Edison Schools: It's baaaaack, and bringing with it innovations like child labor

Detroit’s public school system is hiring a retooled version of Edison Schools, a flopped school-reform fad of a few years ago, in a desperate effort to make over the floundering city’s schools.

In a local Bay Area angle, Detroit has brought in Robert Bobb, former city manager of Oakland and a non-educator, to be the school district’s financial manager. My understanding is that Bobb was respected in Oakland, but his business decision to hire Edison requires an unnatural willingness to turn a blind eye to past performance. I’m proposing a corporate motto for Edison: “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Edison is one of four firms the district is hiring; the Detroit Free Press (showing the press elsewhere how it’s done) has done its homework, finding a spotty history.


Edison, a New York-based for-profit firm, was the great shining hope of advocates of unleashing market forces on public education back around 2001. School districts around the country hired Edison to take over schools, which the company promised to turn into high achievers at no extra cost, while also making a profit for its shareholders.

Edison was a big story in San Francisco in 2001, after the Board of Ed started looking into severing a contract initiated by former Superintendent Bill Rojas that had brought Edison in to run one SFUSD school. Edison, somewhat inexplicably, decided to respond to SFUSD’s move by working up a media frenzy (the willingness of the international – yes, literally international – press to make a major news story out of an arcane school policy issue, at Edison’s behest, baffles me to this day).

Then Edison quietly fizzled as its clients, one after another, dropped the company, and retreated from the limelight, still running a few schools here and there.

But a few years later, Edison was planning its comeback. In October 2007 I blogged here about a leaked plan for the E2 project, a do-over for the company. Now, renamed Edison Learning, the firm is quietly — in contrast to its past grandiose publicity-seeking ways — trying to tiptoe into new client districts.

Some five years ago, as an advocate critical of Edison, I co-wrote a summary of Edison’s history:

Controversial, for-profit Edison Schools, once hailed as the salvation of public education, has fallen from glory as what seemed like visionary ideas turned out to be just a sales pitch. In its heyday, Edison claimed that it could run public schools for less money than school districts could. The company dropped that claim as dismayed clients complained about its extra costs.

Edison's boasts that it could improve student achievement while making a profit fell just as flat.

Edison's student achievement has been mixed at best, and its claims about academic improvement never held up to scrutiny. A July 2002 New York Times analysis of Edison's claims found that the troubled Cleveland, Ohio, school system achieved higher gains than Edison's schools when analyzed with the methodology Edison applied to its own schools' achievement.

The notion of making a profit collapsed too. Edison Schools lost millions of dollars every year, showing a profit in just one quarter of the 10 years it made its finances public.

Edison's stock was publicly traded on the NASDAQ for four years. After reaching a high of close to $40 per share in early 2001, the share value tumbled to a low of 14 cents. In November 2003, the company was taken private in a buyout which paid only $1.75 per share. It was shortly after the buyout that Edison posted its lone profitable quarter, and then immediately ceased providing any public disclosure of its finances. The company has never indicated that it was able to maintain profitability for more than the one quarter.

After losing many contracts — along with its media luster — Edison quietly began moving away from its original mission of "revolutionizing" public education, and into marketing conventional supplemental services such as testing, summer school and tutoring. Almost all of its new business involves providing such services rather than trying to manage schools.

Edison attracted ideological support from backers of privatization and school vouchers, and from such powerful conservative bastions as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Hoover Institution. But its name is no longer mentioned when "school reform" supporters talk about solutions for public education.

It remains to be seen how Edison fares this time around. I looked back at my five-part blog item on the E2 design and realized I’d forgotten how entertaining it was, with its plans for saving money by using child labor rather than hired paraprofessionals and leaving the students in minimally supervised “independent learning” for as much as half the day. Unfortunately, this may not be so amusing when inflicted on Detroit’s badly troubled schools.

I really liked the part in the E2 document on avoiding grandiose promises next time around, too:

.. the marketing campaign ... must also be exceedingly careful not to contain any implicit promises that we might not meet.

... we must be vigilant at all times about the promises, both implicit and explicit, that we make to all parties and about our ability, realistically, to execute consistently on these promises. Our credo in the E2 group must be to under-promise and over-deliver. We have learned how our enthusiastic talk is taken literally by customers and stakeholders and interpreted as a commitment. Our constant caution to make commitments wil be greatly admired by stakeholders — far more so than audacious claims and promises. ...restoration of trust with the opinion leaders in the school reform movement is our goal. That's why we have to be so very careful about what we commit to and the claims we advance. Anything that seems reckless, disingenuous, or arrogant undermines all the hard work we are and will continue to do to build trust.

For anyone following this closely enough, and in case anyone in Detroit does care to do this much homework, here are my posts on this blog on the E2 scheme:

A whole new Edison Schools: the E2 project

The new Edison strategy and child labor

Don’t promise miracles this time


The new Edison: How they’d teach

Oh jeez, I’d forgotten this great part:

"We currently have many teachers who are very low skilled themselves. … We would stake out a courageous and much-admired position if we called a stop to the obvious fallacy that uneducated adults can develop high-achieving students."

Cutting-edge innovation: Don't hire incompetent teachers.

Government of Edison, by Edison and for Edison

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