Miami loss emphasizes Edison failure

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Feb. 26, 2005 San Francisco
PRESS RELEASE
Parents Advocating School Accountability,
www.pasasf.org

Edison Schools loses Miami contract
as for-profit firm slides into irrelevance

Edison Schools, the once-hailed for-profit school management firm now
largely forgotten as a failed experiment, has quietly lost another of its
earliest clients. Florida=92s Miami-Dade County school district in
mid-February severed its contract with Edison to run Henry E.S. Reeves
Elementary School

Reeves was Edison=92s only Florida school, though Edison formed a highly
publicized alliance in 2001 with the Miami-area teachers=92 union, United
Teachers of Dade, to jointly open 10 schools. The much-touted plan withered
and died unrealized after a couple of years. Edison still maintains a
different kind of presence in Florida: The state employees=92 pension fund
owns a large chunk of the company.

The loss of the Miami contract, which Edison apparently did not contest,
brings to 20 the number of school districts nationwide that have severed
ties with Edison. Edison=92s first client =96 Sherman, Texas =96 was the=
 first to
get rid of it, followed by the rest of Edison=92s earliest customers=
 (Boston;
Wichita, Kan.; and Mount Clemens, Mich.).

Edison Schools, founded in 1995 by flamboyant entrepreneur Chris Whittle and
for a time publicly traded on the Nasdaq, promised to improve student
achievement at troubled schools for lower cost than regular public schools,
and make a profit as well. But Edison schools have never been shown to
perform better than other schools, and many school districts complained of
Edison=92s higher costs.

As for profits, Edison has reported only one profitable quarter in its
existence and no longer discloses financial information.

Edison stock traded publicly from 1999 to 2003, soaring to nearly $40 a
share in early 2001 and then plummeting to 14 cents. In November 2003, the
company stock was taken private in a buyout at $1.75 a share. The Florida
state pension fund invested $174 million in the purchase. Media reports
noted that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was a trustee of the board that supervises
pension investments and a supporter of Edison and other school "reforms"
favored by conservatives.

Along with losing Miami, the company is in trouble with other clients around
the country, including its second-largest, Chester-Upland schools in
Pennsylvania. Edison is blamed for many problems in the beleaguered school
district, which is in financial meltdown, and several officials are calling
for non-renewal of Edison=92s contract. New York State=92s Charter Schools
Institute is recommending closure of Edison=92s struggling Charter School of
Arts and Technology in Rochester.

A February 2005 local news report about Chester-Upland sums up other Edison
problems. "Edison has come under fire similarly in many of the other markets
where it runs schools or school districts," Delco Times reporter Josh
Cornfield wrote before the Miami cancellation. "Districts and schools around
the country from Miami to Inkster, Mich., are taking long, hard looks at
whether to renew contracts with the New York-based company."

Only a few years ago, education pundits and the mainstream press showered
Edison with praise. The San Francisco Chronicle in January 2001 described
"thrilled" parents and "soaring" test scores. A March 2001 Salon headline
declared that Edison had "worked miracles." A March 2001 Page 1 New York
Times article about San Francisco=92s effort to sever its Edison contract
emphasized claims of high test scores and portrayed Edison skeptics as
ideologues who, the story said, "failed to offer concrete evidence" to
support their criticism. That article appeared nationwide via wire service
and worldwide in the International Herald-Tribune.

By contrast, four years later the press ignored the severing of Edison=92s
Miami contract, except for a passing mention in the 22nd paragraph of a Feb.
18, 2005, Miami Herald article.

In recent years, Edison has quietly moved away from its mission of
"revolutionizing" public education, and into marketing conventional
supplemental services such as testing, summer school and tutoring. Almost
all of its new business involves providing such services rather than trying
to manage schools.

Edison=92s website now lists a number of schools that it still manages, in
accordance with its original business plan. But the newest additions to the
website list are 13 schools in Charleston and Allendale, S.C., to which
Edison provides consulting services rather than full management.

Edison employs a longtime deception on its website, claiming to manage far
more schools than it actually lists. "Edison Schools currently operates 157
public schools," the website stated in February 2005. A count of the listed
schools shows 111 =96 and that counts the 13 South Carolina schools that
Edison consults for but does not operate. (The count also includes the Miami
school from which Edison was just removed.)

Edison once attracted ideological support from backers of privatization and
school vouchers, and from such powerful conservative bastions as the Wall
Street Journal editorial board and the Hoover Institution. But its name is
no longer mentioned when "school reform" supporters propose solutions for
public education.

###

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