In 25 years as a media entrepreneur, Chris Whittle has never been afraid tochallenge the status quo. And that's made him a virtual magnet for controversy. In the late 1980s he drew fire for Channel One, an ambitious venture that provided schools with free video equipment and news programs--if they showed students commercials in class. Now Whittle's Edison Project is bringing private enterprise to public education in a bold attempt to become the first nationwide chain of for-profit public schools. We spoke to Whittle and curriculum director John Chubb at their New York office and at Edison's Boston Renaissance School.
PT: When people criticize the Edison Project, it's usually because you're trying to run these schools and make a profit. There is an ethic out there that says that...
CHRIS WHITTLE: . . .thou shalt not make money on education.
PT: People see education as sacred. Making money in the process is akin to meddling with our souls.
CW: This view just completely disregards that for-profit activity is all over education already. Let's run through a school. Who built the building? Who provided the textbooks? Who does the food service? Who does the busing? People make money providing these services in every public school in America. Every public school.
I just heard that we had 10 applications for every seat this fall in our kindergarten. Why? Because the word is out that this is a great school. But are the parents who applied sitting there overwrought about the 5 percent [profit] we may make from the school?
JOHN CHUBB: With a little bit of reflection, most people are not troubled by the idea that somebody is going to make money if they provide a service you want. But because it is new, people have questions and suspicions about it.
CW: What counts is whether the children learn, whether they read. Until all children can read, then it is very difficult for anyone to say that we shouldn't try a lot of things. And right now large percentages of children don't read. How can someone defend not trying?
PT: People argue that the profits could otherwise be used to buy more textbooks or to lower taxes.
CW: What they don't recognize is that profit buys something. What did it buy? It bought research and development, which benefits the school. Edison has invested $50 million on research and development. It was thinking about: What makes a great school? If you could start a school from scratch, what would it be? And that's what profit brings to a school. It's that intellectual property that had to be invested in, and in order to get people to invest in it they had to think there was going to be a profit down the road. But that is a very difficult thing to get across to people.
PT: So you basically reinvented the school curriculum?
JC: We researched every element of it. What kind of people are successful principals? Is it a good idea to have eight 45-minute classes a day, or would it be better to have four 90-minute classes? What's the best way to train teachers? To compensate teachers? And then from the organization you switch into curriculum and instruction. What do you want your educational goals to be? What's the most effective means of instruction? How do you feel about reading instruction? Math instruction? What about writing?
Each of those pieces has to be looked at carefully. We spent a fair amount of time and money canvassing people, looking at research. What can we learn from the best [educational] practices? What's the evidence? And then [we put] all that together. What we didn't do was primary cognitive research: How does the brain work? We didn't go there. My feeling is that there is a tremendous amount known and what's needed is [for someone] to put it together. I also should say that we did a lot of research with parents and communities. What do they want? Are they interested in something different?
CW: In a sentence, Edison is bringing four big things to the education sector. One is research and development. Go to any school in America and ask them how much they spend on R&D, and most say they don't have that line in their budget. Not even, for example, the New York City school system, whose budget is around $8 billion a year. It's the equivalent of a large corporation...
PT: A large Fortune 500 company having no R&D. CW: Yeah. And smaller districts don't have the scale to do it. So that's the big thing. And the second thing we're doing is bringing business to education. Education in this country has been essentially a government-provided service for the last century. The third thing is, we're building the first national school system. Education today is localized into 14,000 local school districts, and Edison is cutting across all those districts and asking, What if we had a national school system? And don't take that to mean that we think every school in America should be an Edison school. We're simply saying that there isn't another national provider of education. And the fourth thing we're doing is bringing competition to education, which has largely been organized in a noncompetitive way.
PT: A monopoly.
CW: Yeah. And all of these things are seismic shifts in the way this service has been provided to kids.
PT: You yourself have shifted from publishing to education. How did you become interested in teaching?
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