When Education Alternatives, lnc.(EAl)--the private for-profit company that says it can do a better job of running public schools than the current management and make money on the deal--began to market this claim five years ago, there was no way to evaluate it. The company itself was an unknown start-up and there weren't any others doing what it proposed to do.
The promises sounded good: EAI could do more for less. They had an educational program that would raise student achievement levels "beginning immediately." They would be more businesslike about money, so schools could get higher-quality results for what they were already spending, and could even save money through more efficient management. The company now has a track record. Have any of its promises been fulfilled?
In Miami, where EAI has been providing services at one public elementary school, the school board has decided not to renew the contract. In the four years that South Pointe Elementary School students were taught by teachers hand-picked and trained by EAI to use its computer-oriented instructional program, "the Tesseract Way," they did no better than comparable kids in other Miami schools. The test scores looked typical--even though EAI and the school district each had poured in extra resources and effort to make South Pointe an academic showcase.
In Baltimore, where EAI is running nine public schools, the company's performance has become a can of worms for Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Instead of doing more for less, a June 5-7 special report in The Baltimore Sun reveals, in the first three years of its five-year contract the company got $18 million more to manage its nine schools than the district would otherwise have spent. But the "measurable" student gains EAI promised didn't materialize despite the additional resources: Test scores at the EAI schools have dropped, while scores for kids in all other city schools have steadily risen.
Not that EAI didn't try to get its scores to rise. Early on, the company issued a press release announcing astonishing test score gains at its schools. Shortly thereafter, it also issued stock. After a newspaper investigation, however, EAI acknowledged that the claims were wildly off but chalked them up to a clerical error. The same kind of thing happened again last year--higher scores followed by a retraction. Uneasy city leaders are now demandinq to see financial records that EAI claims are private. And the mayor has warned that if new test scores and an outside evaluation by University of Maryland researchers turn out to be negative, he may pull the plug on EAI.
In Hartford, where city officials last fall awarded EAI a contract to manage all 32 of their public schools, the deal was that the company would get to keep half of any money it could "save"--which means cut-- out of the district's budget. EAI does not earn anything on the basis of how well Hartford's children learn. So it should be no surprise to anyone that the company's first budget plan called for enormous cuts in expenditures, to be achieved mainly by eliminating 300 of the district's approximately 1,800 teaching positions. That's the last thing poor children need.
And it turns out that while EAI officials were figuring out how to cut the district's budget to the bone, they were also running up more than a million dollars in expenses charged to Hartford taxpayers--including first-class travel, expensive meals, luxury accommodations, and public relations activities ... Every time the press called for comment or information about its program, for example, EAI turned on the publicity meter and billed the schools for the tab.
These and other shocking revelations prompted a citywide wave of outrage and embarrassment that forced even the EAI majority on the school board to back away from the firm's harsh budget. But EAI officials have emerged from the turmoil with a new deal: They will assume responsibility for managing just five schools next year, even though last year they rode into Hartford proclaiming that they had the expertise to run the whole system. They have demonstrated only that they know how to live high off the hog while taking a meat axe to a struggling urban education system.
EAI continues to go around the country hawking the idea that its business skill and education knowledge will put schools on a fast track to improved student achievement and better management of limited resources. The reality is, the company hasn't produced. Instead of doing more for less, they've done less for more. Does that stop them from selling their shoddy product? No. But they've adapted their pitch to current circumstances. EAI's new line on test scores, according to a June 14 article in The Washington Post, is that "they are not the only, or even the best, measure of the progress students are making."
In other words, EAI will manage your schools, but don't expect the kids to learn to read, write, and count.