There was a lot of hoopla last week when the president of Yale University resigned and took a new job. This is not front page news in itself, but Benno Schmidt was leaving a prestigious job to become CEO of a national chain of private, for-profit schools being planned by entrepreneur Christopher Whittle. Whittle, best known for Channel One, which provides schools with television sets and satellite dishes in return for a guarantee that their students will watch a daily 12-minute news program with 2 minutes of commercials, says he aims to turn around American education with his Whittle schools.
If Benno Schmidt were a businessman, there would be nothing surprising in this move. The chain of schools he will lead is likely to be a tremendous money maker: Whittle has talked about revenues of more than $10 billion a year by 2010. And the Edison Project, as Whittle calls it, could get a big financial boost if states pass voucher initiatives like the one pending in California, which would allow the spending of taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.
But Schmidt is not a businessman -- he's a scholar and a former Ivy League president. So what has attracted him to the Edison Project? If he wanted to devote his energies to American K-12 education, couldn't he find a better way than joining a chain of private, for-profit schools?
The important point about the Edison Project, according to Schmidt, is that it will offer K-12 education a new start. Edison Project thinkers he says, will consider new uses of technology in the schools; they will look at the possibility of keeping students in school more hours in a day and more days in a year; they will think about different ways to use teachers and volunteers. They will, as a Whittle ad that appeared in the New York Times last week put it, give "America's schools ... fundamental structural change [instead of] tinkering around the edges."
Of course these ideas are worthwhile, but nothing about them is revolutionary. They've all been around for some time, and nobody has been able to make them work. So why should we assume that the appearance of the Edison Project has made realizing them a certainty? It's as though the medical profession suddenly announced that they would have a cure for cancer or AIDS or the common cold within two or three years. Of course no one would make an announcement like this in any field but education. It's only in education that people can get up, promise the moon -- without much prospect of delivering it -- and get lots of applause.
Some people consider the Whittle schools a threat to public education because they worry about what will happen when a number of families who can afford to pay $5000 tuition per year pull their kids out of public school. But turning an educational venture into a for-profit business poses the bigger threat of what we might call an educational-industrial complex. At present, the major reason companies care about schools is because they want well-trained employees. But when schools become a business -- and a potentially enormous business at that -- the situation changes. There will be a number of big companies with a financial stake in Whittle's schools. Of course they will want to ensure the success of the Edison Project. And what better way to do that than to lobby the government to pass voucher legislation? As a result, what should be an educational and social issue only will become a business matter as well.
Whether or not they succeed financially, Whittle schools will face the same problems as other American schools, both public and private, in improving student performance. American students do not do much work in high school because they don't need to work to get what they want. The exception is students who hope to be admitted to elite colleges -- and they work very hard indeed. Otherwise, our students know that they will be able to find a college to admit them as long as they have a high school diploma and enough money. The same goes for students who are going right from a school to a job. They know that employers don't care what courses they have taken or how well they have done as long as they have a diploma. Our lack of student incentives makes it difficult to persuade most students in public and private schools to do much work. Adding a private, for-profit chain to the mix will not change that.
Benno Schmidt is right when he says that there is nothing more important for our society than reforming our schools. But it's amazing that he has decided this is possible in the private, for-profit sector and only there. If he had really been interested in helping public education, he might have looked at education systems in other countries.
He would not have found any successful private, for-profit chains of schools. But he would have found plenty of successful public education systems -- in France, Germany, Japan and Canada, to name a few. And he might have devoted his energy and intellect to trying to figure out how to make our public schools run as effectively as schools in those countries and our students achieve at the same high levels. This would have been a challenging task. As everyone knows, you cannot simply transpose a system of governance or a set of standards from one country's school system into another's. But Benno Schmidt is a smart and energetic man, and I'm sure his help would have been invaluable.
As it is, the question remains whether Schmidt's hopping on board the Whittle enterprise means that Chris Whittle has gained credibility or that Benno Schmidt has lost it.