Time has revealed that the emperor has no clothes.
Recent months have been disastrous for Education Alternatives, Inc. (EAI). In November, Baltimore pulled the plug on the for-profit company's contract to manage 11 Baltimore schools -- eighteen months before the contract was due to expire. Last week, Hartford, which had hired EAI to run its entire school system in October 1994, said good-bye after months of bickering between the two parties about how much EAI would be paid. And all this came on top of EAI's failure at South Pointe Elementary School in Dade County, Florida, last summer. Despite the outside money EAI had pulled in -- and its claims of extraordinary success -- an independent study found that South Pointe students achieved no better than similar students in other district schools. So Dade Country declined to renew EAI' s contract. And EAI, which had hyped itself to superintendents and school boards all over the country, claiming it could quickly and dramatically improve student achievement with the same per-pupil expenditure, was left without a single contract -- and with egg all over its face.
There is no reason to be surprised. Many people greeted EAI as the idea of the future in school reform. Indeed, in 1992, when the ink was hardly dry on EAI's contract with Baltimore, then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander gave the company a "Breaking-the Mold" award for "successful educational innovation." But EAI had no qualifications. It had no experience in running urban schools; it had no curriculum and no blueprint for raising standards and achievement for Baltimore's underachieving students, or students anywhere else, for that matter.
If I announced I was about to mass-produce an automobile that would outperform all the cars currently on the market, people would greet my claims with skepticism. They'd ask, Where's your factory? Who's backing you? What revolution in design will make this car possible? But nobody asked EAI any tough questions. The company got a free ride because it uttered some magic words: It would institute a program that was "bold" and "innovative." Because it had "management expertise," it would know how to slash bureaucracy and waste. In doing so it would find enough money to improve the schools and make money for its stockholders.
Time has revealed that the emperor has no clothes. An independent study of Baltimore schools last year found little difference between EAI schools and the rest: Student achievement has not improved -- in fact, reading scores are down; technology is not being more effectively used; parents are not more involved. And EAI did not run its schools with the same per-pupil allowance given to other schools in the system: The only significant difference between EAI and Baltimore's other schools was that EAI got an extra $18 million.
EAI has been able to keep afloat partly because the media have helped to give it an aura of credibility. There were exceptions. For example, Joe Rigert of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune did a 1994 series on EAI in which he tested the company's claims against its performance. But in many stories, EAI' s claims were accepted at face value and presented as fact -- even after it was obvious that they were questionable, if not outright lies. The bias was often visible right up front --- in the headlines:
• "Bold Stroke for Education: Baltimore Schools Open to a Bold, New Experiment" (Washington Post, September 2, 1992). How would readers be likely to respond to a story about EAI coming to Baltimore after reading these headlines?
• "Why Smith Decided to Call in the Cavalry: Baltimore Schools Convinced D.C. Superintendent There Is a Way Around Bureaucracy" (Washington Post, December 14, 1993). You haven't heard of EAI before? This makes clear that they are a bunch of heroic rescuers.
• And how about this headline from the Hartford Advocate (June 23, 1994) for letting readers know well in advance who they should be rooting for: "Will the Pols Blow School Reform?" (The story continues, "The question now is whether Hartford's warring pols will squander the most promising opportunity to reform the schools in years?")
Lots of media coverage insisted that the union had opposed EAI from the start. This approach injected an element of drama into the stories -- if EAI is having trouble, it must be because of an adversarial relationship with the union rather than its own incompetence. The fact is, EAI won its first public school contract at South Pointe with the support of the union. And though Baltimore was a different proposition from South Pointe, we supported EAI in Baltimore, as well -- until it became clear that they were behaving more like authoritarian bosses out of Charles Dickens than modern employers in the knowledge industry. What about Hartford? By that time, there was plenty of reason to oppose EAI, and we did. Nevertheless, they won a contract to manage the entire system. They lost it because they antagonized the very people on whom their success depended; I call that poor management.
Is EAI finished? Not unless people have decided that they need to deal with a business that manages schools the way they deal with any other business. And not unless the press has decided to sop hyping EAI' s performance and start looking at it. Otherwise, EAI can go on courting school boards. And school boards, which are political creatures, are likely to be impressed by talk of cutting bureaucracy and squeezing out waste and fat, even though EAI has done nothing of the kind. (As I write this, the school board in Wappingers Falls, New York, is considering hiring EAI.)
The other day, a reporter asked me whether EAI' s problems will keep other companies from entering the school management field. The answer depends on whose "problems" you are talking about. EAI' s stockholders might not be interested in buying stock in another school management firm. The school systems that wasted time and money pursuing an educational dead end might think twice before hiring another EAI. But the problems undoubtedly look different if you are a member of EAI's top brass. Some of them, like founder and chairman of the board John Golle, are not losers. They knew when to sell their stock and when to hold on. So the school systems that believed EAI' s plausible lies are out time and money -- and the youngsters in their schools have lost time they could ill-afford. But the people who knew how to play the system? They have done very nicely, thank you.