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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Does Bay Area Rep. George Miller support harming Calif. schools? One blogger thinks so

The Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank, claims that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program for schools aims specifically at harming California — and that it does so with the blessing of liberal East Bay Rep. George Miller, an architect of the reviled Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation.

The rest of this post is from Fordham’s Flypaper blog, by Mike Petrilli, who points out that there’s only one absolute requirement for states to apply:


“

States that don’t permit schools to use student achievement data when making teacher tenure or evaluation decisions need not apply.
It’s not apparent why this is more important to the Obama Administration than, say, lifting charter school caps, or embracing merit pay. But two things are clear. First, it pokes the teachers unions straight in the eye. ... Second, it pokes California straight in the eye, as it is the only state that is indisputably disqualified as a result of this provision. ...
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to change California’s laws to bring it into compliance, though California teachers unions aren’t happy about that.
But here’s my question, again: Why did this issue rise to the level of an eligibility requirement? And why pick on California?
I have two theories. (Actually, I have one theory, and a friend of mine has another.) My theory: George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor committee, is having fun yanking California’s chain, and the CTA/NEA’s chain as well. Miller, a liberal from the Bay Area, has a long history of driving his own state’s officials bonkers, especially around teacher issues. He’s also probably still mad at the NEA for making such a stink about merit pay when Miller’s NCLB reauthorization bill was floated back in 2007. ...
There’s no way that the Administration published the Race to the Top application without running it by Miller; I wouldn’t be surprised if his office pushed the Department to be as tough on California over the firewall issue as possible. At the least, he signed off on it. And he doesn’t regret it; he said in a statement to the LA Times: ” “I hope states that don’t presently meet the eligibility will decide to take the steps necessary to meet it. It’s the right policy to take our education system to the next level.”
... Here’s what’s interesting: Most members of Congress try to bring home the pork to their home states and districts. (That’s one issue that’s surfaced around healthcare reform—how to keep Congress away from Medicare reimbursement rate decisions.) But here’s George Miller, proud California citizen, doing what he can to keep the Golden State from winning the Race to the Top. (Or, more fairly, trying to browbeat it into changing its laws in order to qualify.) Someone should ask a political scientist to make sense of that."

Flak hits Jerry Brown over fundraising for his charter school projects

The July 29 San Francisco Chronicle reports:

“Democrat Jerry Brown, who wrote the landmark 1974 state law to curb special interests' power in politics, has raised nearly $10 million in gift contributions to his pet charities from some of the interests - utilities, casino operators and health care organizations - that he oversees as [California] state attorney general, state records show.”

Brown’s “pet charities”? Those would be the Oakland Military Institute (OMI) and Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), two charter schools that he founded (in defiance of Oakland school district administration) amid a flurry of publicity during his terms as Oakland mayor, 1999-2007.

Brown, by the way, is a likely candidate for California governor, a position he previously held from 1975-1983.

The point of the Chronicle’s front-page story is the ethical concern involved in Brown’s requesting donations to a cause from interests over which he has power. In my opinion, since Brown isn’t benefiting personally from those donations, it’s not the worst breach of ethics I’ve ever seen (the Newsweek high school rankings are a greater ethical sin – that story is complicated; click here to read more).

But there’s an interesting story all the same. I heard Brown speak at an event promoting charter schools in December 2001, while plans for OMI and OSA were under way. His attitude, as I interpreted it, was that those stoopid educators who have so much trouble running inner-city schools should get out of the way and let him show them how it’s done.

Well, after the initial publicity about both schools, they largely fell out of the limelight – probably to Brown’s relief, because from the reports that have trickled out, both have struggled badly. (Yes, OSA has pretty good test scores, but it’s a school with an audition selection process, which inherently means it loses the right to crow about the scores – more about that below.)

OSA, for example, has suffered from near-fatal student, teacher and principal turnover.
I have better information on OSA than on OMI, and I know that at least in the case of OSA, Brown has worked his tush off raising money (as we see from the Chronicle story) and remaining otherwise hands-on in running the school. Some of this I know personally because after struggling to find a stable, effective principal, he wooed away Donn Harris, the very popular principal of my own kids’ school, San Francisco School of the Arts, to run OSA. My strong impression is that Brown personally recruited Harris, whose mission includes bringing stability to the school.

In 2007 the Chronicle reported on another income stream Brown created for OSA – an electronic billboard at the Bay Bridge toll plaza that generated controversy mostly over its brightness, which was blamed for impairing drivers’ night vision and also blighting nighttime bay views from as far away as Sausalito. The lighting was eventually dimmed somewhat. The income generated by renting space on the billboard went to OSA.

According to press reports, Brown legitimately channeled money from the mayor’s discretionary fund to the two charter schools, and also had city staff working on various tasks for the two schools. An August 2006 column in the Berkeley Daily Planet charged that Brown himself and city underlings devoted themselves to OSA and OMI while neglecting the Oakland school district:

Voters … believed that [Brown] would follow through on his promise for “dramatic public school improvement in Oakland,” expecting that Mr. Brown would spend considerable time and energy in reforming the public school system.

Instead, Mr. Brown appeared to lose interest in the public school system … focusing instead on trying to get his two charter schools approved. No one knows the amount of staff hours the City Manager’s office put into the approval process, but it was massive.

The diversion of city staff members to Jerry Brown charter school duty did not end with the approval process. Once the OMI was approved and opened, City Manager’s office employee Simon Bryce moved his offices from City Hall to the OMI headquarters at the Oakland Army Base, working on the city payroll but spending much of his time coordinating OMI activities. Imagine if Mr. Brown’s office had put as much effort trying to help OUSD get out of state receivership? The City of Emeryville did, ending up in an innovative—and perfect legal—transfer of money to Emery Unified that allowed the school district to pay off their state loan.

But [Robert Bobb, then Oakland city manager*] and Mr. Bryce were not the only city employees working extensively on Mr. Brown’s private charter school on city time. So was Mr. Brown himself.

On five separate days in July and August of 2005, for example, Mr. Brown’s official schedule shows entries of between three and five hours of something called, simply, “OSA Phoning with Marianne,” all taking place in the middle of the work week. On July 28th and 29th he is listed as working at this OSA phoning business for two straight days, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday, and again from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday. I have no idea who Marianne is or why they needed to take up the bulk of the mayor’s working time, but you are free to make your own guesses. No other single activity took up as much of Mr. Brown’s time during the period of January 2005 through April 2006, the period in which UnderCurrents received copies of the mayor’s schedule.

… Could Mr. Brown have helped make “dramatic public school improvement”—as he promised in 2000’s Measure D—if he had put his full attention to solving Oakland’s school problems? It’s impossible to say. All we know is that while Mr. Brown was putting much of his time into his two charter schools, Oakland’s public schools were going into state receivership, with children sometimes vainly trying to learn amidst continuing chaos.

So what to make of all this? Obviously, Brown rapidly learned that it’s not so easy to run a school better than professional educators after all. (By the way, I’m told that there was disdain for the notion of hiring an experienced educator to lead OSA in its first years; the recruitment of veteran principal Harris signaled a change in that attitude.)

Turning to the governor’s race for a minute, I have to say that the M.O. of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Brown’s rival in the primary, would have been to forget all about both schools as soon as the going got rough, if not before. By contrast, Brown has demonstrated his dogged commitment, even as the schools floundered. It sounds like OSA, at least, would have collapsed without that – not to mention without the extra millions he has raised for it. (Brown was similarly dogged about working to get OSA into its permanent home in the restored Paramount Theater, where it moved a few months ago; he also recently made news for recruiting Sean Penn to do a fundraiser for the school.)

Commitment shows far more character than fickleness. However, the more righteous attitude for Brown to adopt would be one of repentance: He would apologize publicly for the disdain for educators he displayed while founding OSA and OMI – and for turning his back on Oakland’s public schools to support his two charter projects -- and publicly ask forgiveness. (If I were better informed about religion I could invoke Biblical terms here, given Brown’s Jesuit education and former interest in the priesthood.) He would publicly lay bare the challenges he has faced in working to keep those two schools afloat, and would vow to work to help all schools rise above those challenges. He would declare that it costs far more to run a school than our state provides, and would decisively refute those who claim otherwise. Then he’d go back to all those donors and ask them to support all of California’s underfunded schools, with both money and political support – including calling on them to work with him to repeal Prop. 13.

Now that would be the gubernatorial candidate of my dreams. As it is, at least I can say I admire his commitment and determination.

About the achievement scores for Oakland School for the Arts: Schools with selective admissions processes can’t be fairly compared to schools that admit by lottery – and I’m speaking as a parent at a school that has a selective admissions process. Even though the audition process for an arts school doesn’t take academic achievement into account, the fact that it takes a significant effort to get in still weeds out the unmotivated and low-functioning. So there should be an asterisk on achievement reports for OSA and for my kids’ school as well.

*By the way, former Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb, a non-educator, is now in a position as financial manager of the badly troubled Detroit school system. One of his strategies is bringing in private for-profit companies to run some Detroit schools – including Edison Schools, trying to rehabilitate its image after its previous failure as the great hope of privatization. I’ll be blogging more about that soon.

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Budget contrast

So true, and so tragic:

California values prisoners over students

During the budget debate, it became clear to me that something unthinkable has happened in California: Our fiscal meltdown has so distorted our legislative priorities that we are now a state that places a higher priority on prison than on higher education.

Rachel's bird's eye view of the budget

There is so much to say about the ongoing CA budget fiasco. We've been remiss in our coverage. But if you want a nice, short rundown of what's in the works, check out Rachel's More details of the state budget and how it affects SFUSD.

And if that's too much to ask, the bottom line is we've correctly prepared for this year, but next year looks bleak.

Obama to the NAACP - No excuses

Part three of a four segment compilation of Obama's excellent speech to the NAACP. We pick it up where he addresses education. Check it out.



Links to parts 1, 2, 4

CTA to the Terminator: Never Again

Hat tip to the UESF for sending me a link to this video salvo in the CTA's battle to protect school funding.



How can the district possibly manage its business and prepare for the disasters ahead when the state budget process is so thoroughly busted? What a disaster. And the worst lies ahead.

Let's combine Don Fisher's museum, new SOTA site

Don Fisher – Gap founder/mogul, philanthropist and modern art collector – has dropped his plan to create a museum for his world-class art collection in San Francisco’s Presidio, after years of opposition from various segments of the activist community.

Well, I have my areas of disagreement with Fisher, who has (undoubtedly with sincere good intentions) donated lots of money to what I view as education fads. But the man wants to share his collection with the world, and it’s sad to see his critics looking for self-serving ulterior motives. Couldn't every great museum and symphony hall ever created have been shot down on the same basis?

Now a fellow parent has an idea for Fisher: Those who follow San Francisco school issues know that there’s a long-term plan – with lots of money set aside for it – to create a new campus for San Francisco School of the Arts, our district’s acclaimed public arts high school (I have one child there and another who just graduated, Class of ’09). Though various options are sometimes proposed for a new facility in the Civic Center arts district, the longtime predominant plan would renovate a block of SFUSD-owned buildings at 170 Fell/135 Van Ness into the new SOTA facility.

My friend’s suggestion is that Fisher sign on as benefactor and create a facility that incorporates his modern art museum. Two key advantages over the Presidio site would be central location and transit-friendliness. Another is that the site is adjacent to the hipster-friendly Hayes Valley gallery/restaurant scene (which didn’t even exist when that location was first being discussed for SOTA). What’s not to like?

If Fisher decides to go for this idea, I’m ready to get the SOTA community on board. What better way to combine his two passions, arts and education? How about it, Mr. Fisher?


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