The Consulting BOOM - schools use outside help for their improvements

School Administrator, Feb, 1998 by Donna Harringion-Lueker

According to Phil Hansen, the district's chief accountability officer, each of the high schools has been paired with a team of professors from local colleges or universities that will provide the troubled schools with intensive assistance. These teams work on-site at least three days a week throughout the school year, Hansen says, and they receive between $50,000 and $100,000 for their work.

In addition, Hansen says, the school district has hired retired principals and administrators to work as probation managers who monitor the schools' progress and work with staff members. Probation managers are paid $10,000 a year and work as needed. ("It's almost a full-time job in reconstituted schools," says Hansen.)

To ensure the funds are well spent, Hansen says the district judges the consultants' performance in part on their schools' scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Probation managers also are evaluated according to ITBS scores and monthly reports of their schools' progress. This year, too, Hansen says, the district expects to hire an outside group to evaluate the consultants performance.

"Many of these schools were in serious crisis and had tried various things over the years," says Hansen of the district's decision to use consultants in its failing schools. "Our idea was that a new perspective might make a difference."

In reconstituted schools, where as many as 150 teachers might be new, outside consultants may be especially important. (When a school is reconstituted, all teachers at a school must reapply for their jobs, and many aren't rehired.)

"It takes awhile for leadership to emerge in a situation like that," says Hansen. Some Chicago schools in fact have hired consultants who are experts in team-building because of this, the accountability officer says.

Potential Shortcomings

But is the reliance on outside experts good for education? As the use of consultants increases, so do the cautions.

Too often, school systems use consultants for the wrong reasons, superintendents and consultants say. Some use consultants to check the work of staff members who are incompetent; others hire consultants to make politically unpopular recommendations so that they can shield themselves from the heat. ("I've had to move in some shark-infested waters," says one consultant.) Still other school systems work with consultants to give the public appearance of reform, then shelve the consultant's report once the study is finished.

McLaughlin, who is a consultant himself, concedes the industry does have "a Dilbertesque quality about it"--a reference to the popular Dilbert comic strip with its scathing indictment of managerial waste and incompetence. "It's a highly paid activity ... done by someone who'd like to keep himself employed," McLaughlin admits.

Rodenhauser, who tracks the industry for his newsletter, offers a similar caution. "Consulting is a high-profit, high-revenue business," he says, contending consultants can be guilty of "not knowing when to turn the meter off."