Edison's epic collapse

EDISON SCHOOLS SET out a decade ago to privatize public education in America, and unfortunately a lot of educators – and financiers – bought into the plan. Now, as Tali Woodward reports on page 17, the whole operation, involving 133 schools, is nearing collapse. Edison's stock has fallen 93 percent in the past few months, and the company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

And thousands of kids, including 450 in San Francisco, may wind up suffering as a result.

It's a spectacular failure of a spectacularly bad program, rivaling in importance (if not in scope) California's experiment with energy deregulation. And it carries a powerful lesson in the perils of privatization for public officials at every level of government.

Most of the battles over Edison have centered on educational policy and the effectiveness of the Edison model. Edison foes argued that it wasn't possible to provide better classroom teaching for the same money every other school got – and make a profit at the same time. Teachers argued that Edison's cookie-cutter curriculum wouldn't work in diverse school districts among students with different needs. And in almost every instance, those criticisms turned out to be right: test scores at Edison school have been far below promises and expectations, and teachers have fled the privatized classrooms in droves (see "Edison Exodus," 6/19/00).

But there was another problem, one that school districts all over the country failed to anticipate when they signed deals with Edison: the company simply doesn't have a viable business plan. Now those communities – including San Francisco – are stuck with a tricky problem: What happens when the private vendor that's teaching your kids suddenly goes bankrupt? Do the creditors show up and seize the new computers and nice carpeting in the Edison schools? Do the public school districts have to come in – perhaps in the middle of a school year – and take over a school that uses a very different syllabus but suddenly can't pay its staff? How will that affect the students?

The answer: nobody knows.