Edison-Go-Round

EdisonLearning, the school management company founded by Chris Whittle in the early 1990s, has fired it CEO, Terry Stecz, two years after he replaced Whittle. In a memo to Edison staffers, Michael Stakias, the president of Liberty Partners, a New York-based private equity firm that is Edison’s majority owner, announced that Jeff Wahl, Edison’s chief operating officer since 2007, would replace Stecz immediately. Before joining Edison, Wahl spent 15 years in various management roles at General Electric. Maybe Liberty's hoping he's got the right background to illuminate a path to profitability at a company named for the inventor of the lightbulb.

Stecz apparently didn't. He was working in management at Pharmacia, the $14-billion heathcare company with products that included Celebrex and Nicorette, when Liberty recruited him to be Edison’s COO in 2004. He became Edison’s CEO when Liberty pushed Whittle out of the company’s management in early 2007. Stecz struggled, with little apparent success, to shake off Edison troubled legacy as a controversial, unprofitable school management company, going so far as to change the company’s name earlier this year from Edison Schools, Inc, to EdisonLearning and announce a move into on-line education.

Whittle hasn’t fared much better that his successor. The high-living entrepreneur set out to launch an international network of high-end for-profit private schools when he left Edison in early 2007, only to depart his new company, Nations Academy, last summer in the wake of a falling out with his major investor, Sunny Varkey of Dubai.

Whittle is reportedly planning a new for-profit private school business. And he’s trying to raise some cash. He’s put up for sale for $27 million a guest house and a third of the property on his 11 acre estate on Georgia Pond in the Hamptons. Six years ago, when Edison’s stock crashed and the company nearly went under, Whittle sought to sell the entire estate, where the neighbors include Steven Spielberg and Martha Stewart, for $45 million, before taking the property off the market when Liberty bought Edison.