When McKinsey & Co show up in your country, watch out!
With education systems facing pressing challenges globally, a new report from the predatory management consultancy McKinsey & Company puts forth “recommendations for reform” centred around ‘enhanced governance’ and ‘systemic execution.’ However, given the firm’s questionable history in advancing Western corporate interests internationally, often under the guise of societal progress, a neo-colonial agenda could underlie these supposedly altruistic findings.
Across regions like Latin America, Africa, and Asia over past decades, precedents abound of McKinsey encouraging deregulation, privatisation, and foreign direct investment via consulting work with governments – ostensibly to stimulate growth and opportunity locally. Time and again however, such market liberalisation mainly opened doors for American and European conglomerates to exploit resources and labour – with host country populations suffering detrimental impacts ranging from income inequality to environmental degradation.
This pattern of McKinsey arguably acting as an initial corporate advance party under the sheen of policy expertise makes it wise to critique similar forays into education reform in school systems in the Global South. The human capital frame and managerially-focused solutions risk commodifying student populations to suit Western economic interests. Before any community disruption though, local voices and experiences should anchor deliberations on improving education.
In essence, the global power imbalances allowing McKinsey significant influence itself warrants analysis before assessing the firm’s orientalist ideas for progress, especially with children’s lives at stake. This historical context thus frames a responsible review of their “education reform study.”
Governance and Execution
When the article refers to ‘governance and execution’ in the context of successful education reform, it means the leadership, decision-making structures, and processes that guide how reforms are designed, managed, and implemented over time.
Specifically:
Governance: This refers to who makes decisions about education reforms, how priorities and goals are set, how policies are created to enable reforms, building alignment among stakeholders on a vision, etc. Having effective governance, to them, means having systems in place to strategically direct reform efforts.
Execution: This refers to the organisations, teams, procedures, and management processes that take high-level reform goals and translate them into concrete objectives and plans that are then implemented, monitored, and adjusted. Good execution, in their view, ensures vision gets converted into tangible outcomes.
Thus, governance in their view is about the high-level leadership and direction-setting for reform, whilst execution is about the operational side of driving change and making things happen in schools and classrooms.
Their article argues successful education reform balances both - having a governance model that sets a strategic course combined with strong execution capabilities to actually enact the innovations and changes required to improve student outcomes. “Reform” is made more likely when governance and execution are aligned and working well together.
Trojan Horse much?
McKinsey has a concerning history when it comes to ‘consulting’ in the Global South that often precedes predatory corporate practices. For example, McKinsey advocated economic liberalisation policies in countries like Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s that paved the way for oligarchs to rapidly concentrate wealth by acquiring former state assets. Similarly, McKinsey pushed market deregulation and privatisation of industries like energy and transportation in Latin American countries in the 1980s and 1990s. This allowed American corporations enter and garner massive profits while inequality widened.
We can see similar patterns play out more recently in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia as well over the past decade. Governments open up markets further to Western companies based on McKinsey’s advice, geared towards more foreign direct investment. The local populations often deal with consequences like price hikes, labour issues, environmental damage, wealth concentration, and expanding inequality once these economic policies take shape on the ground with corporate interests driving decisions.
Thus, McKinsey’s track record of enabling Western neo-colonial corporate expansion into developing nations without caring about the detrimental impacts on vulnerable local populations and economies makes this report suspect upon arrival. This historical pattern certainly raises valid warnings when we consider McKinsey’s current education reform proposals globally. Their motivations and agenda need interrogation - something that my autistic brain does best.
What comes next?
Given McKinsey's consultancy history enabling corporate exploitation in the Global South, we should extrapolate how similar education “reforms” centred around ‘governance and execution’ likely serve neo-colonial interests rather than actually educating vulnerable students.
Here are a few likely scenarios that may happen if these reform recommendations moved forward:
Emphasis on “performance metrics” could justify large-scale standardised testing programs - opening lucrative deals for Western ed-tech companies to provide such software/analytics at the cost of local teacher agency and culturally-responsive instruction.
Top-down governance models and accountability systems may undermine community participation to instead streamline public-private partnerships - allowing foreign corporates control over schools under the logic of “efficiency.”
Enacting reforms requires training - again enriching Western consultants flown in to preach “world-class” skills and solutions divorces from complex realities facing students navigating poverty, language barriers, trauma etc.
The reforms could even morph into advocacy for private charter schools and for-profit educational services that leave out the most marginalised children.
Whilst notions of “evidence-based global best practices” sound convincing from a McKinsey PowerPoint - the on-the-ground implications likely serve to reinforce economic and cultural power imbalances whilst doing little to systematically address real barriers to learning that students experience day-to-day.
Upending local education cultures to instead implement a Western-defined vision of progress risks the worst kinds of paternalistic policies that ultimately commodify the very youth they claim to support - for the benefit of corporate interests seeking new markets and low-cost labour rather than empowered societies.
We should heed history’s cautions before letting consulting firms get further hooks into school systems abroad or at home. Progress should elevate community wisdom first - not boardroom priorities.