went not to the schools but to consultants.

One thing that becomes clear is BCG’s interest in cutting costs. Another is in opening the path to for-profit corporations. Not much about any interest in education or learning or curriculum or teacher morale or such.

These guys should not be flying under the radar. Let them be known by what they advocate and what they do to our community schools.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been around the block or two when it comes to corporate schooling, even though it profits from other consulting and includes as alumni Mitt Romney, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and hedge fund manager John Paulson. Along with Broad Foundation support, the consulting firm worked on Delaware’s Vision 2015 for a longer school day in 2007, designed a business plan for the North Carolina New Schools Project, and have left footprints  in Cleveland, Arizona, Seattle, Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. BCG, as Daniel Denvir has noticed, recommended “that New Orleans, which has decimated its teachers’ union and put most schools under charter control, create the exact same species of achievement networks in 2006” as the ones proposed for Philly.

“Since at least 2007, BCG has been working on linking teacher pay to student test scores and so-called academic achievement for the Dallas Independent School District. Under J. Puckett’s Texas office leadership, BCG has also struck a deal with Uplift Education, where Jeb Bush’s son, George P., sits on the board of directors.  Puckett and Phil Montgomery, Uplift’s founding member, both sit on the board of Commit, an IBM, Bank of America, Bank of One-funded school group. Puckett was also a player in the Exxon Mobile/Gates Foundation-hyped National Math and Science Initiative (page 27, PDF box).

“BCG heavily promotes online learning in K-12 and college. In “Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education,” the consulting firm calls for an “aligned set of educational objectives, standards, curricula, assessments, interventions, and professional development,” all centered around online technology. Deeming charter schools the leaders of internet schooling, the “study’s” authors quote online profiteer and Democrat for Education Reform’s Tom Vander Ark, praises Rocketship for hiring low wage non-teachers, and thanks their senior advisor, Margaret Spelling, Bush’s U.S. Secretary of Education. The” report” also praises the conflict-of-interest-laden School of One in NYC and KIPP’s BetterLesson program.

Categories Black Alliance for Educational Options, Boston Consulting Group

What Is the Boston Consulting Group?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
10

There is a new scandal in New York City. It seems the New York City Housing Authority paid $10 million to the Boston Consulting Group to write a report that is not available to the public that paid for it. According to the article in the New York Daily News, the report was commissioned by someone at the Housing Authority who used to work for the Boston Consulting Group.

Now, readers of this blog may recall that the Boston Consulting Group was paid over $1 million in private funds to draft a short little paper recommending the privatization of a large number of public schools in Philadelphia. It was also hired (not sure the price tag) to draft the plan for the Transition Planning Commission that merges the schools of Memphis and Shelby County, moving a large number of children and $212 million into private hands.

Who are these guys? Who elected them to redraft the meaning of public education in urban America?

Their role in reshaping education is becoming more noticeable but I still have no idea where they are coming from.

They usually advise major corporations. Why are they now redesigning urban school districts?

What does Boston Consulting Group know about education? For that matter, what does McKinsey, Alvarez & Marsal, and Bain Capital know about education? Are these corporate strategists imposing corporate practices on a public service that belongs to the local community? Are they turning our schools into mirror images of corporate America?

Will we be stack ranking teachers and children like GE and Microsoft? Will we close low-performing schools and replace them with start-ups? Uh, yes, we are doing it now thanks to NCLB and Race to the Top.

What is their expertise? What is their experience? Do they know everything? Who advises them on education?

I read on the BCG website that Margaret Spellings is a senior advisor. Who else is giving them direction about how to transform public education by giving it to private entrepreneurs?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization

Teachers in Memphis Speak Out

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
11

I have published several posts (see here, here, and here) about Memphis, where a “Transition Planning Committee” devised a plan to merge the Memphis public schools and the Shelby County Schools. The planning was based on work by the Boston Consulting Group; the director of the TPC is the executive director of Stand for Children in Memphis. The plan proposes to shift many children out of the Memphis public schools and into new charter schools, so that charter enrollment will increase from 4% of Memphis students to 19% by 2016. The plan also involves a transfer of $212 million from the public schools to charter schools.

I have received letters from Stand for Children and from both supporters and opponents of the plan. Today I heard from Memphis teachers:

I teach in one of the grades K-3 in Memphis. In addition to the injustice of using test scores at all in making personnel decisions, K-3 teachers are evaluated based on the test scores of students they have never taught.Every teacher in Tennessee who teaches K-3 and every art, music, P.E. teacher, and librarian, instead of using their students’ value-added scores for half of their evaluation (because there aren’t any), is assigned their school’s value-added score for half of their evaluation.This is clearly designed to make the bad schools worse. Already, nearly all of the K-3 teachers at my failing school have transferred to other schools with better school-wide value-added scores. I don’t yet know who the principal has hired to replace them, but I’m guessing many will be TFA types (we also have a TFA-style program here called Memphis Teaching Fellows, run by The New Teacher Project), most of whom will be ineffective their first year.This legislation is designed to make the bad schools worse, so that they can be closed and turned into charters.The same teacher wrote this comment:In the meeting the Transition Planning Commission (TPC) had with teachers, the district strongly encouraged all teachers to go in place of faculty meeting. I didn’t go because I knew it would be a waste of time, but my colleagues went. According to them, it was a waste of time. They had a thousand teachers in the auditorium of a high school and no organization for the meeting. Teachers were not given an opportunity to speak the the group as a whole. Instead, they broke off into discussion groups comprised of a large number of teachers and one staff member. Teachers’ suggestions in these groups were written down and supposedly submitted to the TPC. The teachers I spoke to doubted anyone would read their suggestions. Why couldn’t they just ask teachers to email these suggestions, instead of wasting enormous amounts of time at the end of a long school day to organize a thousand teachers into discussion groups?

This comes from another Memphis teacher:

Let’s clear up the confusion around teacher input and the transition plan. There are NO current teachers on the Transition Planning Commission. The TPC appointed NO current teachers to the work groups who prepared the plan. The only input the TPC got from actual teachers was what they allowed them to say at community “listening tours”. These tours were usually about two hours long and held in various parts of the community. I believe there were six of these events. They were open to the public and teachers could attend and speak. The TPC members present answered virtually no questions as these were listening events. I do not call this teacher input. Additionally the teacher unions were intentionally left out of the discussions and were told their input was not needed even though the two unions involved represent over 7000 teachers. Teachers have no idea what is really in this plan.

 
Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee
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