Education and the Commercial Mindset

Samuel E. Abrams

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674986848, 9780674049178
• eBook ISBN: 9780674545809
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Economic Theory

America's commitment to public schooling once seemed unshakable. But today the movement to privatize K–12 education is stronger than ever. Samuel E. Abrams examines the rise of market forces in public education and reveals how a commercial mindset has taken over.


"[An] outstanding book."
—Carol Burris, Washington Post

"Given the near-complete absence of public information and debate about the stealth effort to privatize public schools, this is the right time for the appearance of [this book]. Samuel E. Abrams, a veteran teacher and administrator, has written an elegant analysis of the workings of market forces in education."
—Diane Ravitch, New York Review of Books

"Education and the Commercial Mindset provides the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of the school privatization movement to date. Students of American education will learn a great deal from it."
—Leo Casey, Dissent

1

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE

If schools need fundamental change, not just tinkering, then an entirely new, profit-based alternative such as the Edison Project offers the best hope, perhaps the only hope, for providing new models of education.

Benno Schmidt, President and CEO, Edison Project, “Educational Innovation for Profit,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1992

■ IN 1990, Vanity Fair ran a long story about Chris Whittle, his burgeoning media empire based in Knoxville, Tennessee, called Whittle Communications, and the launch of Channel One TV, the company’s daily twelve-minute cable news program with two minutes of commercials beamed to classrooms in middle and high schools across the country. On the first page of the article, Whittle is pictured at the kitchen table in his apartment in New York’s fabled Dakota with two books and a pile of papers before him. One of the books is a paperback edition of Myron Lieberman’s Privatization and Educational Choice, endorsing, as noted in the Prologue, for-profit management of schools.¹

When asked in an interview fifteen years later about the influence of Lieberman on his conception of the Edison Project, as his company was initially titled, Whittle said Lieberman’s thinking was significant and added: “Right after the announcement [of the Edison Project], Myron was a big supporter of our separate system of private schools. But he would probably say we made a mistake in running public schools without full managerial freedom. That may have been too much of a compromise for him.”²

Though the Edison Project—which would be renamed Edison Schools in 1999 and EdisonLearning in 2008—evolved into a subcontractor working with public school districts without such autonomy, it was conceived as something quite different. In unveiling the Edison Project at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on May 16, 1991, Whittle described an enterprise that appeared to comport with the recommendations of Lieberman as well as Milton Friedman: an independent for-profit chain of schools that would break the mold of traditional education and outperform public schools across the country. Whittle said tuition would be just under the per-pupil expenditure of neighboring public schools. To contain costs, the Edison Project, Whittle said, would “harness student power” by putting students to work as tutors, office aides, and cafeteria workers.³

To be wired with the latest technology and open eight hours a day and eleven months a year, Whittle’s schools were slated to serve elementary, middle, and high school students as well as children as young as one in day-care programs.⁴ With this model, Whittle forecasted dramatic growth: 200 schools with 150,000 students by 1996 and 1,000 schools with 2 million students by 2010.⁵ Whittle said he would need $2.5 billion to $3 billion to open the first 200 schools and would raise the money from private investors.⁶

To justify such bold expectations, Whittle built on an argument made by Friedman in 1975 for “highly capitalized chain schools, like supermarkets.”⁷ Whittle would claim repeatedly that much as locally owned restaurants, hardware stores, clothiers, groceries, and banks had been replaced by national brands like McDonald’s, the Home Depot, Gap, Safeway, and Bank of America, schools, too, could and should be run by major corporations.⁸ “In each case,” Whittle contended, “customers decided to go to these new establishments because they liked what was offered there. Such a trade has not been made in schools, though, because no options have been offered there.”⁹

To Whittle, the community involvement in local affairs that Alexis de Tocqueville and many social analysts since had hailed as basic to the vitality of American society served an antiquated purpose.¹⁰ And yet the concept of chain schools represented a brazen challenge to a fundamental aspect of everyday American life. The concept of an outside company running even one school represented such a challenge, as evidenced by the aforementioned pushback from community leaders in Gary, Indiana, to Behavioral Research Labs in the early 1970s.¹¹ Whittle was nevertheless certain his idea would be embraced in view of his dismay at the quality of leadership, instruction, and facilities he observed in visiting schools across the country in selling Channel One.¹²

Naming his company after the legendary inventor Thomas Alva Edison, Whittle maintained that just as Edison did not fiddle with candles to create the lightbulb but rather devised an utterly different approach to achieve a better and more cost-effective form of lighting, American educators had to break with past practices to develop a new way to teach children.¹³ This new way, the implication was clear, would be as superior to current methods as a lightbulb to a candle.¹⁴ “These won’t look like schools you know,” Whittle said at the company’s inaugural news conference.¹⁵

What Whittle left out in introducing the Edison Project was vouchers. Vouchers were basic to the recommendations of Friedman and Lieberman. Whittle’s case about options for consumers between local and national brands, the scope of his ambitions, the national stage on which he announced his plans, and the estimated price of tuition falling below the per-pupil expenditure of neighboring public schools all suggested that the Edison Project was never intended to be an independent chain of schools—or certainly not for long.¹⁶ The Edison Project, as Whittle depicted it, made sense only as an expensive gambit. If Whittle got the infrastructure in place early and if vouchers won political approval, the Edison Project stood to be the front-runner in a booming market.

Whittle had good reason to believe vouchers would soon become a reality. George H. W. Bush was in the White House. His secretary of education, Whittle’s fellow Tennessean Lamar Alexander, was an ardent advocate of vouchers. And Whittle knew Alexander well. Alexander was both a former stakeholder in Whittle Communications and a member of Channel One’s advisory board.¹⁷

■

At base, Whittle’s new way called for imposing the rigor of business—its timelines, quality standards, costing methods, and accountability measures—on education. Whittle, for instance, routinely argued that if Federal Express can tell customers exactly when a package shipped and where it was in transit, schools must be able to pinpoint for parents their children’s levels of proficiency in reading and math throughout the year; this argument later appeared in a series of full-page advertorials for the company in Education Week.¹⁸ Exhibiting no doubts about whether learning could or should be monitored in such a precise manner, Whittle conveyed conviction that schooling differed little from package delivery or any commercial enterprise. “The biggest contribution business can make to education,” he said, “is to make education a business.”¹⁹

Whittle was far from alone in calling for a corporate makeover of American education. Others long before Whittle and concurrently saw schools as being in desperate need of business solutions. As early as 1912, the education scholar and administrator James Phinney Munroe employed the language of scientific management made popular by the industrial efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor in calling for greater accountability. In opening his book New Demands in Education, Munroe wrote: “The fundamental demand in education, as in everything else, is for efficiency—physical efficiency, mental efficiency, moral efficiency.” Munroe continued: “The potential economic worth of each school pupil, to say nothing of his moral value as a householder and as a citizen, is enormous, provided he be so educated, by his family, by his environment, and by his schools, as to become an efficient member of society.”²⁰

While Munroe prescribed a genuinely progressive curriculum, with as much emphasis on the arts and athletics as on academics,²¹ and while he specified that the authority of school boards be limited to “matters non-educational,”²² his tone was managerial. “We need ‘educational engineers’ to study the huge business of preparing youth for life,” he contended, “to find out where it is good, where it is wasteful, where it is out of touch with modern requirements, where and why its output fails; and to make report in such form and with such weight of evidence that the most conventional teacher and the most indifferent citizen must pay heed.”²³

In this same spirit, one month before Whittle rolled out the Edison Project, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the formation of the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) as a central component of his America 2000 education strategy and announced Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill as the organization’s chairman. Defining the NASDC as “a private-sector research and development fund of at least $150 million to generate innovation in education,” Bush pledged to follow up on its recommendations by urging Congress to commit “$1 million in start-up funds for each of … 535 New American schools—at least one in every congressional district—and have them up and running by 1996.”²⁴

O’Neill was soon after replaced by Thomas Kean, president of Drew University and former Republican governor of New Jersey. Kean’s fifteen fellow board members comprised some of most powerful people in American business, including Louis Gerstner, chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco; Frank Shrontz, chairman of Boeing; Lee Raymond, president of Exxon; James R. Jones, chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange; John Ong, chairman of BF Goodrich; and Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the National Football League. Their mission was to lead the way in breaking the mold of conventional schooling.²⁵ And their language was no less bold or ambitious than Whittle’s.

“The R&D teams,” stated the NASDC declaration of purpose, “… can be expected to set aside all traditional assumptions about schooling and all the constraints that conventional schools work under.… Time, space, staffing and other resources in these new schools may be used in ways yet to be imagined. Some schools may make extensive use of computers, distance learning, interactive video-discs and other modern tools. Some may radically alter the customary modes of teaching and learning and redesign the human relationships and organizational structures of the school. Whatever their approach, all New American Schools will be expected to produce extraordinary gains in student learning.”²⁶

This ambition to realize significant improvement in student achievement, echoed by Whittle in his vision for the Edison Project, drew, in turn, on the widespread sentiment that America’s schools were in decline and accordingly posed a grave threat to national prosperity. No document captured this sense of crisis more than the 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Issued by President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE), the report alleged, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” The authors of the report—an array of educators, researchers, and public officials ranging from school principals and university presidents to a former governor of Minnesota—contended that Americans could take pride in their schools of the past, but “a rising tide of mediocrity” was overtaking today’s schools.²⁷

As specific evidence, the NCEE authors made the following claims: “The College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points. College Board achievement tests also reveal consistent declines in recent years in such subjects as physics and English. Both the number and proportion of students demonstrating superior achievement on the SATs (i.e., those with scores of 650 or higher) have also dramatically declined.”²⁸

In its most ominous words, the report affirmed, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1. Fundamental Change
• 2. Market Discipline
• 3. On the Wire
• 4. Reprise
• 5. The Governor’s Proposal
• 6. Waterloo
• 7. Redefinition
• 8. Market Failure
• 9. The Fourth Way
• 10. Limits
• 11. A Distant Mirror
• 12. Across the Gulf
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index