And the cash winner is...

"School Reform Consultants", at $2.6 million dollars.

The whole post is a great (and important) read.  I'm not entirely (ok, at all) swayed by the District's claim that you have to spend money only on proven effective programs/people/services: unless the federal government actually outlined a list of allowed contractors*, you can use research to prove just about anything effective.

Moreover, this whole approach: Whee!  Let's throw money at consultants! - stinks of everything I hate about District spending in general: no institutional memory.  Some of these contractors have been working with the District for years: shouldn't the District be able to go it alone by now, or is there never any exit plan?  Some of these contractors are undoubtedly working on a new version of some program the District has already implemented and abandoned (I personally have collected an archive of FOUR different binders, spanning thirty-plus years, all of which implement the same approach to language variation and teaching codeswitching).

This stuff is far more important than principal follies in the District, I have to say, for all that they get less press.

In other news, this time is the most I've spent upright since Saturday afternoon, when the flu I hadn't caught all year caught me.  Alas, I have not yet "checked out" and sure won't be doing so today, since I'm going back to bed.

In final news, the chicks are at this interim ugly stage between feather and down and visibly larger by day.


*They may have done; Reading First sure did.  The research for the Reading First program is remarkably biased, first by setting study requirements so narrow only very few studies qualified, and then by ignoring anything that the committee chairs didn't like.