The story of the Edison Schools is a gripping tale of money, kids, and greed. What began in the 1980s as an enterprise to transform public schools quickly became a troubled business battling falling test scores and dismal stock prices. How did the most ambitious for-profit education company in U.S. history lose respect, money, and credibility in such a short time? Revealing how American McEducation went from glory to crisis, The Edison Schools tracks entrepreneur Christopher Whittle's plan to introduce a standardized nationwide curriculum and cut administrative waste. Education specialist Kenneth J. Saltman finds that the critics' predictions came true in Edison schools across the country: Experienced teachers left in droves, students were virtually given answers to standardized tests to drive up scores, and difficult students were "counselored" out.

The story of the Edison Schools is a gripping tale of money, kids, and greed. What began in the 1980s as an enterprise to transform public schools quickly became a troubled business battling falling test scores and dismal stock prices. How did the most ambitious for-profit education company in U.S. history lose respect, money, and credibility in such a short time? Revealing how American McEducation went from glory to crisis, The Edison Schools tracks entrepreneur Christopher Whittle's plan to introduce a standardized nationwide curriculum and cut administrative waste. Education specialist Kenneth J. Saltman finds that the critics' predictions came true in Edison schools across the country: Experienced teachers left in droves, students were virtually given answers to standardized tests to drive up scores, and difficult students were "counselored" out.

In 2000, Edison Schools, the nation's largest education management organization, asked RAND to analyze its achievement outcomes and design implementation. RAND evaluated Edison's strategies for promoting student achievement in its schools, how it implemented those strategies, how its management affected student achievement, and what factors explained differences in achievement trends among its schools.

With the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 andwidespread charter school legislation, there is increasing interest ineducational management organizations (EMOs) to provide innovative, alternativeforms of governance and management of public schools, both contract andcharter. The largest EMO is Edison Schools, Inc., which operates 103 schools in18 states and the District of Columbia. This report was commissioned by Edison Schools to evaluate the schools itmanages. The analysisexamines Edison's strategies for improving schools,implementation in a sample of its schools, and achievement trends attained byits students. Edison has a two-part strategy: (1) provide resources to supporta coherent and comprehensive school design, and (2) implement accountabilitysystems to ensure resources for the design are in place and used asintended. Evaluation was based on interviews, Edison-provided documents, visits to 23Edison schools, and school-level test scores in reading and mathematics. Thefirst set of achievement analyses sought to estimate the effect of Edisonmanagement on reading and mathematics by examining longitudinal trends inaverage student proficiency. The second set used achievement data and casestudy data to identify factors that could explain differences in achievementamong Edison schools. Found that in case study schools the best-functioning Edison schools (thosewith strong instructional leadership, motivated teachers, effective use ofdata, implementation of Edison curricula, and high levels of professionalcollaboration) demonstrate the promise of the Edison ideal. However, it wasalso found that there was considerable variation in the extent to which theideal was realized. This is likely due to length of operation, instructionalleadership, and local constraints. When considering whether schools were conversion or charter schools, andlength of operation, and considering the incompleteness of information, theevaluation found that, despite first-year achievement decline in conversionschools, on average Edison schools do not exceed the gains of matchedcomparison schools, but Edison results do improve in years four and five. It isuncertain, then, whether achievement over four to five years is comparable orsuperior to matched schools. The variation in individual Edison schools'achievement is extensive: some having strong performance, and others fallingbehind comparison schools.Some evidence suggests Edison schools operatingwith fewer local constraints may have better achievement trends. Severalexplanations are offered for the variations. In summary, the net long-termeffects of Edison schools is uncertain, and predictions cannot be made aboutthe long-term effects of Edison's program. In conclusion, the study offers sets of recommendations for Edison schooladministrators and for district staff and policymakers considering hiring theEdison educational management organization. (TNM).

The authors argue that the most influential and well-known educational policy programs in the past 30 years are not based on democratic consensus, but are instead formulated by the political community as symbolic efforts meant to generate personal partisan gain.

The Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works. American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement. All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing. At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way. Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate.