Why the McKinsey reports will not improve school systems

Abstract

In the last four years McKinsey and Company have produced two highly influential reports on how to improve school systems. The first McKinsey report How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top has since its publication in 2007 been used to justify change in educational policy and practice in England and many other countries. The second How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better, released in late 2010, is a more substantial tome which is likely to have an even greater impact. This article subjects both reports to a close examination and finds them deficient in 10 respects. The detailed critique is preceded by a few general remarks about their reception, influence and main arguments.

Keywords:

• critical analysis
• research

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank John Bynner, Emma Coffield, Tony Edwards, John Lowe, Ian Rodger and Dylan Wiliam who helped me to sharpen up the arguments of this article. I am also very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of this journal whose comments improved the article’s shape and style.

Notes

1. Sir Michael Barber was formerly a teacher, an official of the National Union of Teachers and professor of education at the Universities of Keele and London. He is currently an Expert Partner in McKinsey and head of its ‘Global Education Practice’ (sic). He was Chief Adviser on Delivery to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His latest co-authored book is called Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders.

2. Dr Mona Mourshed is also a partner in McKinsey and leads their education practice, covering the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

3. McKinsey and Co is an international management consulting firm.

4. The US Department of Education is currently running an $4 billion competition called The Race to the Top, where states submit bids outlining their plans for comprehensive education reform; specifically, states need to show how they will improve education in science, technology, engineering and maths, ‘driven by an economic imperative’ (Robelen 2010, 6).

5. I suspect that Braun (2008, 317) is right when he argues that the interest of policy-makers ‘in education stems largely from an appreciation of the role of human capital development in economic growth’.

6. To be ‘great’ apparently is not as good as being ‘excellent’.

7. These acronyms refer to international assessments of student attainment in tests. PISAprogram for international student assessment; TIMMS, trends in international maths and science study; and PIRLS, progress in international reading literacy study.

8. The Tory-led coalition government in England decided in 2010 to seriously reduce funding for the NCSL as part of its austerity measures.

9. I have deliberately given only a few key references to these substantial research literatures to avoid including long lines of names and dates, so those given should be taken as gateways to rich fields of knowledge.

10. Again, I have restricted myself to one reference in the text, but interested readers could also consult Phil Hodkinson’s (2008) valedictory lecture at Leeds University on the same theme. The authors of the McKinsey reports need to acknowledge that such criticisms of their ideas exist and they also need to respond to them. One of the criteria that Michaels, O’Connor, and Resnick (2008) have proposed for educational debate is accountability to the learning community: reports should ‘attend seriously to and build on the ideas of others’. This criterion will need to be addressed if there is to be a third McKinsey report on school systems.

11. The PISA results for 2009 usefully discuss ‘resilient students’, that is, those who come from the bottom quarter of the socially most disadvantaged students, but who perform among the top quarter of students internationally. In the UK ‘24% of disadvantaged students can be considered resilient’ and 31% is the OECD average (OECD 2010b, 7).

12. The three authors are committed to improving the quality of learning, but seem to have no concern for the English language. At times, their prose is clumsy: ‘school systems’ performance journeys’ (op cit: 123); and ‘incremental frontline-led improvement’ (op cit: 60). At other times they introduce ugly neologisms: ‘architecting tomorrow’s leadership’ (op cit: 27); and ‘schools … not only outperform … but also “out-improve”’ (op cit: 132).

13. Another surprising omission concerns the relative absence of comment in either report on information technology. This prompts me to ask: how many classrooms did the three authors observe?