School austerity measures come to the suburbs.

• Author: Lahm, Sarah

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On a recent Thursday night, in a darkened middle-school auditorium in suburban Stillwater, Minnesota, a showdown between agitated parents and reticent school administrators took place. On the auditorium stage stood two long tables draped in black cloth, with microphones positioned for Stillwater school district personnel and board members.

Also attending this school board meeting were legions of parents and community members--many armed with notepads and dressed in bright red or yellow T-shirts. The shirts were emblazoned with slogans opposing the district's hastily announced plans to close three Stillwater-area elementary schools.

As board members and Stillwater Area Public Schools Superintendent Denise Pontrelli sat nearly motionless, parent after parent approached the stage. One woman, Dee Dee Armstrong, handed out cans of Coke to the assembled school officials. "Golly!" she called out loudly, "It's been a stressful fifty-seven days, hasn't it?" The soda, she explained, was a peace offering, in anticipation of a trying night.

It had been fifty-seven tense days since Pontrelli announced plans to shutter three district schools. The community responded with alarm and disbelief, while Pontrelli defended the move as necessary to conserve limited district resources.

It also drove home a point: The market-based education reform movement has come to the suburbs.

This movement--which has led to the shuttering of public schools based on the advice of outside business consultants and an insistence that schools must do more with less--has to date been largely directed at urban school districts. Cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans have borne the brunt of massive school closings (Chicago shut down nearly fifty neighborhood schools in 2013 alone) and increased competition from school choice and charter schools, in exchange for the promise of a more "equitable" education landscape.

Now this movement has extended its reach beyond the city and into areas once thought to have better schools--or, at least, wealthier parents and better protection from invasive, outside education reform groups. And, as parents and community members are figuring out, one group in particular seems to be leading this invasion: the Boston-based District Management Council.

The Council is a for-profit education reform consulting group, staffed primarily by MBAs with no perceivable K-12 classroom experience. This includes Council CEO John Jong-Hyun Kim, a former McKinsey & Company business consultant with deep roots in the market-based reform movement. In the mid-1990s, he started a private investment firm, Ibis Holdings, that focused on "educational opportunities."

It's a lucrative market. The Council gets contracts, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, from public school districts for such services as doing a "time study," in order to analyze how efficiently district staff get work done. It also specializes in telling districts how to revamp their costly special education departments, often by cutting staff and reducing the number of kids who get services. And, while some districts certainly have found the Council's input valuable, it all seems to lead to the Council's stated bottom line of "cost-effective performance."

An October 2015 Progressive article, "Cashing In on Special Needs Kids," highlighted the impact of a Council special education audit on families and staff in the Minneapolis schools. But the Council has a reach that goes far beyond one single district--Minneapolis--or one simple function--auditing public school special education departments. The Council's website lists 126 school...