The Delaware Department of Education has contracted with Public Consulting Group to be the vendor for Governor Markell’s “suggested” Statewide Review of Educational Opportunities. Who is Public Consulting Group? I was all over them last summer when I saw over $400,000 pouring out of the DOE to this company. They handle the Medicaid Reimbursement for service providers that help out students with disabilities in schools. People like occupational therapists, psychologists, etc. If a disabled student is on the state Medicaid plan, Medicaid actually reimburses school districts and charters for those providers. On paper, it looks great! The state gets back a lot of money from this. But the data that goes out to PCG and the DOE during this process is truly frightening!
This company caught my eye a year ago when I was just doing a random search at the money pouring out of the DOE on Delaware Online Checkbook. I noticed a hell of a lot of cash going to this one company. As a result, I wrote three articles on PCG that truly became scarier with each one. PCG has been busy in Delaware lately. They also bid for the Delaware Report Card Survey, but that contract was awarded to Tembo Inc., out of Philadelphia (they did the very controversial Teach For America report the legislators wanted last year. Tembo also won the bid for the Report Card Portal contract). While their financial award for doing this work on the SREO initiative is ONLY $70,000.00 for the next year, I don’t buy DOE’s claim that they are contracting this out so they don’t look biased. This company already has their hands on a lot of data with Delaware students…
If you read the below RFP for this, the truly horrifying part comes in this one sentence: Data will be available from the state’s longitudinal data system. So we are going to let a company that already has their hands on actual notes from psychologists into the whole DOE data system? Are they out of their minds?
This is a company that did the same Medicaid program for New Jersey and if you read the third article on PCG I wrote last year, it shows how New Jersey had some FERPA issues with PCG. As well, PCG developed the entire data longitudinal system for New Jersey, so they have access to that whole system as well. And they even set up a system to profile students with their “early warning system”. What every student needs, the ability to be tracked on a data system to see how you turn out! Big brother isn’t just watching you, he’s controlling your future now!
It is insane that our DOE and Governor Markell allow so much of children’s data into the hands of outside companies. As well, if you go to PCG’s website, you can see they are dipping into personalized learning and other online initiatives. So not only does this company have the keys to get into data systems but they are also developing data systems. Should one company have this much power? Probably not, but I’m sure the knuckleheads at the DOE don’t even think of this kind of stuff…
The Season Of Myths 