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Edison Schools: It's baaaaack, and bringing with it innovations like child labor
by Caroline Grannan
Detroit’s public school system is hiring a retooled version of Edison Schools, a flopped school-reform fad of a few years ago, in a desperate effort to make over the floundering city’s schools.
This story has Bay Area angles. Detroit has brought in Robert Bobb, former city manager of Oakland and a non-educator, to be their school district’s emergency financial manager. My understanding is that Bobb was respected in Oakland, but his business decision to hire Edison requires an unnatural willingness to turn a blind eye to past performance. I’m proposing a corporate motto for Edison: “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Edison is one of four firms the district is hiring; the Detroit Free Press (showing the press elsewhere how it’s done) has done its homework, finding a spotty history:
Edison, a New York-based for-profit firm, was the great shining hope of advocates of turning public education over to the free market back around 2001. School districts around the country hired Edison to take over schools, which the company promised to turn into high achievers at no extra cost, while also making a profit for its shareholders.
Edison was a big San Francisco story in 2001, after the Board of Ed started looking into severing a contract initiated by former Superintendent Bill Rojas that had brought Edison in to run one SFUSD school. Edison, somewhat inexplicably, decided to respond to SFUSD’s move by working up a media frenzy (the willingness of the local, national and even international press to make a major news story out of an arcane school policy issue, at Edison’s behest, baffles me to this day).
In fairly short order, Edison fizzled as clients, one after another, dropped the company. The company retreated from the limelight, still running a few schools here and there.
But a few years later, Edison was planning its comeback. In October 2007 I about a leaked plan for the E2 project, a do-over for the company. Now, renamed Edison Learning, the firm is quietly – in contrast to its past grandiose publicity-hounding ways – trying to tiptoe into new client districts.
For the rest of this assessment, go here
— Caroline Grannan
Examiner.com
2009-07-31
http://www.examiner.com/x-356-SF-Education-Examiner~y2009m7d31-Edison-Schools-Its-baaaaack-and-bringing-with-it-innovations-like-child-labor?cid=exami
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Pages: 380
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