“In middle school and there was something in a book about Arabs and the teacher said – All Arabs are terrorists. I raised my hand and said “I am Arab and I am not a terrorist.” She just stared at me.”
Equity training seems to be the new indulgences. Purge your sins with cold, hard cash. Maybe once all four parts of your Loudon piece are finished, you can print it and nail it to CNN's front door.
So what I'm seeing is that someone helped a bunch of consultants rip the county off for some bogus services based on hyper-inflated and anecdotal evidence of "systemic racism" and nobody dared say anything for fear of being called a racist-apologist.
Also, that a full 20% of the student demograpgic was intentionally omitted because it didn't fit into the slick box they had prepared for all of that cash flow.
No wonder parents came together to vote these clowns out of office.
Oh, but you see... it just proves that racism is the root of Loudon County's problems -not the ineptitude of it's elected officials. Classic distraction technique.
There is a lot to think about with this one. Budgets, prior arrangements (corruption), consultancy fees, addressing externalized, internalized and institutional racism, plus the neoliberal hyperfocus of "my child" first.
But let's put that aside until Matt's next article, and focus how WE TOO could get into the business of securing no-bid contracts for school systems looking to buy some legitimacy and pose as a woke beacon or racial progress (while really failing to acknowledge that they know very little about cultural competency across the board).
Maybe we could form a group and become a shrugging atlas of wokeness? We can call the Broke Joke for the Woke Project!
Earl Scheib eat your heart out.
We can wokify your district for $399, 995.
*** P.S. do not accept any contracts for the state of Kentucky, that shit is hopeless.
"The inclusion of other stories just seemed bizarre, like this tale about a teacher saying the word “police” in front of a Hispanic student:
The other day we had a teacher mention police – not in a mean way – to a student. Hispanic kids are dealing with immigration and deportation and for that girl, hearing “the police” means a lot to her."
-------
As a teacher, I had something like this happen, and it was just as benign. I won't get into great detail, but I had several meetings, some formal and others informal, over what another student said, which was recalling a thing a public figure did say AND was relevant to the what we were talking about/learning that day. The mom felt that I did not adequately use my authority to convey to the class that this thing that was said by another student was wrong (again, it was benign, and within context it was very benign). My end takeaway is that there is a severe abuse of words, especially "trauma" with a certain sect of people, and they use it to try to bully people. It as one of the events that crystalized for me the thesis that the puritan spirit is alive and well in our more secularized world.
Any "managers", "executives", "leaders" (what the f**k ever) that have to hire consultants to identify/figure out a problem, and its alleged solutions, are publicly admitting their gross incompetence.
Interesting how the cost of "Flight, hotel, rental car and meals" for "8.16-8.17.18" comes out to EXACTLY $1,200.00 One would think that the actual number would NOT be round, and so be for example, "$1,168.48" Very fishy to me.
oh, my. Regrettably I, and I suspect many others, have seen this kind of thing far too many times. A sudden "problem" and amazingly a new company with a focus on responding to the problem for large sums of money, in general far more than teachers ever actually make. To a normal eye, it just seems both stupid and egregiously rapacious. And very very opportunistic. Thanks for doing the work Matt, deeply appreciated.
I wonder what commonalities might be discovered were one to compare the reports written by the Equity Collaborative for different clients. Would we find similar language or even similar “stories”?
To what extent might these reports be of the fill-in-the-blank template variety masquerading as individually crafted reports justifying their expense?
The answers could either put such cynicism to rest or expose a bunch of grafting charlatans.
$5,000/day a consultant is a ton of money even with travel costs (not clear if they were included) for a school to be hiring for consulting. There is no reason to go much above ~$3,000/day even with travel, this isn't Deloitte sending in Harvard MBA management consultants or forensic CPAs.
I provide highly technical consulting to cities/states an generally bill $1-2k/day + travel. And if I go much above $2k there tend to be LOTS of questions about rates regardless of how crazy the work or how great the results. Interesting schools are shelling out $5k/day with such shoddy bidding.
I also wonder how much of the $32k for the District Equity Plan was actually newly drafted. Or was it just a canned document rebadged.
As for "For instance, Asian students were left out of the section about academic “achievement disparities” (actually there were no stories at all referencing the experiences of the county’s second-largest demographic)."
It is because (as you know) they knew their answer before they started, so were only looking for data which confirmed it. You see this all the time in politically motivated reports. I have been asked to draft giant cost benefit analyses before where I am not allowed to look at or consider any of the the costs. Guess what such an analysis determines...X was a massive benefit!
It's always fun for me to triage press accounts on these types of hot button stories. This is necessary because we're now in the era of partisan click journalism, which means we mostly get hyperbolic stories written for specific, narrow audiences. The truth is the last thing most "journalists" care about. They pretend that the truth is not objective, rather a sliding, indexed hodgepodge of political hopes and dreams and dialectical all or nothing zero sum gains or losses. And let's not forget that the dumbest fux in the media constantly frame their stories as uncovering the latest "assault on democracy" or some other nonsense. As stupid and antithetical to journalism as all this is, doing a triage actually works pretty well to get to some kernel of the truth. Here's how it works:
1. Read a partisan click article written in the NYT or the WP (lefty nonsense)
2. Read the same story written by the WSJ or any right leaning blogger (right wing hyperbole)
3. Read Matt's or a handful of other indie journalists' take on the same story (truthiness)
Somewhere in there is the simple, basic story that Occam so wisely warned us about...in other words not the scintillating end of democracy that the communist party of America was hoping for.
That's not to say that there isn't some controversy here. The new normal these days seems to be for public institutions (and private corporations) to over-react to bad behavior by a few of their employees, while also assuming that the entire institution needs to be re-educated on how to behave according to the new woke rules. That's just dumb. Then, since a lot of these institutions are inherently dumb, instead of doing in house surveys and research on their own to figure out how big of a problem really exists, they turn to expensive training orgs to sort it out for them. And what do these training orgs ALWAYS find out? That yes, there is a really really really big problem that only they can fix...so hire us and your problems are solved. Sounds a little suspicious right? They "find" a big problem that coincidentally only they are qualified to fix. It reminds me of the Three Stooges episode where the idiots released mice and insects into a bigwig party and then knocked on the mansion door to offer their services as exterminators. Unfortunately, the Stooges fucked up the party so badly that a chocolate cream pie fight ensued and all the rich dowagers got what was coming to them - pies in the face.
I suspect the leaders of this school district don't like the taste of the pie they are currently eating.
It’s remarkable the amount of money that’s wasted on educational claptrap, next year it will be something else so the educrats will have something to talk about in their meetings. (Retired New York State K-2 teacher here.)
The racial grift is a good one. Climate grift solid as well. They’ve kept the COVID grift past its sell date. What a messed up culture.
“In middle school and there was something in a book about Arabs and the teacher said – All Arabs are terrorists. I raised my hand and said “I am Arab and I am not a terrorist.” She just stared at me.”
Sure. That happened.
Equity training seems to be the new indulgences. Purge your sins with cold, hard cash. Maybe once all four parts of your Loudon piece are finished, you can print it and nail it to CNN's front door.
So what I'm seeing is that someone helped a bunch of consultants rip the county off for some bogus services based on hyper-inflated and anecdotal evidence of "systemic racism" and nobody dared say anything for fear of being called a racist-apologist.
Also, that a full 20% of the student demograpgic was intentionally omitted because it didn't fit into the slick box they had prepared for all of that cash flow.
No wonder parents came together to vote these clowns out of office.
Oh, but you see... it just proves that racism is the root of Loudon County's problems -not the ineptitude of it's elected officials. Classic distraction technique.
"Definition of a consultant: someone that steals your watch, then tells you what time it is."
“You need to pay us more money…based on the report you paid us to write about whether or not you need to pay us more money.”
There is a lot to think about with this one. Budgets, prior arrangements (corruption), consultancy fees, addressing externalized, internalized and institutional racism, plus the neoliberal hyperfocus of "my child" first.
But let's put that aside until Matt's next article, and focus how WE TOO could get into the business of securing no-bid contracts for school systems looking to buy some legitimacy and pose as a woke beacon or racial progress (while really failing to acknowledge that they know very little about cultural competency across the board).
Maybe we could form a group and become a shrugging atlas of wokeness? We can call the Broke Joke for the Woke Project!
Earl Scheib eat your heart out.
We can wokify your district for $399, 995.
*** P.S. do not accept any contracts for the state of Kentucky, that shit is hopeless.
"The inclusion of other stories just seemed bizarre, like this tale about a teacher saying the word “police” in front of a Hispanic student:
The other day we had a teacher mention police – not in a mean way – to a student. Hispanic kids are dealing with immigration and deportation and for that girl, hearing “the police” means a lot to her."
-------
As a teacher, I had something like this happen, and it was just as benign. I won't get into great detail, but I had several meetings, some formal and others informal, over what another student said, which was recalling a thing a public figure did say AND was relevant to the what we were talking about/learning that day. The mom felt that I did not adequately use my authority to convey to the class that this thing that was said by another student was wrong (again, it was benign, and within context it was very benign). My end takeaway is that there is a severe abuse of words, especially "trauma" with a certain sect of people, and they use it to try to bully people. It as one of the events that crystalized for me the thesis that the puritan spirit is alive and well in our more secularized world.
Any "managers", "executives", "leaders" (what the f**k ever) that have to hire consultants to identify/figure out a problem, and its alleged solutions, are publicly admitting their gross incompetence.
Interesting how the cost of "Flight, hotel, rental car and meals" for "8.16-8.17.18" comes out to EXACTLY $1,200.00 One would think that the actual number would NOT be round, and so be for example, "$1,168.48" Very fishy to me.
oh, my. Regrettably I, and I suspect many others, have seen this kind of thing far too many times. A sudden "problem" and amazingly a new company with a focus on responding to the problem for large sums of money, in general far more than teachers ever actually make. To a normal eye, it just seems both stupid and egregiously rapacious. And very very opportunistic. Thanks for doing the work Matt, deeply appreciated.
I wonder what commonalities might be discovered were one to compare the reports written by the Equity Collaborative for different clients. Would we find similar language or even similar “stories”?
To what extent might these reports be of the fill-in-the-blank template variety masquerading as individually crafted reports justifying their expense?
The answers could either put such cynicism to rest or expose a bunch of grafting charlatans.
$5,000/day a consultant is a ton of money even with travel costs (not clear if they were included) for a school to be hiring for consulting. There is no reason to go much above ~$3,000/day even with travel, this isn't Deloitte sending in Harvard MBA management consultants or forensic CPAs.
I provide highly technical consulting to cities/states an generally bill $1-2k/day + travel. And if I go much above $2k there tend to be LOTS of questions about rates regardless of how crazy the work or how great the results. Interesting schools are shelling out $5k/day with such shoddy bidding.
I also wonder how much of the $32k for the District Equity Plan was actually newly drafted. Or was it just a canned document rebadged.
As for "For instance, Asian students were left out of the section about academic “achievement disparities” (actually there were no stories at all referencing the experiences of the county’s second-largest demographic)."
It is because (as you know) they knew their answer before they started, so were only looking for data which confirmed it. You see this all the time in politically motivated reports. I have been asked to draft giant cost benefit analyses before where I am not allowed to look at or consider any of the the costs. Guess what such an analysis determines...X was a massive benefit!
It's always fun for me to triage press accounts on these types of hot button stories. This is necessary because we're now in the era of partisan click journalism, which means we mostly get hyperbolic stories written for specific, narrow audiences. The truth is the last thing most "journalists" care about. They pretend that the truth is not objective, rather a sliding, indexed hodgepodge of political hopes and dreams and dialectical all or nothing zero sum gains or losses. And let's not forget that the dumbest fux in the media constantly frame their stories as uncovering the latest "assault on democracy" or some other nonsense. As stupid and antithetical to journalism as all this is, doing a triage actually works pretty well to get to some kernel of the truth. Here's how it works:
1. Read a partisan click article written in the NYT or the WP (lefty nonsense)
2. Read the same story written by the WSJ or any right leaning blogger (right wing hyperbole)
3. Read Matt's or a handful of other indie journalists' take on the same story (truthiness)
Somewhere in there is the simple, basic story that Occam so wisely warned us about...in other words not the scintillating end of democracy that the communist party of America was hoping for.
That's not to say that there isn't some controversy here. The new normal these days seems to be for public institutions (and private corporations) to over-react to bad behavior by a few of their employees, while also assuming that the entire institution needs to be re-educated on how to behave according to the new woke rules. That's just dumb. Then, since a lot of these institutions are inherently dumb, instead of doing in house surveys and research on their own to figure out how big of a problem really exists, they turn to expensive training orgs to sort it out for them. And what do these training orgs ALWAYS find out? That yes, there is a really really really big problem that only they can fix...so hire us and your problems are solved. Sounds a little suspicious right? They "find" a big problem that coincidentally only they are qualified to fix. It reminds me of the Three Stooges episode where the idiots released mice and insects into a bigwig party and then knocked on the mansion door to offer their services as exterminators. Unfortunately, the Stooges fucked up the party so badly that a chocolate cream pie fight ensued and all the rich dowagers got what was coming to them - pies in the face.
I suspect the leaders of this school district don't like the taste of the pie they are currently eating.
It is a classic protection racket. Be a shame if property values fell because the schools aren't inclusive
It’s remarkable the amount of money that’s wasted on educational claptrap, next year it will be something else so the educrats will have something to talk about in their meetings. (Retired New York State K-2 teacher here.)