One wonders what those of us here in Northwest Arkansas have done to deserve so much attention from charlatans lately.  In the last year we have been visited by Eva Klein and Associates, Tony Wagner, and now Sarah Palin.  Unfortunately, the community coughed up money to be wooed by Eva Klein and Tony Wagner.  Palin is at least coming for free, unless you count the cost the English language is incurring by losing any non-ironic use of the word “rogue” henceforth.

The latest sum of money the community will be parting with–$36,000 to be exact–is going to pay Phi Delta Kappa for conducting a curriculum audit of the Fayetteville School District.  Like Eva Klein & Associates did for Fayetteville (for $150,000), Phi Delta Kappa came into town  for a few days and held focus groups with community members to hear their ideas.  In February they’ll provide us with a nifty presentation that summarizes what community members told them.  The modus operandi of these types of consultants is well-known. Dilbert has been lampooning them for years.

To be sure, the report that Phi Delta Kappa comes up with won’t look exactly like the same ideas the community gave them.  They’ll be re-written in such a way that any resemblance or lack of substance will be obfuscated by consultant-speak gobbledy-gook.  For example, when the Rogers School District hired Phi Delta Kappa to conduct an audit, one of the recommendations they received was:

Develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management system that delineates short- and long-term goals, directs curriculum revision to ensure deep alignment and quality delivery, and defines the instructional model district leaders expect teachers to follow in delivering the curriculum.

Translation: Establish a system to set and achieve goals. And make it a good one.

Here’s another recommendation from the Rogers audit:

Research, identify and implement strategies to eliminate inequities and inequalities that impede opportunities for all students to succeed.

Translation:  Do what you and every other school district has already been doing (or should have been doing) for decades.

I’m willing to bet Fayetteville’s audit will contain many of the same recommendations given to Rogers.  These types of consultant groups have stock boiler-plate language that they recycle time and time again.  I also expect to see some of the views of the community rewritten in consultant-speak.  Here’s some of the comments and concerns the Northwest Arkansas Times picked up from teachers and parents at one of the focus groups:

I got this list from the newspaper, which cost me fifty cents–a whopping $35,499.50 less than Phi Delta Kappa is going to charge for repackaging these ideas in consultant-speak.

I don’t know exactly why organizations pay money to outside consultants, like when the city paid Eva Klein & Associates to tell us that the University was one of our strengths, and that the perception that Fayetteville was anti-business was one of our weaknesses.   Don’t we already elect and pay people to think about these things and have a vision for what we need to do?  So why are they sub-contracting out their duties?

Still, I don’t want to prejudge the Phi Delta Kappa report too much, and I am hopeful that when the report comes out it will be useful.  But my concern and my prediction is that some form of the goals written above, re-written in consultant speak, along with some more generic goals, like the ones in the Rogers report, are going to make up the bulk of what Fayetteville receives.

We’ll come back to this in February when we finally get our hands on the report, at which time we’ll translate it into English and check my predictions.