The light goes out for once-hailed Edison Schools

July 22, 11:49 AMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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The glare of publicity proved unflattering to Edison Schools.

Back in 2001, the San Francisco Unified School District was a big national and even international news story because of one little school -- Edison Charter Academy at 22nd and Dolores.

ECA was run by New York-based Edison Schools Inc., a flamboyant experiment in running public schools for profit. Edison, founded by flashy entrepreneur Chris Whittle, was publicly traded on the NASDAQ for several years. At the time, it was widely hailed as the future of public education, the miracle everyone had been seeking.

Edison 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.

Whittle has left the building (and though his vision may have died, he himself has made no apparent effort to disguise the fact that he’s still alive). Edison, under its current leadership, now has officially changed its name to edisonlearning and its focus to becoming “a player in education software, focusing on student tracking systems and other ‘achievement management solutions.’,” according to a blog post by Thomas Toch, a think-tanker who has long studied Edison.

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.”

It’s hard now to explain why Edison’s lone San Francisco school made such a media splash. At the time – early 2001 – Edison was trying to take over several schools in New York City and the entire Philadelphia school district (both efforts were unsuccessful, though it got a few Philly schools to manage), just as the SFUSD Board of Education was attempting to sever its contract with Edison. In an odd strategy, Edison responded by launching a massive PR blitz about the SFUSD controversy (despite the fact that other Edison client school districts were also moving to kick Edison out, and one – Sherman, Texas, Edison’s first client – had already done so).

For reasons that are even more unclear, the national and even international media obliged Edison by picking up the story – largely without question just as they got it from Edison. Edison’s message, playing on San Francisco’s easy-to-exploit “land of fruits and nuts” image, was that the Board of Education was trying to get rid of a successful school because of purely ideological opposition to a for-profit company running schools. While that wasn’t completely invalid – a new school board majority was indeed unfavorably inclined toward the concept – it was also the case that Edison was failing to abide by aspects of its contract with the district, and its school was costing SFUSD more than expected and showing mediocre achievement.

Other Edison clients around the nation had the same complaints, which is why so many other districts were also moving to get rid of Edison – a fact that somehow escaped many of the reporters who descended on San Francisco as well as much of the local press. Our district and its battle with Edison inexplicably made Page 1 of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other major media hither and yon. Much of the local media was also in Edison’s camp; SFUSD took a bad ongoing beating on the Chronicle editorial pages. One time I explained the whole situation to a friend who was a part-time Chronicle copy editor, and she was shocked to find out that ECA wasn’t SFUSD’s top-scoring school – so that gives an idea of the impression the Chron was conveying. (At the time, ECA bumped around in the bottom quintile of SFUSD schools ranked by Academic Performance Index scores, depending on the year.)

In retrospect, that media frenzy just looks bizarre, and the glare of the spotlight was ultimately unflattering to Edison. In any case, that particular experiment is now officially dead. In the big picture, it is sad that an effort that promised to remedy the problems facing public education couldn’t manage it. But the Edison failure demonstrates once again that it’s a mistake to put too much faith in simplistic solutions to complex problems.