Brokering Schools: When the State Takes Over

What constitutes “failing” when it comes to a school? How should failure be judged? And what should happen after a school is determined to be failing?

Under the best circumstances, those closest to a troubled school would be aware of the situation and take steps to intervene. The school administration and the community’s elected education representatives (the school board) would be on top of the situation. They also would, through firsthand knowledge, understand whether the school was actually failing or merely struggling with difficult circumstances. This is a key distinction.

Many schools struggle to educate students coming from troubled homes, impoverished neighborhoods, and disadvantaged communities. Often it is an uphill battle made worse by limited resources, outdated facilities, and other negative factors within the district.

True local control would argue for communities assessing their schools and seeking assistance when needed, not state education bureaucrats abstracting from sterile test scores some notion of whether a community’s schools are succeeding or failing. The current state model is top-down bureaucracy. But that’s not the worst.

Again, in the best circumstances, if a community were to assess that one (or more) of its schools was failing to serve students and parents, it might approach the state for assistance. Responsive—rather than autocratic—state education leaders might then muster resources to intervene, providing to the local community the kinds of assistance necessary to reset the school, literally, to help the school recover a sound educational footing and move forward. After all, the state has greater resources than many local communities, and sometimes schools do require positive interventions that are beyond the scope of local expertise or financial resources. (In truly dire circumstances even federal intervention can be necessary, such as during the early years of desegregation.)

Unfortunately “the best circumstances” do not apply to Indiana’s methods of determining when a school is “failing,” because the measures of failure are simplistic and suspect. Moreover, when the state “takes over” it does not muster resources to help restore the school to good educational health. Instead, the state acts as a broker, essentially giving the school—accompanied by tax dollars—to a private management company. The company is not held accountable to the state or the local community in any meaningful way. And, in most cases, the management company is motivated not by a drive to educational excellence but by the desire for and expectation of financial gain.

A case in point is Gary, Indiana’s Theodore Roosevelt Career and Technical Academy, now called Theodore Roosevelt College and Career Academy and operated by EdisonLearning Inc. If the name “Edison” sounds familiar, it should. Back in the 1990s Chris Whittle launched a for-profit education enterprise called Edison Schools Inc., claiming that his company could run schools better and for less money than could public school districts—and make money for his company’s shareholders. It turned out to be a hollow claim.

Edison stock was traded on NASDAQ for four years, reaching a high of nearly $40 a share in 2001 before the share value plunged to 14¢. In 2002, Whittle was courting Roger Milliken for a possible bailout. Now Whittle is back with the latest incarnation, EdisonLearning, which has, in essence, been given Roosevelt to turn around, at least theoretically, and on which to turn a profit, again theoretically. The track record on either score has not been impressive.

James K. Glassman, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2005, commented:

Today, instead of owning 1,000 private schools, Edison merely manages 157 public ones. What happened? Edison had nowhere near the funding to construct such a gigantic enterprise so quickly, and Mr. Whittle and Mr. Schmidt [a partner] lacked management skills and patience. After early setbacks in starting his private schools, Mr. Whittle decided to switch focus entirely and sought management contracts from urban school boards. With no experience dealing with big-city unions and politicians, Edison blundered into disaster after disaster. "Too often," writes Mr. Whittle, "what rules schools is politics, not grades." He should have recognized that fact earlier and stuck to creating his own low-cost schools.

State takeovers are an iffy proposition at best. They are propelled not by local desires but by political ideology reified through sterile assessments that focus on numbers rather than the people who have most at stake—local students, parents, teachers, administrators, concerned citizens, and elected officials. What the state does with and to the schools it takes over is equally iffy, given the questionable choice of companies such as EdisonLearning Inc.

Usurping local control is egregious in itself. Doing so in order to divert tax dollars into the hands of private enterprise is illegitimate. And doing so in the name of improving education is, to put it kindly, disingenuous.