A $300 Million Educational Problem

 A $300 Million Educational Problem

This is a story about one of the problems with education: a $300 million problem.  It is about the detrimental effects of privatized consulting on student success and mental wellness and teacher retention. 

 

I was a veteran and award-winning teacher for 25 years at one of the most lauded public schools in America: Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL.  I was rated by students as an outstanding teacher who made a difference in their lives for over a dozen years and I was awarded Ambassador Awards by the Board of Education.  The school’s required survey about the social and emotional health of students revealed data that I was eighteen percentage points higher than the average teacher at my school in areas like: classroom belonging, classroom learning strategies and teacher-student relationships.  In 2022, I publicly resigned for ethical and pedagogical reasons.  You can read my resignation letter that details the concerns I had for nearly a decade here and you can watch my plea to the School Board to address the ethical and pedagogical issues that were affecting students and teachers alike.   My public plea resonated across the country.  I got emails of support from teachers from California to Massachusetts and everywhere in between.  And, I got dozens and dozens of messages from students - both current and former students who agreed with me.  My story made it to local radio WGN 720 and eventually found Trish Spurgeon who runs the Youtube channel "Teacher Therapy."  Trish's interview with me hit 43K views in less than a week;  It resonated with teachers and the comments confirm that.  However, more importantly, it created a catharsis in myself as I reflected on what had been happening over the last several years at my former high school.

 

The $300 Million Problem

I realized that the path my school was taking was to serve the personal interests of administrators who work with and profit from Solution Tree, a $300 million privately owned educational consulting corporation.  My school had been wildly successful in the 1990s and the superintendent at the time created an educational consulting group.  He retired from my school district but he kept close ties.  As the new administration saw the potential for massive profits from educational consulting they began to work with the consulting group while still running the day to day operations of the public school.  Over the years, the administrators have been able to build consulting into their contract! They are allowed to do consulting work and get paid privately while still receiving their salary from the public school.  Simply put, the administrators in charge are incentivized to sell for-profit consulting even if it is not serving the students and parents of their school (School Officials Consulting Raises Questions of Transparency, Chicago Tribune, 2015.)

 

Despite the scrutinization from the Tribune, the practice has continued and the taxpayers of the district pay for it - both literally and figuratively. One example of how they pay for it is that the school has a team of marketing and communications with a director who makes $148K per year.  Stevenson uses this team to  carefully manages its image by brushing under the rug serious issues like racism, drug dealing, overdose deaths, sexting, and even confiscating the student newspaper when articles threaten to tarnish the Stevenson brand (Chicago Tribune 2010).  Yes, all schools deal with issues like this, but Stevenson's use of marketing allows problems to fester and go unaddressed.  Their carefully scripted marketing pushes the brand and the public image while behind the scenes the school squashes teachers and students who try to address these issues or raise questions about them.  The school even makes teachers sign an acceptable use agreement saying that if a teacher says anything that might damage the school's reputation then they can be fired for it.  All of this is important to understanding how problems can go unaddressed by the school.

 

The problem that led to my very public ethical and pedagogical conflict with Stevenson came as the school spent nearly a decade branding and selling its grading practice known as Evidence Based Reporting (EBR).  During the late 2000s, there was a movement especially among elementary school teachers to grade based on standards, or standards-based grading.  There were some dubious authors promoting this practice; they had little experience and little evidence that it worked and they did not have models or parameters for how to do this at scale in a large high school.  But they were a part of Solution Tree, the educational consulting group that was founded by Stevenson's former Superintendent and now closely working with the current administration to make huge profits.  

 

The way that the grift  works simply is this:

Stevenson administrators (who work for Solution Tree) hire speakers from Solution Tree to speak to the school.  Then, the administrators re-brand what the speaker talked about to brand it Stevenson.  So for example, they brought in a speaker who talked about standards-based grading.  Stevenson re-branded that as "Evidence-Based Reporting."  At the time, the school was already a leader in high school education - it had won numerous Blue Ribbon Awards, had an extremely high graduation rate and was rated the number one public school in Illinois.  Why did it need to change the entire practice of grading? There was never a case for why this change was necessary or what was not working.  Nonetheless, by 2012, the school pushed teachers to experiment with this grading and pilot new grading methods. I was one of the teachers willing to try new methods and grow, but I realized early that the grading method had serious flaws and I tried to collaborate with my administration about it.  They were not interested in my ideas. “This needs to be addressed,” “This is not working,” “How about we try this?” Etc... All were met with no, no no.  It was hard to fathom why the school would ask me and others to pilot this idea but not be open to feedback about it.   

Then I found out that the school’s administrators  were publishing a book (through Solution Tree) that claimed the school was already doing this grading - despite that  it was only being done by a few teachers who were piloting the system and many had concerns about the system, and their system was still changing.  This book was published in September of 2015 without peer review, empirical data or research. But the administration could use the school's success to sell its book.  The consulting and books also bring other schools to Stevenson for "site visit days" (also here).  When these schools visit Stevenson, they meet with the upper administration like the superintendent, assistant superintendents and principal.  This creates opportunities for these administrators to offer their services to consult with these schools beyond the site visit day.  Hundreds of teachers visit Stevenson costing their districts thousands of dollars and that leads to more consulting gigs for the administration selling grading practices that they were not even using.  All of this adds up to a $300 million business for Solution Tree.

 

The bigger problem 

It seems dishonest to be selling educational practices that are not even being implemented, but there is a larger problem.  With a focus on the brand and selling the brand to other schools, the teachers and students suffer.  Students are frustrated with the grading going on.  They don't know their grade.  They don't feel prepared for college.  And they don't feel it is fair that they are competing against other students.  All of this is documented in  the messages I got from students who agreed with me and wanted to show support. They explain the ways that this grading stresses them out and creates bad habits making them not ready for college.  And Stevenson school district conducts its own survey as well as an independent survey audit by the University of Chicago.  Both of these surveys (detailed here) confirm my accusations.  Stevenson’s own survey of graduates shows that students feel they are not learning how to take important tests; not learning time-management and organizational skills; not learning how to do reading; not learning how to meet deadlines; and not learning how to do homework.  All of these are not graded under the system that the administration forced on teachers and is selling across the country.  And in all of the years before this grading was mandatory, less than 1% of students said that they were less prepared than their peers for college, but since the grading has been mandatory that number has climbed by 400%.  And when I raised concerns about this publicly in the spring of 2022, the school union urged teachers to take the anonymous 5 Essentials survey from the U of Chicago.  Nearly all of the teachers (99% ) at Stevenson took the survey and they rated both leadership and teacher-principal trust as weak.  In one case, 3 of my students failed to turn in their final paper resulting in a failing grade.  Although administration initially approved failure notices for these students, the students complained over the summer and then turned in the assignment.  When we returned to school in August, I was pressured to change the students’ grades.  I felt morally and pedagogically compromised.  As I mentioned earlier, I received dozens of letters of  support from teachers who felt the same but were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job.  Stevenson’s administration does not want to dialogue with teachers but instead prefers protecting the brand which has led to a politics of protection (detailed here) that stresses teachers out pushing them out the profession. 

This story resonates with teachers, students and parents everywhere!  I continue to get messages of support from all of them.  If you would like more information or are interested in my story, please don’t hesitate to contact me.