In 1991, Christopher Whittle announced a revolution: His new Edison Project would create a national chain of innovative for-profit schools that would turn around American education. Whittle had already caused a sensation with his Channel One, which offers TV sets and satellite dishes to schools in return for a guarantee that students will watch a daily 12-minute program with 2 minutes of commercials, so the Edison Project was followed with great interest. But a few weeks ago, the revolution stalled as Whittle announced that the project would now concentrate on managing existing schools and would open only a few new ones. What happened?
According to Whittle's original timetable for the Edison Project, 200 "campuses" serving 150,000 students were to open by 1996, and by 2010, 2 million students would be attending Edison schools. The Edison Project schools would be important, Whittle said, not just because of the number of kids attending them but also because of the influence these schools would have on U.S. education.
Whittle gave lip service to the idea that his schools would be good medicine--especially for public schools. Since Edison schools would offer fresh ideas, existing schools would be able to learn from them (and perhaps purchase their teaching programs, hardware, software, consulting services, etc.). So while he was making money, Whittle would be helping schools that were already out there.
But Whittle's real message seemed to be that there was no point in thinking of fixing public education; it would have to be replaced with something entirely different. He often compared the difference between our current schools and the ones he would invent to the difference between a candle and Thomas Edison's incandescent light. And, as he said, there is no way to make a light bulb out of a candle:
We need a complete redesign of the way we teach our children. This means we cannot begin with the system we now have. When Edison invented electric illumination, he didn't tinker with candles to make them burn better. Instead he created something brilliantly new: the light bulb.
Whittle also liked to compare our current education system to the disastrous command economies of Eastern Europe. When he first announced the Edison Project, Eastern Europe had just gotten rid of Communism, and the Berlin Wall had just come down. What had made these miracles possible? Whittle's answer was "West Berlin"--these changes would never have taken place if West Berlin hadn't been there. And he said of the Edison Project, "We will build West Berlin." In other words, the U.S. education system, like the Communist system, was so bad the only way to deal with it was to destroy it and build a new one--with the West Berlin of the Edison schools as the shining example. But Whittle and Benno Schmidt, the former president of Yale University whom Whittle brought on to be president of the Edison Project, have run into financial trouble. They have not been able to raise the $2.5 billion needed for the first 100 schools. Moreover, it turns out that they made a disastrous miscalculation about how much money it would take, not just to run the new schools but also to build them or rent space for them. So the Edison Project's mission has been totally rewritten. Instead of creating a revolutionary new system, it will concentrate, as Whittle recently announced, on managing existing schools.
This ideological about-face raises some serious questions about Whittle's credibility. Whittle said that the entire education system had to be dismantled and built again according to a new model. But now, instead of creating West Berlin, he's saying, "If you want to hire us, we can run the old system. We can give you a new, improved version of Communism; we don't need West Berlin." And instead of insisting that only inventing the light bulb will be good enough, he is saying he can make candles that will do just fine.
What is it Whittle now sees that makes him claim he can salvage an education system that he claimed, a short time ago, was irredeemable? Was all he said just adtalk? And is that what it is now?
The idea Chris Whittle was selling--and that he has now given up--is one he shares with a number of critics of public education. They believe that a public system is bound to be crippled by bureaucracy and plagued by poor student achievement, and the solution is to replace public education with a private system. But among other industrialized countries all over the world--France and Germany and Japan and Australia--we find no example of a country that has entrusted the education of its children to a private system. Instead, they all have fine public systems. There is no reason why we should not have one too.