Superintendents and school boards have drawn on a variety of consultants to help with the great issue facing school districts – improving the performance of all students while making the most efficient use of resources. Typically, these efforts are initiated by a crisis of performance, finance or equity, and more often some combination of each.

For the most part, these efforts have proved disappointing for four reasons:

• The full set of factors bearing on success are not examined.
• Political preferences dominate the analysis, not just the debate over stategy.
• Advisors lack the skills, inclination or reputation required to force decision-makers to confront objective realities.
• Although a strategy reduced to writing generally enjoys broad rhetorical support the day it is announced, it is rarely internalized by management, staff or other stakeholders.

There has been a considerable amount of objective study on parts of the problem – for example, the specialized studies of resource allocation by Alan Odden, Karen Miles and Margeurite Roza (after all, "the budget is policy"), but more often the whole does not get worked until financial disaster strikes. The “turn around” business of Alvarez and Marsal in cities in Saint Louis, New York City and New Orleans comes to mind.

Over the last few years The Parthenon Group has been engaged at the “front end,” adapting the tools and techniques of strategic advice management consulting firms provide to large companies to the particular environment of school districts. Although the firm is a bit secretive about its client list, articles and reports show they have provided important inputs to New York City (here, and here), Washington, DC (and download below), and Charlotte-Mecklenberg, NC. It is disappointing that this work has been paid for by foundations rather than the districts, as that fact says volumes about how districts really value this kind of work, but it doesn’t undermine the potential quality of the work itself.

In the interest of full disclosure, your editor initiated a relationship with Parthenon while Chief Operating Officer of New American Schools, a relationship that continued after he left. Today the firm is a client of K-12Leads. He probably disagreed with their recommendations as often as he agreed. But that was a plus. What Parthenon did was place the issues in the right frame, ask the right questions, collect and analyze the right data, present it in a way that forces decision-makers to confront the right set of choices, and defend their recommendation's based on their review of the facts. Your editor always came away from any discussion knowing much more than before. More important, every New American Schools Design Team – from Success for All to America’s Choice eventually embraced the "market map", "value-chain" and "customer acquisition" concepts and adapted those ideas to their own missions. Your editor has no doubt it is a basic reason that all of these organizations – mostly nonprofits, and others that later joined the NAS family are now financially sustainable with dissemination strategies based on fees rather than grants. (Download the quality provider template NAS developed later based in part on the experience with Parthenon.)

Of the four problems noted above, the last is beyond Parthenon’s pay grade, but the firm handles the first three as well as anyone can expect.  If you are a district – or a school improvement provider, it’s a firm worthy of consideration. Take a look at the hotlinks.