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This review has been accessed times since November 24, 2005
Whittle, C. (2005). Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education. New York: Riverhead Hardcover.
288 pp.
$24.95 ISBN 1594489025Reviewed by Jim Horn
Monmouth UniversityNovember 24, 2005
If you support the notion that publicly run, publicly controlled, public education is the imperfect, yet essential, public business that may be our best institutional tool for realizing a democratic republic in America, then you are likely to find plenty to disagree with in Chris Whittle’s vision (or is it a nightmare?) for turning schools into companies, companies that are to be paid for with tax dollars. With $400 billion annually at stake, the public schools are, by far, the juiciest prize for a new type of corporate welfare known as the EMO (education management organization). Chris Whittle’s new book, Crash Course. . ., lets us look down the sights as he takes aim at his biggest target yet.
Those, on the other hand, who favor a privatized education solution to all that is wrong, or imagined wrong, with American schools, will likely find Chris Whittle’s Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education a ground-breaking piece of wishful thinking. With the popularity of vouchers now on the same slope as recent presidential poll data, Whittle attempts to sculpt a vision for a hybrid American school, a new alternative to the “public school monopoly” that conservatives have railed against for the past 25 years. In this bravado new world of educational corporate welfare that Whittle projects out to the year 2030, the public school will remain public, in that public dollars pay the bills for personnel, transportation, food service, maintenance, and, of course, the contracting fee to Edison, Inc. or its MacSchool counterparts—yet private, in that education corporations organize, manage, hire principals who hire teachers, consult, assess, make merit pay recommendations based on those assessments, and, of course, get paid with public dollars that, in turn, make a 10% profit for the shareholders for the company. If this doesn’t sound good enough to get you to spend the $25 for this kind of visionary thinking, then add to this emerging educational utopia the need to increase class size, severely reduce the number of teachers, turn students into part-time clerical workers; and I am sure that you will agree that Whittle’s book will be required reading, at least by every reform industry lobbyist on K Street who is sure to get goose bumps at Whittles’ recurring focus on the 400 billion dollars that Americans spend on K-12 education every year.
What qualifies Whittle for such a far-reaching educational vision? For starters, he has a history of entrepreneurial education endeavors. Since the early 90s, he has effectively burned through several hundred million dollars in various failed ventures, including a scheme to offer textbooks with the same colorful Skittles and Snickers ads that became the hallmark of Whittle’s first big educational venture, Channel One. As a result of the Channel One success by a hometown boy with an expanding local payroll, Whittle Communications, in the late 1980s, was able to acquire a prime location in Knoxville for a palatial “publishing campus” downtown. Labeled derisively by locals as Whittle City, it was, nonetheless, resplendent with Italian marble, set in soft florescence, and exuding an Ivy League façade; and all of it ended up on the auction block only months after it was completed.
That venture proved to be Whittle’s first big flameout, forcing the sale of Channel One to cover the bills and leaving Whittle with a 7 million dollar estate in the Hamptons and something known then as the Edison Project, an outfit whose education privatization advisors prominently included Lamar Alexander, another local boy who was making a splash at the time as Bush 1’s Secretary of Education. By 1995 Whittle had turned that idea for a mass-market alternative to public education into Edison Schools, Inc., opening his first four Edison Schools in various locales around the country. By 1999 Whittle was ready to go public with the company, even though Edison posted a net loss of $50 million in the previous year. To make a long story short, by 2002 the stock was in free fall, moving from nearly 38 dollars a share to its low of 15 cents. By the following year, in a sweetheart deal that is even shocking by today’s standards of corporate crony politics, Whittle had found a benefactor in the State Pension Fund of Florida. With the support of Jeb Bush, the pension fund, whose largest constituency, ironically, happens to be public school teachers, not only bought out the failed company but also allowed Whittle to retain control, doubled his salary while offering him new stock options, provided loan extensions to repay debts, and gave more loans to keep the outfit afloat. (One can only guess what the Governor knew, or thought he knew, about the future movement of corporate welfare schools that would justify such an investment.) Part of the answer, or at least part of the gamble, may be found in the futuristic froth that characterizes Whittle’s current contribution to the literature of corporate socialism.
With Whittle’s checkered business record and his penchant for the extravagant risk, one must wonder if the title, Crash Course, might not have been the best title for a book that presents the strategic vision for the next big “reform industry” venture to save education from itself. Unconscious prophesy or just bad judgment, we don’t know, but we do know that Crash Course does not disappoint those who are looking for a rollicking and reckless adventure into the world where the CEOs of the EMOs have plans to offer “integrated suites of intellectual property” for a fee to school systems aspiring to become school companies.
Despite a sizable chunk of text dedicated to disparaging those old-fashioned schools that continue to trap us in our fond memories of them, the school companies that Whittle envisions look very much like steroidal versions of those advocated by the business efficiency zealots from the early 20th Century. The biggest difference I can see, besides being paid for by the taxpayers, is that every student and teacher will be able to instantly track testing errors on fancy laptops, whereas John Franklin Bobbitt and his education efficiency experts had to hand calculate and graph them on paper. Frederick Taylor would be green with envy at such modern day efficiency.
To save money, in fact, and to encourage students to buy-in (quite literally) to the school company program, Whittle proposes that students do school work independently for half the day, thus allowing the company to pay its teachers twice as much while cutting the faculty in half. During one hour of that daily independent learning time, students will be paid to work in various “chores,” from clerical duties to technology jobs for the school company. This idea was apparently floated for the first time in 2002, as reported by Jonathan Stein (2002):
Earlier this month, Chris Whittle picked up a $300,000 expense for an Edison principals and staff getaway at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs -- "five-star luxury at the foot of the Rockies," the hotel boasts. There, behind closed doors that nevertheless permitted a curious fly on the wall, he was reported to have told the gathering that "we could have less adult staff" by having students run "big" parts of school offices and "huge" parts of school technology systems. To evince his business acumen, he added that 600 students working an hour a day would be the equivalent of "75 adults."Whittle explores this idea further in the latter part of Crash Course, in a section that has an imaginary CEO for an international EMO wandering the world, visiting his many branch offices (Rio is called Silicon Beach), checking out his empire, absorbing failed companies, and expending his R&D in ways that can be scaled up to educate for further profit. Chipper and oblivious to the dystopic vision of these new age versions of 1984’s Victory Schools, this CEO comes upon one of his ERD (educational research and development) schools where the students have actually been hired to teach themselves what we must assume that they, otherwise, would not ever be taught. Only a few adults are present to keep order and, we may assume, to pass out checks. Representing a merging of process and product in a head-spinning type of voracious efficiency, one may wonder about the need for future schools at all, since, in this scenario, the students, having been hired to teach themselves, will have already become gainfully employed, thus fulfilling Whittle’s sole purpose for attaining their education to begin with.
By 2030, Whittle assures us that “America can eradicate failing schools” (p. 155). When I came across this comforting claim, I went to the index to see where the discussion of poverty begins in the book. Despite the fact that poverty remains the underlying cause of failing schools, failing homes, failing lives, etc., there is no section that deals with the subject. Perhaps Whittle’s claim should be read more literally, in that the goal by 2030 is to eradicate schools, schools that have been judged as failing as a result of NCLB’s criteria for success that make universal failure a certainty—long before 2030.
Crash Courseis imbued with a futuristic fascination with metaphors of militarism. Whittle uses these analogies repeatedly to frame his vision. In the book we receive clearance to visit a future with PLUs (Principal Leadership Universities) that constitute the West Points in the war against ignorance. We are invited into the education equivalents of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), the SICs (student information centers). These SICs are the huge assessment database centers that “store and protect electronic information on everyone the company [school] serves and employs” (p. 184). SICs will also have an early warning system, much like the ones on commercial airliners that warn the pilot of impending disaster. When a student approaches a crisis point, behaviorally or academically, an alarm goes off to administrators, teachers, and parents on their laptops (everyone has laptops).
The military analogies extend to Whittle’s discussion of the federal role in education as the bid acceptor and proposal funder for the best educational ideas offered by a business community with a never-ending supply of good ones. For Whittle, America’s education constitutes a “national security issue,” even though this sentiment is outright contrary to his elaborate plan for multi-national education corporations that will offer their services to any country willing to pay (he clearly has a fantasy about when China comes calling for his educational solution).
Whittle reminds us that when a government entity like the DoD needs a replacement item for its inventory, such as a new strike fighter plane, it calls for proposals, of course, from the aerospace industry, which are offered up in the form of competitive bids. The same principle, Whittle says, should apply to the government’s replacement of the public schools (after the impossible demands of NCLB make that need apparent to anyone who was not convinced beforehand).
There are several problems with this DoD analogy, but the most glaring one involves who will be allowed to propose and bid on the next “strike fighter” of education. Even with the renowned inefficiency of government as a documented fact, it does not seem to have occurred to Whittle that the federal government would never entertain bids for a new airplane from, let’s say, doughnut makers or funeral directors, regardless of how well these folks make and/or market their goods and services. Even the DoD (when it takes bids) goes to the people who know something about building airplanes, ones that can get off the ground and that can stay in the air, not just ones that look good, are fun to sit in, or make a big noise. Whittle would have Dunkin’ Donuts given equal consideration as Boeing, or let’s say Bill Gates’ thoughts on education heeded as readily as that of Stanford professor, Linda Darling-Hammond—or John Dewey, for that matter.
In as passionate a plea as you will find in this otherwise detached, though creepily-upbeat, piece of corporate literature, Whittle makes the case for, 1) continuing the course set by current charter law legislation in forty states, 2) the re-authorization of NCLB, and, 3) the spread of state take-over laws (as in Philadelphia) that enable corporate welfare outfits like Edison to gain entry to regular public schools or public charter schools. Whittle knows that the impossible demands of NCLB and the draconian sanctions that accompany the eventual assured failure of most public schools, are, indeed, the crucial elements to be protected at all costs:
As consequences are called for, the federal government must not blink. Additionally, continuing strength in this legislation will accelerate the growth of alternative-education providers—who, because of the advantages of scale, are primary engines of improvement—as school districts focus more and more on finding new ways to achieve NCLB’s mandated results (p. 198).If these sanctions are not protected (or even if parents simply said no to their children being tested at the current insanity level), then the reform industry is dead; and we must revert back to the old days when the messy and contentious forces of a democracy-in-the-making made school the institution through which its hopes and fears were played out in making a future that included the hands and minds and voices of its citizens.
In researching for this review, I came across a quote (2002) by one of Whittle’s friends that I cannot get away from:
"Chris has made a million mistakes," says the pal, "but he's doing something very adult. Is that a bad thing?"Yes, it is—it is a very bad thing. If Whittle’s business history can suggest anything about his future, we may count on him quickly scaling up a half-baked, yet well-packaged, company bound for failure, unless another benefactor can be found to bail him out yet again. In such a predictable scenario, Whittle, though personally unscathed, will have left behind another trail of disaster for those who bought the bill of goods along the way, in this case the American public.
I suggest that we pay him off now, before he and his compatriots in the reform industry are given a free hand by the current regime of corporate socialists to destroy a civic treasure that took almost 200 years to build, while charging us handsomely for the demolition in the meantime. My advice: Buy this book, read about the plan, write your own review, share it with your members of Congress, and then distribute it widely—as widely as you can.
References
Stein, J. (2002). Whittle me this. Philadelphia Citypaper.net., October 24-30, 2002. Retrieved September 28, 2005, from http://citypaper.net/articles/2002-10-24/slant.shtml.
Gross, M. (2002). Whittling away debt. New York Daily News, November 9, 2002. Retrieved September 28, 2005, from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/34157p-32335c.html.
About the Reviewer
Jim Horn teaches graduate Foundations of Education and Education for Democracy at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He also maintains a weblog, Schools Matter: http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.
Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman
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