Private Enterprise, Public Woes in Phila. Schools

Washington Post ^ | 9/17/02 | Michael A. Fletcher

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

Not long after Pennsylvania officials announced last spring that Edison Schools Inc. was their choice to run 20 of this city's worst-performing schools, a representative of the firm came to Gillespie Middle School to sell skeptical teachers on the promise of the nation's largest for-profit public school manager.

Once the Edison model took hold, the representative assured staff members at the 77-year-old North Philadelphia school, there would be new books for the children, fresh paint on the building and new computers for teachers and pupils. The students, he added, would quietly walk the halls with their arms calmly folded behind their backs.

But less than two weeks into the school year, Edison has scaled back many of those promises. And the company's difficulties here are just part of a growing list of problems besetting the New York-based company, which more than any other has helped move private management of public schools from the radical fringe to the mainstream of school reform... CLICK

[coloradan]

I'm shocked! Shocked! to see an article from the Washington comPost blasting privatization of government schools.

[2banana]

Government has run public schools into the ground for the last 50 years and they get on Edison's case for not turning them around in a month...