After 16 years, endless controversy, and a sea of red ink, Edison Schools is no longer. CEO Terry Stecz, who replaced Edison founder Chris Whittle as chief executive in early 2007, announced yesterday that Edison Schools would henceforth be known as edisonlearning, and that the company intends to become a player in education software, focusing on student tracking systems and other "achievement management solutions." Whittle predicted the company would be managing 1,000 school with a million students by 2010 when he lured Benno Schmidt away from the Yale presidency to help launch Edison in 1992. But Whittle and Schmidt could never make the company profitable and after reaching a financial high water mark in February 2001, when the company's stock was worth nearly $2 billion, things went South in hurry when venture capital dried up with the Dot Com Bust, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of Edison's revenue reporting, the company lost a string of contracts, a teacher union-led attack on for-profit school managers intensified, and the work of running schools for mostly disadvantaged kids in poor neighborhoods proved a lot tougher, and less profitable, than the company had expected. Nor has the company been able to scare up much new business in the No Child Left Behind era, a period where states and schools systems have scrambled to find help in turning around the many failing schools identified by the law.
Edison's competitors haven't fared much better. Of the dozen or so other substantial for-profit school management companies that sprung up in the 1990s, most have disappeared, switched to non-profit status, or are limping along. Only one or two companies are profitable and they haven't expanded as far or as fast as expected.
So Edison's executives and majority owner, a New York-based private equity firm called Liberty Partners, are hoping that rebranding the company will lead potentinal clients in the education world to give the company a fresh look, to put aside Edison's troubled past and the legacy of it flamboyant founder. But changing the name on the door and moving into the educational software business doesn't alter the fact that Edison spent 16 years and nearly half a billion dollars trying to find a way to run high-quality public schools for disadvantaged kids as a viable business--surely one of the most important experiments in American educational history--and failed. More than anything else, the announcement of edisonlearning is a sobering commentary on school reform.
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4 comments:
See story at Education Week: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/01/43edison_web.h27.html?tmp=518632322
they were selling snake oil. there is no one simple answer, no panacea for a very complex problem that is NOT limited to the schools. it is a societal problem. kids who come to school hungry or beat up by absentee parents or are moved from foster home to FH., who have no idea what a father is cannot be expected to learn due to some magic formula.
i dont know about snake oil but there was definatley some shananigans going on administration wise. I must say I knew their demise was forthcoming and what should be expected when you try to privative free public schools and allow individuals without backgrounds in education to run the schools...
an article from Ed Week from last month paints a different picture:
--begin excerpt--
"We are still very much in the school-management and charter-school-management business. But we need to be able to partner with all reform-minded educators," said Joseph Wise, the company's chief education officer and a former superintendent of the Duval County, Fla., school district. "To do that, we have to increase our offerings as well as our delivery system."
Meanwhile, Edison founder and chairman Christopher Whittle and vice chairman Benno C. Schmidt are working on a plan to open a global chain of private schools through a related company, Nations Academy. (See Education Week, Dec. 19, 2007.)
'New Platforms'
Terry Stecz, Edison's chief executive officer, said the company is trying to find ways to create "new platforms" to improve student performance, especially since it serves many low-achieving students. It is trying to use what it has learned in running schools, he said, to become "the preferred partner for large urban systems, states, or cities." Doing that requires the ability to deliver a "continuum of solutions," including a robust array of online options, he said.
In that vein, Edison has been developing a "hybrid" school design model that would enable students to learn both through traditional classroom methods and newer technological means, Mr. Stecz said. For the past three years, Edison has also been marketing its services as a turnaround specialist for districts with, schools in need of restructuring.
The additional lines of service can help the company — which has often been criticized for "taking over" schools — reposition itself as a collaborator with a range of approaches, Mr. Stecz said. "We've learned in almost 20 years there is no one solution," he said. "So it's important to get into a community … and create a portfolio that can address many needs."
Steven Pines, the executive director of the Education Industry Association, a Rockville, Md.-based advocacy group for private-sector education companies, said he sees Edison's move as a "diversification of business strategy that is smart and in tune with market changes."
"The online marketplace is one of the hottest-growing niches in K-12," he said. "To maintain its position as a well-known education brand, Edison is probably well served to step into that virtual space."
Edison also announced that it is launching the EdisonLearning Institute, a research-and-development arm. John E. Chubb, an Edison co-founder and the company's senior executive vice president for new-product development, will be the institute's managing director.
Company aims to partner, not compete with school districts.
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