Tag Archives: NOC

Right-Wing Neo-School Voucher Bill Hits Minnesota

January 29, 2017

Among the polished marble and gold-tinged walls of the Minnesota State Capitol Rotunda, a stand-off of sorts took place on January 24. On the outskirts of the rotunda, a circle of protesters–parents, teachers, union reps and activists–stood silently, clutching hand-written, pro-public school and anti-voucher signs. 

Before them, a crowd of school choice advocates began filling the inner circle of the rotunda, all wearing festive, buttercup-yellow scarves around their necks. The scarves came from a local group called OAK, or “Opportunities for All Kids,” but they were also a reminder that, hey–it’s National School Choice Week!

To show solidarity with other school choice devotees, the gold scarves were donned nationwide at charter school and state capitol rallies. Even Betsy DeVos was found sporting one at a Washington, D.C., charter school event. (I’m glad she’s found something to do while waiting to be–most likely–voted in as Trump’s education secretary on January 31.) 

In St. Paul, the OAK folks were also on hand to support the latest attempt to keep Minnesota taxpayer dollars in private hands, when it comes to education funding. Through a bill introduced by Republican Ron Kresha of northern Minnesota, lawmakers will be asked to provide a tax credit for individuals and corporations who make “equity and diversity donations” to private and religious school foundations.  

Such donations are then supposed to be used as scholarships for kids withering away at miserable and/or secular public schools, but don’t call them vouchers (at least not yet). A school voucher, strictly speaking, draws money directly out of public education coffers, and directs it to private schools, including religious schools, in the form of reimbursement. A tax credit, or “neo-voucher,” on the other hand, allows taxpayers (corporate or individual) to avoid paying into the public education coffers in the first place.

These “neo-vouchers” have been spreading across the country more quickly than traditional vouchers. The tax credit model provides a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools with even less public accountability than with regular vouchers, and to bypass state constitutional provisions that have stood in the way of some state’s traditional voucher programs.

–Brendan Fischer, Center on Media and Democracy

Neo-vouchers are the latest school privatization scheme cooked up by the determined forces at ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is the place where “global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called ‘model bills’ reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations.”  (Read Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money, for more info, or scroll through these short videos on ALEC’s agenda.)

ALEC has been pushing school voucher bills since the early 1980’s, under the tutelage of pro-privatization ALEC guru, Milton Friedman. Back then, ALEC tried the honest approach, by openly stating that its original voucher bill was intended to smash teachers’ unions and “introduce normal market forces” into public education.

But they have learned that vouchers are unpopular and, in many states, simply not allowed–thanks to the burdensome separation of church and state. Now, according to the Center on Media and Democracy, “ALEC and other school privatizers today frame ‘vouchers’—taxpayer-funded tuition for private, and often religious, schools—in terms of ‘opportunity’ for low-income students and giving parents the ‘choice’ to send their children to public or private schools.”

A recent Truthout article calls this narrative a “useful fiction” built around the idea that vouchers are “social mobility tickets”–and not a scheme to further segregate, de-fund and destroy public education. And it is working:

The American Federation for Children (AFC), chaired by Amway billionaire Betsy DeVos, estimates that vouchers and voucher-like tax-credit schemes currently divert $1.5 billion of public money to private schools annually. But that is not enough. By expanding “pro-school choice legislative majorities” in state houses across the country the organization hopes that $5 billion a year will be siphoned out of public schools by 2020 and applied to for-profit and religious schools.

Minnesota’s Voucher, er, Tax Credit Bill

This kind of “voucher by another name” is what we have with the bill now moving through the Minnesota legislature. ALEC has named its model bill the “Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act (Scholarship Tax Credits),” and Minnesota legislators have brought it, once again, to the Senate and House for consideration. In the mold of ALEC, they are calling it the “Equity and Opportunity Scholarship Act.” The basic premise of it is that individuals and corporations can direct their tax dollars to private school foundations, rather than pay into the state’s general education fund.

These donations, as noted above, would be used to provide tuition scholarships for individual students. And, the qualifying income level for these scholarships is quite high: a family of five making $105,000 per year, or twice the limit allowed by federal reduced lunch guidelines, would be eligible. (This points back to the idea that vouchers are more about breaking the public school system than helping low-income kids attend spendy private schools.) The state’s general education fund stands to lose up to $35 million if this neo-voucher bill passes.

In 2015 Republicans tried to push a similar bill through, with help from Democrat Terri Bonoff, a determined Teach for America and education reform supporter who ran for Congress in 2016 and lost. (The Minnesota push for vouchers goes back, at least, to the 1990’s.) The bill didn’t make it, but it’s back–and this year, Republicans control both the House and Senate in Minnesota. 

An important note:

But…School Choice!

Back to the gold-scarved, school choice rally sponsored by OAK, or “Opportunities for All Kids.” OAK is a relatively new organization run by long-time Republican operative, Chas Anderson, who was closely aligned with former Governor Tim Pawlenty and once held a top spot in Minnesota’s Department of Education.

I can’t tell where OAK gets its funding from, as they do not appear to be a registered nonprofit. In 2015, Anderson joined forces with two other “high-ranking alums of the Minnesota GOP”–Kurt Zellers and Brian McClung–to start a PR firm, MZA+Co. The return email address for OAK is Anderson’s MZA+Co email address: chas@mzacompany.com, so it is unclear whether OAK is a separate group or a project of her PR firm. 

In April, 2016, former Pawlenty spokesman McClung appeared on Twin Cities Public Television’s Almanac program to weigh in on Republican plans to fix the “achievement gap.” Ripping a page from ALEC’s playbook, McClung emphatically gave Almanac host Cathy Wurzer an earful: “For too long,” he insists, “Democrats and the teachers’ union have stopped kids from having real choices…and so we need to find ways to empower parents.”

He doesn’t mention that, as the state’s population has grown steadily less white and less wealthy, public funding for education has dropped. This is, of course, a Friedman-esque way to create a crisis for our public schools, thereby “proving” they are failing–and insisting that neo-voucher, school choice schemes are the only way to fix them. 

Choice Before Quality

At the OAK rally on January 24, as silent protesters stood witness, a small and equally quiet group stood before a podium. There, Arizona charter school advocate and sought after education reform expert Lisa Graham Keegan took the stage wearing a crisp red suit and waxing on about how she and her husband are “blessed to have a home in northern Minnesota.” 

Image result for lisa graham keegan
Lisa Graham Keegan, at a previous school choice rally. Photo: Gage Skidmore

Graham Keegan glowingly stated that she is “passionate, passionate” about school choice, but confessed to being “agnostic” when it comes to where kids go to school. “We love having choices,” she told the group in front of her,” because our five children are very different.” Graham Keegan helped write charter school legislation in Arizona, where, she has admitted, quality control lagged far behind the desire to make school choice a reality. (Arizona already has a state law that gives individual and corporations tax credit for directing their monies to private school foundations.)

Local school choice supporter Reynolds-Anthony Harris followed Graham Keegan onstage, saying that “our job is to harvest the best out of our children.” Harris is a small business owner whose company, Lyceum Partners+Design, was listed as a supporter of a series of school board candidate events in Minneapolis in the fall of 2016.  At one of these events, Harris moderated a particularly contentious candidate forum on behalf of  “Animate the Race,” a side project of Minnesota Comeback (another “sector agnostic” group with wealthy funders). 

After Graham Keegan and Harris were finished, OAK supporters headed off to a luncheon, to be followed by attendance at the Equity and Opportunity Scholarship Act hearing in the House Education Finance Committee. 

The line of resistance, so far, to this ALEC-crafted tax credit bill has been drawn by Education Minnesota, NOC (Neighborhoods Organizing for Change), and the faith-based group, ISAIAH. Before the school choice rally, these groups held their own media event in the basement of the state capitol. Hoisting signs that called vouchers a “false promise,” supporters called for more resources for existing public schools–more nurses, more mental health support, and more investment in training and retaining teachers of color.

Tax credits are just another name for vouchers, they insisted, before calling out the “two-tiered systems”–one for wealthier, white students, and one for marginalized students of color–that vouchers and other school choice schemes have created in cities such as MIlwaukee, Washington D.C., Cleveland, and, of course, DeVos’s Detroit.

Paul Slack, president of ISAIAH and head pastor at north Minneapolis’s New Creations Church, ended the anti-voucher rally by saying that “public education is still our best opportunity–not perfect–but the best opportunity for all of us.”

“Collectively,” Slack said, “we have one question for our legislators. Are you listening?”

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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Educators, Allies to March From AFT Convention

July 18, 2016

Today at 4 p.m., members of Minneapolis’s Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) and the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, along with community allies and representatives from teachers unions around the United States, will be marching together in downtown Minneapolis. Their jumping off point is the Minneapolis Convention Center, where the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) national convention is being held this week.

A July 18 press release from NOC states that the groups are marching to “stand in solidarity,” as a show of  “direct action following the unjust killing of their colleague and friend Philando Castile.” Along with honoring Castile, the march is also intended to “demand justice for his life and for Black lives everywhere.”

But the marchers are also providing a framework that moves beyond drawing attention to police violence by planning to march from the convention center to the U.S. Banks building in downtown Minneapolis:

The groups are demanding community safety beyond policing; naming those who profit from unjust and violent systems that are taking the lives of people of color; and demanding investment in community-driven solutions.

Like the Chicago Teachers Union, the St. Paul teachers union has been instrumental in drawing parallels between disparities in access and outcomes in education to big picture issues of economic injustice, arguing that large, national banks like U.S. Banks and Wells Fargo profit mightily from the prison industrial complex and the foreclosure crisis, for example.

This is reflected in NOC’s work, too, and in their press release for today’s event: 

  • Both U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo have served as the underwriters and trustees for a number of cities that have issued bonds to pay police misconduct settlements. Cities throughout the country have spent over $1 billion in the last 10 years on such settlements, taking money away from public services.
  • Local and state governments, desperate for funds and wanting to avoid raising taxes, use traffic tickets and fines to increase cash flow and balance their budgets. U.S. Bank operates the online payment system in states such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, and for municipalities in those states, receiving a fee for each transaction.
  • U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo have both provided significant financing to private prisons, including the largest for-profit prison operator in the country, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The controversial prison in Appleton, Minnesota, now owned by CCA and vacant, was originally financed in 1992 through the use of bonds, for which U.S. Bank served as the trustee. 

Karen Lewis, the high-profile head of the Chicago Teachers Union, is scheduled to speak at the march, along with Amber Jones, of NO, and Michelle Wiese, the newly elected president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, among others.

WHEN:

TODAY, TUESDAY, July 19, 4:00 p.m.

WHERE: 

Minneapolis Convention Center (Second Avenue South Entrance), 1301 2nd Ave S., Minneapolis, MN 55403

“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book. And then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker; you’re the parent; you’re the teacher; you’re the drug counselor.’ We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience; don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when periodically the tensions boil over.”

–President Obama, quoted in Charles Blow’s recent New York Times Op-Ed, “Blood on Your Hands, Too”

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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Bernie Sanders & AFL-CIO to focus on Racial and Economic Justice in Minneapolis, Unions

February 9, 2016

It’s 5 degrees outside, but you can put away that parka: things are hot in Minneapolis right now.

Bernie Sanders is coming to a north Minneapolis forum on Friday, February 12. The exact details have yet to be revealed, but the significance of this event is, as Sanders might say, “yooge.”

Sanders will appear at north Minneapolis’s Capri Theater, at the invitation of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), a northside non-profit dedicated to fighting for racial and economic justice in the Twin Cities. A February 8 NOC press release says the forum will “focus on the Black experience in America, and specifically in Minnesota” and the racial disparities that exist here and elsewhere. Also up for discussion is what the federal government can do to “invest in radical solutions being developed in Black communities and other communities of color.” The statement says Hillary Clinton declined NOC’s invitation to attend.

According to NOC, a presidential candidate has never held a forum in north Minneapolis, a historic area home to some of Minneapolis’s proudest, yet most marginalized neighborhoods (learn more about the area by watching this superb, story-based video). By agreeing to come here, Sanders will have to put his progressive stump speech to the test.

Are the marginalized and people of color really at the center of Sanders’ proposed reforms? If you follow the recent writings of both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander, you know that, this year, there will be no free passes given to candidates who say they want what’s “best” for African-Americans, specifically, or people of color overall.

That seems refreshing, as does another major event scheduled in Minneapolis this week. On Thursday and Friday, Tefere Gebre, Vice President of the AFL-CIO, will be in town for a forum on the need to bring racial and economic justice to the nation’s unions. POCUM Forum

Kerry Jo Felder is the education organizer for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation (MRLF), which acts as an umbrella organization for the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, and other local unions. Felder says Gebre is coming to Minneapolis as part of the AFL-CIO’s eight-city Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice tour.

This tour was set in motion at the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and is intended to provide a platform for confronting the institutionalized racism in labor unions, while also making the case that unions can provide solutions to today’s entrenched and expanding racial and economic inequities.

Felder, who started a People of Color Union Member (POCUM) caucus within the MRLF, says the union must step up and do a better job of acknowledging how racism is holding unions back. “I hear the stories all the time, from my POCUMs. People are sick and tired of being passed over for jobs and promotions.”

Tackling racism head-on is essential to the overall survival of unions, according to Felder, who lives in north Minneapolis and sees disparities–in housing, jobs, income and education–around her every day. “We have to have people who are in the unions go back to the community, and explain why unions matter. Relationships matter. If people are getting passed over for positions, they’re not going to have a good taste in their mouths, or want to help support unions.”

The AFL-CIO held similar racial and economic justice tours in 1995 and 2005, says Felder, but, clearly, not enough has changed.“We’re trying to make this happen,” she insisted. “We hope we can focus on what’s bad about how our unions are operating, come up with some solutions, and make it good.”

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka gets this, says Felder. “He sees that, if the unions are going to survive, they are going to have to include people of color more.”

Perhaps, if Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, or any presidential candidate, is going to survive, they will also need to, authentically, address the issues–and solutions–raised by people of color.

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McKinsey & Co. in Minneapolis: Trojan Horses, Tobacco Money & Big Banks

February 5, 2016

Third in a series: As the Minneapolis school board embarks on a refreshed superintendent search, I am taking a look at how the Minneapolis schools fell under the distracting and destablizing influence of the market-based education reform movement, also known as GERM. Access part one (McKinsey & Co. Mind Meld) here, and part two (McKinsey & Co. in Minneapolis) here.

Part Three

Sick days and snowy days (so beautiful) have slowed my McKinsey series down, but I’m back. Here is a brief recap of where I left things off last week: 

Trojan horse

In 2007, in Minneapolis, McKinsey & Co. consultants–acting in tandem with the local Itasca Project–wrote up a new, nine-point plan for the city’s school district, promising that, though ambitious, their plan was “doable,” and would make every Minneapolis student “college ready” by 2012. The Itasca Project thenloanedMcKinsey consultant Jill Stever-Zeitlin to the Minneapolis Public Schools, who came on in the newly created position of “Chief of Accountability and Strategic Partnerships.” (See more on McKinsey/Itasca “loaning” here.)

Why was a private, for-profit management consulting company providing strategic direction–and privately funded staff–for a public school district? This may be the point at which good intentions (let’s help all kids get to college) crossed paths with a growing national and global market-based education reform movement. This movement aims to get government out of education by replacing public school systems–deemed to be failing and in crisis–with “portfolio” districts, built around “choice” and competition.

This movement also aims to put public education dollars into private, deregulated hands, and, it assumes that people like McKinsey consultants, who are trained in data and performance management, have the answers. (The ultimate goal? To make sure the world’s education institutions serve the needs of global corporations. Watch this McKinsey video for a lesson in this, especially the part where students are described as the “winners” because their “curriculum is being molded by…industry itself.”)

And, McKinsey did its evaluation of the Minneapolis schools for free. In fact, in the 2000’s, McKinsey & Co. consultants got used to doing work, at no cost, for (or to?) the citizens of Minneapolis.  When former mayor RT Rybak took office in 2002, he brought McKinsey in with him.  A 2004 City Pages article put it this way:

During his first months in office, Rybak embraced a report by McKinsey & Company, the consulting group that wrote the business blueprint for Enron. The five-part report mostly focuses on streamlining the city’s planning and development departments, but it also pays particular attention to how the city is viewed through a business/consumerist lens. Corporate jargon like “strong customer service skills,” “responsibility and accountability,” and “strategic goals” are littered throughout.

Perhaps because it was done pro bono, the report seems to have caused few ripples, except for concerns attributed to then-City Council member Natalie Johnson Lee, who worried that the “report does not directly address communities of color, and fails to tackle poverty head-on.” (It is also not clear what, if any, long-term benefits the McKinsey rejiggering accomplished.)

One can also get a peek behind the McKinsey curtain from 2004, when Rybak and his communications director, Gail Plewacki (who is now the communications director for the Minneapolis schools), tried to require the city’s police officers to go through the mayor’s office before speaking to the press. City Pages reporter G. R. Anderson, Jr., described the situation this way: 

Rybak’s press secretary Laura Sether (told) me the policy was simply about the “coordinating of communications.” It wasn’t hard to see the McKinsey effect–a pretense to transparency that was really about information management.

Pro bono work such as this is part of McKinsey’s charitable arm, as it is for many large corporations. But it is also a tried-and-true business strategy: “Philanthropic initiatives … can pave the way for future market-based innovations,” wrote McKinsey executive Doug Conant in a 2013 report. “It’s a great way to learn about communities and their needs, and test new business strategies.”

In Minneapolis, in 2007, McKinsey/Itasca’s pro bono strategic plan for the city’s schools definitely paved the way for “market-based innovations,” in the form of a coordinated, business-led mission to shake up and remake the public school system.

And much of this mission was funded, inadvertently, by Big Tobacco

For years, Jill Stever-Zeitlin’s salary in MPS was paid for by the Itasca Project through a grant from the local Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi Foundation for Children (the RKMC Foundation).  The RKMC Foundation was started, according to RKMC’s website, in 1998, with a “$30 million commitment from the Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP law firm. The gift was a result of fees earned from the $6.6 billion settlement in the Minnesota tobacco lawsuit.”

This windfall allowed RKMC to support some beloved local organizations, such as the Children’s Theater, with an initial aim to “support PreK-12 education, public health, and social justice.” But, RKMC’s website tells us, in 2007 the foundation shifted. Just as McKinsey consultants were plunging in to the strategic redesign of the Minneapolis schools, “…the Foundation chose to focus its assets to achieve greater impact on improving children’s lives.”

Here’s what those assets have supported in Minnesota:

  • The Minneapolis Foundation: Through corporate philanthropy and support from the RKMC fund, the Minneapolis Foundation has provided financial support and thought leadership for the pro-business education reform movement in Minnesota. (The Minneapolis Foundation, in turn, provides financial support for the Itasca Project, which received flak in 2010 for wanting to pay its first “CEO” close to $400,000.)
  • The Minneapolis Foundation’s outgoing president, Sandra Vargas, is board chair of the national, hedge fund-heavy education reform network, 50CAN, which the Minneapolis Foundation also helps fund. Vargas became president of the Minneapolis Foundation in 2007, suggesting this was indeed a pivotal year for the local reform movement,
  • Teach for America (TFA). This education reform powerhouse was brought to the Twin Cities with help from the RKMC Foundation, giving TFA a foothold for expansion in Minnesota. While TFA recruits do not have a large classroom presence in Minneapolis, TFA alums have been put into high-profile, highly paid administrative jobs within the district–often after just two years of teaching experience, leading to an emphasis on management systems, data collection and standardization (hallmarks of the McKinsey approach to public education). One example: Minneapolis’s “Office of New Schools,” run by TFA alum Betsy Ohrn, and built to promote the portfolio-like splintering of the Minneapolis schools.
  • TFA also has a “deep bench,” far beyond the classroom, nationally and locally. Beginning in 2012, with TFA alum Josh Reimnitz’s  Minneapolis school board campaign, outside education reform money has poured into local elections. 
  • Educators for Excellence (E4E) is a TFA offshoot, also brought to the Twin Cities by RKMC funds. E4E is positively framed as a place for “teacher’s voices,” but also requires teachers to sign a pledge in order to join. The pledge includes an agreement to be evaluated according to student test scores, which sounds like a great “accountability” tactic, but is deeply flawed and, some would say, profoundly unethical (see this report connecting high stakes testing to the school to prison pipeline). E4E also helps promote corporate structures for public education, such as pay for performance–a controversial practice abandoned, ironically, by Microsoft (E4E is partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). E4E has a New York PR firm, SDK Knickerbocker, on retainer to help sell its “teacher-led” message.
  • MinnCAN. The RKMC Foundation provided seed money for MinnCAN, a franchise of the national 50CAN education reform network, to grow here. MinnCAN is run by former TFA-Twin Cities Executive Director Dan Sellers, who also managed, or mismanaged, some might say, the 2014 influx of outside dough into the Minneapolis school board race. (Want to get a handle on MinnCAN’s priorities/lobbying efforts? Follow the money.)
  • MinnCAN has shared office space in Minneapolis with the local pro-charter school expansion group, Charter School Partners. The RKMC Foundation has provided financial support for Charter School Partners, which has since morphed into MN Comebackan incredibly well-funded group with designs on a complete takeover of the Minneapolis Public Schools, through the expansion of “high performing” charter and district schools.
  • MN Comeback has also received money from the RKMC Foundation and the Minneapolis Foundation. Additionally, MN Comeback is part of a national education reform support and expansion group called Education Cities (again, follow the money). Amy Hertel is a former McKinsey consultant and Minneapolis Foundation education policy director. She now works for Education Cities, as the Vice President for “Network Impact.”

Think of this as a coordinated, McKinsey/Itasca-RKMC-Minneapolis Foundation-national education reform network marketing campaign, with two dominant talking points: 

  1. The Problem: The Minneapolis Public Schools, like “urban” public education everywhere, is failing. It is expensive, bloated and messy, and it is failing students of color, thanks to entrenched “adult” interests, such as teachers unions.
  2. The Solution: Competition, data, school choice, the expansion of charter schools, the use of “transformational,” non-unionized teachers, mayoral appointed school boards, metrics, performance management, greater “autonomy” in exchange for greater “accountability,” and the systematic redirection of resources from the public into private hands, through “scholarships” (vouchers), for example.

The very real, very consciously-created and unaddressed racial and economic “gaps” that exist in Minnesota and throughout the United States are always used as the (public) justification for this work. 

But here is how a Minneapolis Public Schools employee–who has asked not to be named–remembers McKinsey’s work in the district:

They held focus groups for MPS staff around 2007 — you participated and got a $10 gift card to McDonald’s or something. At the small group I was part of (about 3 or 4 white staff), they asked us what we thought were the main issues facing MPS. I said I thought racism in the form of segregated schools and predominantly white teaching staff. Jill (forget her last name — was running the focus group [and don’t forget McKinsey was doing this for free for MPS]) said, “What do you mean?” I elaborated about white schools, schools of color, low-income schools, privileged schools in SW Mpls; how we had a huge majority of white licensed staff and an ever-growing percentage of students of color, but MPS was not providing any professional development to increase educators’ understanding of our own racism and how it impacts how we view our students & their families.

After that, McKinsey published a big report about their “findings” and it didn’t say a thing about race. They had to publish an addendum to make up for their racist blind spot. 

Retired Wells Fargo CEO Jim Campbell was chair of the Itasca Project from 2003-2008. In a McKinsey & Co. video about the Itasca Project, called “Doing Well by Doing Good,” Campbell describes Itasca this way:

“Our whole focus is on picking issues and working on them and producing results.”

Notably, while Itasca, through McKinsey, was leading a “strategic redirection”–minus democratic input or oversight–of the Minneapolis schools, this happened, thanks to the north Minneapolis group known as NOC (Neighborhoods Organizing for Change):

In October 2011, prompted by outrage over damage to education funding caused by the foreclosure crisis and the lobbying influence the banks are exerting over our democracy and public revenues, NOC presented the school board with a report demonstrating the $28 million negative impact of Wells Fargo’s foreclosure practices on the district’s budget. Community members rallied and testified at the board asking them to move their $25 million monthly payroll account.  NOC followed up in December by presenting the school board with more than 12,000 petition signatures demanding they move their money.

NOC’s organizing pressure was followed, in 2012, by a SEIU (Service Employees International Union) report, titled I.O.U.: How Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank Have Shortchanged Minnesota Schools.” The report’s purpose? To square “some of the blame for a $2.4 billion school shift and other shortfalls in school funding on the practices of the state’s largest banks and their executives.” 

This begs the question: Who is failing whom? And who is controlling the narrative?

More to come! McKinsey, the media, and the education ecosystem

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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