Schools Matter blog refers to a Times UK article entitled "Business will seek to run state schools after shift in political attitudes". Many of us have already realized that the powerful push to privatize education is a world wide movement.
Across the Pond...Edison Expanding?Businesses are looking to revolutionise state education by bidding to run hundreds of schools, as politicians open the door to new education providers.
Companies want to create national chains of state schools, eclipsing the current groups of charitable academy sponsors, which tend to be small and geographically based.
Although both the Government and the Conservatives say that organisations driven by profit should not run schools, both have created a path for them to enter the sector. Governing bodies of new, or existing, schools can appoint a contractor to operate the school on their behalf — a model used widely in the US.
...."All three are almost certain to be approved, given their educational experience. After an interval, understood to be two years, they would be able to apply to become accredited schools groups — enabling them to run larger numbers of schools.
Let's take a peek at the history of Edison Schools in the US. This is a great website which followed the problems of Edison Schools as far back as 2001.
Parents Advocating School Accountability...PASA Controversial, for-profit Edison Schools, once hailed as the salvation of public education, has fallen from glory as what seemed like visionary ideas turned out to be just a sales pitch. In its heyday, Edison claimed that it could run public schools for less money than school districts could. The company dropped that claim as dismayed clients complained about its extra costs.
Edison's boasts that it could improve student achievement while making a profit fell just as flat.
Edison's student achievement has been mixed at best, and its claims about academic improvement never held up to scrutiny. A July 2002 New York Times analysis of Edison's claims found that the troubled Cleveland, Ohio, school system achieved higher gains than Edison's schools when analyzed with the methodology Edison applied to its own schools' achievement.
Here is an example of one of many articles listed. From 2008:
The light goes out for once-hailed Edison SchoolsEdison was the darling of the free-market right, touted by the big think tanks (one of its top executives, John Chubb, was and still is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution), the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the rest of that crowd. Some liberals chimed in too. I would imagine that Peter Schrag and Joan Walsh – both prominent journalists whose attitudes appear to be generally liberal, pro-public-education and (in my view) overall highly sensible – are a bit embarrassed now about their 2001 articles praising Edison achievement in The Nation and Salon, respectively.
With all the publicity Edison got at the time, it’s surprising that more people aren’t wondering what ever happened to that miracle that was supposed to be bringing private-sector efficiencies to public education. I really expected some high-profile collapse, and semi-joked that Whittle would fake his own death. But actually, Edison has just gradually faded, and has quietly shifted its focus toward providing supplemental services to schools, an area in which a for-profit business is perfectly unremarkable.
Now it has even more quietly officially died, though apparently its successor will continue managing however many schools are still left in Edison’s hands (again, Edison’s own information is fuzzy). That presumably includes the one in San Francisco, which for years now has been under the auspices of the California state Board of Education, no longer an SFUSD school. It’s a rent-paying tenant in an SFUSD property; little is known about it outside its own community.
..."Meanwhile, Whittle and his Edison colleague Benno Schmidt (a once-respected academic – in fact, former president of Yale) have moved on to a new scheme, according to New York Magazine: “an international chain of for-profit elite private schools.” Somehow the New York Mag headline seems like the final nail in Edison’s coffin: “After failing with for-profit public schools, Chris Whittle goes private.”
By November 2009...Edison was back and getting stimulus money for education. That surely was an extremely short demise.
Edison's back and getting stimulus moneyDETROIT — In July, DPS financial manager Robert Bobb announced the hiring of four educational management companies to run seventeen public high schools as part of the restructuring of Detroit’s school district. At least one of those companies has a well-documented track record replete with academic performance failures and contract terminations.
The management companies — EdWorks of Cincinnati, Edison Learning of New York, Model Secondary Schools of Bellevue, Washington and Institute for Student Achievement of Lake Success, New York — will be paid with $20 million of economic stimulus funds, according to published reports."
And problems with Edison's Confluence Academy...a blog post from 2006.
Edison Is the Symptom, NCLB Is the DiseaseIt’s not that I object to Edison and Confluence Academy per se. I understand that theyare logical expressions of our contemporary system of education, especially the way that we educate poor minority children. Edison is profiting – literally and metaphorically – from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law. But Confluence and Edison are symptoms of a much larger social disease, a disease that creates the conditions for these companies to exist and thrive and for these schools to be regarded as models for our future.
The most troubling thing about my visit to Confluence came when I observed what actually happened in the classrooms. I visited six classrooms at various grade levels. I did not observe a single white student. Every child I saw was African-American. The students were dominated and controlled in ways that were reminiscent of a trainer working with frightened, caged animals. The children seemed utterly unchildlike, utterly joyless. In one first grade class, I observed students who had all of their body movements tightly controlled. They responded in automaton-like fashion to instructions from the teacher.
And we simply cannot forget that Jeb was Whittle's rescuer at one time...using the Florida Pension Fund to bail out his project.
A 2005 review of Chris Whittle's book Crash Course By 1995 Whittle had turned that idea for a mass-market alternative to public education into Edison Schools, Inc., opening his first four Edison Schools in various locales around the country. By 1999 Whittle was ready to go public with the company, even though Edison posted a net loss of $50 million in the previous year. To make a long story short, by 2002 the stock was in free fall, moving from nearly 38 dollars a share to its low of 15 cents. By the following year, in a sweetheart deal that is even shocking by today’s standards of corporate crony politics, Whittle had found a benefactor in the State Pension Fund of Florida. With the support of Jeb Bush, the pension fund, whose largest constituency, ironically, happens to be public school teachers, not only bought out the failed company but also allowed Whittle to retain control, doubled his salary while offering him new stock options, provided loan extensions to repay debts, and gave more loans to keep the outfit afloat. (One can only guess what the Governor knew, or thought he knew, about the future movement of corporate welfare schools that would justify such an investment.) Part of the answer, or at least part of the gamble, may be found in the futuristic froth that characterizes Whittle’s current contribution to the literature of corporate socialism.
That is absolutely stunning that Jeb used the Florida pension fund to help out a crony.
Here is more about the Edison bailout by the Florida Pension fund.
How Edison survived.But by 2002 Edison was on the ropes. Its stock had crashed from $37 to as little as 14 cents. Whittle had long since abandoned his original, controversial goal of building a network of private, for-profit schools, but even the strategy of contracting to privately manage public and charter schools proved flawed. Plagued by local opposition and severely criticized for its educational performance, Edison was hemorrhaging money ($354 million in twelve years), and had lost one-fourth of its contracts.
Edison's collapse would have been a major embarrassment for boosters of educational privatization--that is, if an unlikely white knight hadn't come to the rescue, purchasing the company for $182 million. Edison's savior, ironically, was the Florida Retirement System (FRS)--the pension fund for public employees, roughly half of them teachers, whose union has vigorously criticized both Edison and privatization. The purchase, made by Liberty Partners, an investment firm that made private equity investments exclusively with FRS money, not only put the retirement security of public employees at risk; it financially underwrote the cause of privatization, which public employee unions oppose as a threat to jobs and the pensions of its members. But neither public employees nor their unions had a voice in the matter.
So Edison survived to get money from Arne Duncan's education stimulus billions.
And now they are moving across the pond to the UK where the Times thinks it is the new model for our country...that they are following suit.
I guess that is correct.
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