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.
They state:
Given the scope of learning loss so far and the limitations of remote learning, students will likely need additional learning hours to make up the loss. That can come through extended school-day and structured after-school programs, weekend school, and summer school programs that already have proven benefits.
To catch up, many students will need step-up opportunities to accelerate their learning. Now is the time for school systems to prepare postpandemic strategies that help students meet their full potential.
Students who have not been afforded laptops and broadband connections, who have struggled due to poverty and the loss of proper schooling due to the pandemic, need well-staffed schools, with curriculum studies that include the arts and extracurricular activities that make learning exciting. Any extra school time should be about the needs of students and parents.
If students have schools that consider their strengths and interests and give them well-prepared teachers who have the resources they need to teach, they will do well for their own futures and the future of the country.
Helping children get back on track should not be about forcing them to spend long hours grinding out assignments, likely online. This sounds like the same “no excuses” track that has dominated the conversation for years due to the terrible policies of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act. High-stakes standards were originally driven by the school reformers and those like McKinsey & Company themselves.
Frank Coffield, an emeritus professor of education at the Institute of Education at the University of London, wrote in 2011, “Why the McKinsey reports will not improve school systems.” Coffield showed how McKinsey & Company’s reports on schools and schooling were widely accepted, despite problems. Politicians associated them with improving the economy by making changes in schools even though the reports were flawed.
Diane Ravitch wrote in 2019, When I worked in the first Bush Administration In 1991-92, McKinsey consultants were everywhere. Gaggles of very young, well-dressed people marched in and out of the White House with briefcases and plans. McKinsey has advised school districts, given them business plans to fix their problems. Does anyone ever check up on how their proposals turned out? Do they ever admit failure? I never figured out what they were doing or why they were there. Like Pearson, McKinsey is always there, although there is no evidence that they are education experts.
McKinsey & Company promote other school reform groups to help. It’s like a big club, and teachers and those who actually do the work with children don’t belong. If they did, McKinsey would not have relied on iReady to collect the information for their study.
They used iReady.
They found weak Math results in their report, analyzing assessment data from the Curriculum Associates i-Ready platform.
While the worst-case scenarios from the spring may have been averted, the cumulative learning loss could be substantial, especially in mathematics—with students on average likely to lose five to nine months of learning by the end of this school year. Students of color could be six to 12 months behind, compared with four to eight months for white students. While all students are suffering, those who came into the pandemic with the fewest academic opportunities are on track to exit with the greatest learning loss.
But iReady is distrusted. Consider this blog post by a math teacher, “Why iReady is Dangerous.”
She states:
…the iReady Universal Screener is a dangerous assessment because it is a dehumanizing assessment. The test strips away all evidence of the students’ thinking, of her mathematical identity, and instead assigns broad and largely meaningless labels. The test boils down a student’s entire mathematical identity to a generic list of skills that “students like her” generally need, according to iReady. And yet despite its lumping of students into broad categories, iReady certainly doesn’t hesitate to offer very specific information about what a child likely can do and what next instructional steps should be.
I came across many troubling questions that made me seriously question whether the makers of this assessment have any business writing a math test, let alone making instructional recommendations.
Problems with iReady have also been exposed by Tultican in “i-Ready Sells 50-Years-Old Education Failure,“ and me in “Common Core, Camouflaged in Testing and Technology,” and others.
Why are districts still using iReady, and why did McKinsey rely on it here?
McKinsey & Company were already predicting catastrophe last spring with “COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime.”
McKinsey refers to the following.
- Curriculum Associates
- Opportunity Culture
- Chiefs for Change
- Acceleration Academies
- BRIA (Broward Remote Instructional Assistance)
- Hamilton Project
- Aim High (California)
- Match Education (Boston)
- Saga Education
- The National Student Support Accelerator
- New Teacher Project
- The National Student Support Accelerator
Some of the above might have something useful to use with students like BRIA which could provide assistance to students in Broward County.
The focus now and when the pandemic is over should be on the child. Funding should go to public schools for programs run by teachers and those prepared to help children learn. Students don’t need to be browbeaten with nonstop, mostly online instruction, repeatedly hearing claims they’ve fallen behind.
Many students have fallen behind, or maybe they haven’t. The teachers I know have done an outstanding job of helping students adjust to the pandemic.
Students need a break—a time to breathe and be kids, to have some fun with their friends and deal with and get over this nightmare like the rest of us.
Reference
McKinsey is an admitted narco-trafficker. Its judgement – or lack thereof – is unsuitable for US public education.
The suggestion to make up for lost learning hours sounds remarkably like the mantra of the National Center on Time and Learning (http://www.timeandlearning.org/), which is related to Empower Schools.
Yes. I heard about that and toyed with bringing it up here but decided not. But I’m glad you mentioned it.
ANOTHER GROUP? Honestly, I wish all these folks would return to college, get REAL teaching degrees, and go into the field!
” Honestly, I wish all these folks would return to college, get REAL teaching degrees, and go into the field!”
That would be too hard! It’s easier to get a bulls__t general Business degree and then switch jobs every few years for more money and/or “better” working conditions or benefits. No unionization is necessary if people are continually unhappy and moving through the conveyor belt of available faux careers in search of the next best thing. Teachers are generally happy with their career choice (altruistic in nature)….it’s the mandates, extra paperwork and degradation imposed by the business sector that makes it unappealing.
Preach! Well-said, Lisa! Thank you for commenting. Children need teachers who will stick around, not armchair experts far removed from the school.
The time on task eqauls learning myth is alive and well in the corporate education establishment and echoed through ignorant, and often lazy, reporting. It is the environment of a child that predicates meaningful learning and social contributions. The so called summer reading gap is not due to student time reading books but due to unequal learning environments. The same can be said for the deficits we will see coming out of this pandemic. Government needs to do all in its power to address the social environment and allow teachers to make curricular decisions to enhance learning in the classroom and beyond. What we have seen through companies like McKinsey and Pearson, I have worked with both, is a brazen disregard for what the data really says about learning for the sake of profit.
It also will not harm students to repeat a year.
Many of them needed it BEFORE the pandemic because they were, “shuffled along” from grade-to-grade with no accountability.
Many of them…shuffled along…no accountability…PLEASE be more specific. These are generalizations not based on proof but hearsay.
For the record, Florida and other states have been retaining third graders for years. The research shows that retention is harmful to students. As a middle school teacher, I often could tell the students who had repeated a grade because they were more physically developed than their peers, and it was rarely easy for them.
Thanks, Paul. So much truth here.
McKinsey & Co have full run of Broward County schools as a showplace for the Microsoft & Broad Foundation’s (& Microsoft’s?) deep-south antedeluvian racism deployed under the label of “equality.”
Here is what REAL LEADERSHIP would look like, were it not for out-hiring of all responsibility with equally incompetent posers and profiteers posing as academics: 1) Open schools when “R” is < lessthan1, meaning for every person infected now, on avg., less than one other person will be infected in the future & the disease is declining, not spreading
2) Random Surveillance testing&
3) 20-30X HEPA classroom air changes/hr like for airlines!
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Yikes! Michael. I did not know this about Broward. Why am I not surprised?
McKinsey makes my blood boil. It comes as no surprise that they would be chomping at the bit to exploit this crisis with their anti-humane mindset on what education really is and what its value to society really is. (hint: Not for economic competitiveness) (disaster capitalism, anyone?) I wrote this blog post in August, 2016. It discusses Supplemental Education Services as mandated by federal regulations. I think it applies equally to what McKinsey et al are likely to have in store for the “poor children of color from Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities [who] have fallen behind in school due to Covid-19, so the country needs to ramp up instruction.”
https://resseger.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/after-chool-tutoring-and-the-neoliberal-agenda/
Thank you, Sheila. There is so much about this that is both sad and informative. I hope everyone reads it. But this jumped off the page at me. I’d like to see after-school programs that provide enrichment. What you describe is hard to believe.
“I am even more disturbed and concerned than I was at the time I sent this letter. The practice of urging children to attend an after-school program, which is touted to their families as a means to improve their academic skills, but in reality is focused on improving their scores on standardized tests of dubious quality and value, in utter disregard for the children’s needs for meaningful engagement with print-based materials, is unconscionable. Of the five children in my class last year, one was so distressed by the format of the pre-test on the first day that he literally would not make a mark on the paper. When I read with him to encourage him to participate, he inadvertently let slip hints that he could indeed read the passages, but the score of 0 on the pre-test in no way revealed what he actually could do as a reader.”
This “kids are failing” decree is a de-facto admission of the impotence of on-line, self-directed learning.
The pet dream of the corporate reform world down the drain. And how do they suggest we play catch-up for millions of kids left to fend for themselves: the old fashioned way, in-person instruction, and lots of individual care and support.
It’s interesting to watch the drive to still promote online learning, when parents can’t wait to get their children back into in-person school. Thanks, Rick.
Who pays McKinsey to write these reports? I assume they don’t work for free? Follow the money.
My thanks to Diane Ravitch.
https://dianeravitch.net/2020/12/15/nancy-bailey-mckinsey-says-it-is-time-for-schools-to-get-tough-with-the-students/
Time magazine cited the McKinsey report for their latest article “The Learning Gap Is Getting Worse as Schools Rely on Remote Classes, Especially for Students of Color”. No one blinks an eye. The “data” is never questioned, even by respected media outlets. It took me one quick read of the report for my radar to be triggered. The money and connections organizations such as McKinsey have automatically allow them credibility despite the fact any critical reader with a background in education and research can see immediate holes. I knew little about McKinsey and iReady, but knew enough to do some research myself which brought me to your post. Thank you for the information.
Like you, I recently learned more. I’ve often seen their name attached to education reports and not usually in a good way. I had heard about iReady from parents mostly in Florida who don’t like it.
Thanks for your comment, Shelley.
Laura Chapman does some fine research here about McKinsey & Company.
https://dianeravitch.net/2021/01/04/laura-chapman-mckinseys-education-expert/comment-page-1/#comment-3173630