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Education Funding Opinion

Consultants Vs. Real Live School Administrators, Part 5

By Alexander Russo — July 10, 2007 1 min read
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From today’s Washington Examiner, via The Quick And The Ed:

Communications breakdown caused boxes of sporting goods, computers and other essential equipment to be left padlocked in a shuttered District of Columbia junior high school for almost an entire year while a neighboring school was starved for supplies, a city consultant told The Examiner.

From the June 21 edition of The Nation:

The [bus route] chaos was caused in large part by the financial consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, an outfit the department hired without competitive bidding at $16 million to find $200 million from the [New York City] department's budget to divert directly into the schools...The net savings for all this grief: $5 million, far less than what was originally estimated.

I’m not saying that district folks always get it right -- just that high-priced consultants are no guarantee of efficiency and performance either.

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