Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Did Aspen Group LLC actually help SDUSD in return for $229,000?

Schools don't need Aspen Group to micromanage them. Schools need a whole new culture. I suggest bringing in Patrick Leoncini, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.




Randy Quinn, senior partner
Aspen Group International, LLC

Much Ado About Micromanaging
EMILY ALPERT
Voice of San Diego
August 24, 2009

...After the school board picked the new superintendent, Terry Grier, it brought in a new consultant, the Aspen Group LLC, to keep working on governance issues with them in April 2008. I've tallied up $229,000 in contracts to those consultants since then, plus another $160,000 contract the school board signed with Aspen to work with them for the next school year...

But when school board member Katherine Nakamura told me that the closed meeting today gave them a real opportunity for some honest conversation about their roles and allowing the superintendent to be the superintendent, I had to ask: Wasn't that what all those governance trainings were for? What happened in that closed meeting that wasn't happening in those earlier trainings?

"The issue of Houston maybe clarifies things," she said. "We had some more honest conversations."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We are having "severe" difficulties with the coherent governance model which was adopted in June of 2007 by our school board in Eden Prairie Mn.

Since the adoption of the model our board no longer weighs in on decisions made, there is no real transparency or openness and honesty from administration.
We have spent too much money to the aspen group consultants and are not seeing results. I hope to that when new members are seated that the over priced consultants go away!!!