Biz Plan Competition

3 Replies to “Biz Plan Competition”

1. In Connecticut, the education reform crowd is already milking the public teat for their gilded cages:
   Education Reform Carrion birds circling Windham – Where are Windham’s elected leaders?

   Governor Malloy’s State Board of Education appointed former Hartford Superintendent of Schools, Steven Adamowski, to serve as Special Master of Windham’s schools and put him in charge of the extra funds.

   The first allocation of those funds went toward his salary of $225,000 a year. Add in $22,000 for health benefits, $16,000 for workers compensation and professional liability insurance, equipment, travel and a personal secretary working in his Hartford office and more than $350,000 of the initial $1 million in public funds was already gone.

   Over the past year, the “Adamowski Approach” has taken shape.

   Of the initial $2 million (the additional state support for year one and year two), more than $750,000 has gone to Adamowski or his personal staff. About $50,000 was skimmed off by State Education Resource Center (the contracting entity the state used to side-step bidding requirements) for “indirect costs” and another $95,000 went to SERC for a Positive Behavioral Intervention Program for Windham.

   That doesn’t even cover SERC’s “administrative costs” to oversee the contract, Then there was $5,000 for consultants for fiscal process planning, $100,000 for consultants for planning, $75,000 for consultants for “benchmarking” activities, another $45,000 for more consultants for planning, $11,000 for Talent Recruitment, $20,000 for stipends and signing bonuses, $10,000 for some feasibility study, $10,000 for school choice materials, $20,000 for extra communications services, $27,500 for school governance consultants, $70,000 for a new communications officer and the list goes on and on.

   In fact, it is hard to determine whether any of the extra taxpayer funds went to anything that directly benefits the needy children of Windham.

2. Yikes. I just opined on my local school blog that if reformers really wanted to have an effect, they’d go after school districts and not teacher unions. Then I came over here and as usual, Phillip provides a case story.

3. Oh snap! I just sailed into the Biz Plan link. Loathsome. I may have more to say about it later but just now, it may the one of the more irredeemably ignorant ideas ever to come out of Yale. Full disclosure, Yalies don’t impress me much.