As an undergraduate, I attended the Pennsylvania State University. Now I teach at the University of Pennsylvania. And though I know this is a sensitive subject for many of you, I have to say I haven't quite figured out what's so different about the two.
It can be true in some ways that private schools are better than public; for example, the facilities here are certainly nicer than those at Penn State. But the education one can receive is largely equivalent, as our own Richard Beeman wrote last month in The New York Times.
Indeed, one shouldn't expect much difference -- as nonprofit institutions, private and public schools are run similarly. As much as it may seem otherwise, Penn is not motivated solely by the desire to make money off its students.
But despite having what is still considered to be a very successful nonprofit system of higher education, many Americans still seem to believe that primary and secondary education would be better if it were run for-profit. And last month, Philadelphia students became the latest subjects of the privatization experiment, when Edison Schools, Inc., took over 20 public schools.
The advocates of educational profiteering claim that the problem with American public schools is that nobody is held accountable in a government bureaucracy, whereas corporations always hold their employees to account.
But the fact is that companies like Edison have not been held accountable. Although it claims to have improved test scores substantially in its schools, a University of Western Michigan study found its students' performance generally below those in public schools on tests -- even when one compares only annual improvement, Edison's students do only as well as students in government-run schools. The Brookings Institution did a broader study and found much the same results for charter schools in general.
Edison has only been running schools in Philadelphia for a month, but it is already encountering significant difficulties. After a recent tour of the Edison-managed Gillespie Middle School, participants discovered that Edison had fired the school's librarian, and books were hidden behind "Do not touch" signs -- the computer teacher is also gone, and the computer room is locked behind iron bars.
This despite the fact that Edison gets $1.2 million more to run Gillespie than similar public schools get thanks to state grants for the privatization experiment. Yet again, taxpayers subsidize corporations and get little back.
But it's not entirely fair to say Edison is profiting off public money, since the company has never actually made a profit.
In fact, Edison has spent a lot of money on some of its schools.
On a recent tour of the Kenderton Elementary School, another of Edison's schools, I found -- to my surprise -- that the school seemed to be run competently. Staff praised Edison highly for having brought in new computers and books, while Principal Aaron Starke told me the school had never had so much. And though we couldn't tell on a Saturday whether the library and computer rooms were actually used by the students, Edison did seem to put a lot of money into Kenderton.
The problem with Edison's management, even at Kenderton, is twofold. First, although the schools are in desperate need of more money, new technology alone is not sufficient to improve learning, especially if the school doesn't even have the staff to take advantage of it.
Second, and more important, Edison doesn't actually have the money that it's spending. It would be easier to write this column if I thought Edison was getting fat off its extra state subsidies, but in fact the company is pretty close to bankruptcy.
It has tried to follow the model of corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com: spend lots of money to gain customer loyalty at the beginning, eliminate competition and eventually raise prices to compensate. But the model isn't working, and Edison's investors know it. Its stock price has plummeted and is now below $1 per share, compared to $21.68 per share in January.
According to the Philadelphia Daily News, last Wednesday Edison tried to shut down its Philadelphia headquarters and move into one of its schools to save money on office rent. School District CEO Paul Vallas prevented it, citing state law -- now, Edison is literally homeless.
On Thursday, the city withheld a $3 million payment to Edison, demanding to see financial documents, according to Reuters. It also took legal action to protect all the books and computers from creditors in case Edison does go bankrupt.
Their fear isn't unrealistic: on the first day of school, Edison had to return a truckload of school supplies because it couldn't pay for them.
The end is coming soon for Edison. One only hopes that the students whose schools were taken over will not suffer because of it. But one wonders whether those who advocated this ill-conceived privatization scheme will be held accountable for it.
The lesson here is that simply giving public schools away to private corporations cannot be expected to magically solve the problems of the educational system. As a friend, a former teacher named Amy Stuart, told me, perhaps what the school system needed was more money, not to subsidize corporate profit, but to help the students themselves.
Stephen Preston is a lecturer in Mathematics.
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