Saltman, K. J. (2005). The Edison Schools: Corporate
Schooling and the Assault on Public Education. New York:
Routledge.
Pp. 238
$17.95 ISBN: 0-415-95046-5
Reviewed by Rucheeta Gholkar
Arizona State University
November 12, 2005
In announcing the release of Kenneth Saltman’s new
book, the Hoover Institution’s Education Next
suggests, ”Reformers may want to read the book just to
remind themselves that there really is a cottage industry of
thinkers who believe that ideas like ‘competition,’
‘choice,’ and ‘efficiency’ are mortal
threats to our kids and our way of life.”
(http://www.educationnext.org/20053/86.html)
Saltman, in fact, has written The Edison Schools to show
that “reformers” who seek to privatize education are
not in the business of “re-forming” a society
harboring troubling economic disparity, but rather of
re-producing educational inequalities and social hierarchies that
benefit the rich and powerful. Indeed, Saltman suggests that the
business terminology exalted by “educational management
organizations” is a threat to the ideal of equal
educational opportunity. Perhaps those who express the opinions
of the Hoover Institution are correct, however, in suggesting the
foolishness of believing that “ideas like
‘competition,’ ‘choice,’ and
‘efficiency’ are mortal threats to our kids and
our way of life.” Indeed, Saltman adeptly shows that
this neutral sounding but highly politicized market vocabulary is
used to maintain, not threaten, the way of life enjoyed by those
whose money and power ensure that their children will never have
to enter the world of an Edison School.
The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the
Assault on Public Education is one volume in a series
entitled Positions: Education, Politics, and Culture,
edited by Saltman and Ron Scapp. Books in the series are
intended to be “short, polemical, and accessibly written,
merging rigorous scholarship with politically engaged
criticism” (p. vi). The present volume accomplishes this
goal, using the case of the Edison Schools to examine the
relationship between society and education in the United States.
As Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in
Education at DePaul University, Saltman is well positioned to
step back from the privatization debate as it is framed by
corporate interests, in terms of cost and test-score efficiency,
and reframe it in terms of social justice and democratic values
(p. vii). With this reframing, the author succeeds in his major
goal viz., raising “much larger questions about the
relationship between the public interest and the private
accumulation of wealth, between what knowledge matters and who
has the power to make it so, and between corporations and
democracy” (p. 20). Saltman uses several strategies,
outlined and analyzed in this review, to drive home his argument
that “the largest corporation involved in public school
privatization threatens to undermine not only public schooling
but ultimately the American public itself” (p. vi).
Saltman makes the first point of his argument by
depicting Edison’s founder, Chris Whittle, as an
opportunistic and often dishonest salesman. Readers quickly
understand that Whittle’s money-making schemes blatantly
disregard their impact on children and society. Whittle’s
history of commercializing public space includes Channel One, a
classroom news program with commercials for products like
Snickers and Levi’s (p. 23). While appearing highly
successful despite controversy over advertising in schools, an
accounting scandal later revealed that Channel One’s
revenue had been significantly overstated, in one instance by
more than twenty percent (p. 40). Whittle’s
entrepreneurial history also includes ventures like Knoxville
in a Nutshell, a series of student guides whose failure
exemplified Whittle’s propensity for gambling with large
sums of money and then needing to borrow at high interest rates.
When Whittle Communications spiraled downward, it was revealed
that the company had failed to file tax returns in many states
where they were required, leaving Whittle with more than $10
million in unpaid taxes and fines (p. 43). Saltman shows that
these early Whittle ventures foreshadowed the fiscal and ethical
carelessness of Edison Schools.
Saltman’s account of Whittle’s move from
marketing to running public schools reveals Whittle’s
connections to several conservative political figures. Lamar
Alexander, Tom Ridge, and George W. Bush are among the powerful
Republicans whose relationships with Whittle raise questions
about the fairness of government deals with Edison. Saltman
shows that along with Edison executives John Chubb, Tom Ingram,
and Benno Schmidt, these politicians seem more committed to each
other’s well-being than to that of the students in Edison
Schools. When Edison was awarded contracts to run twenty
Philadelphia schools by Governor Tom Ridge in 2002 despite public
outcry and evidence of underhanded deal-making, the U.S.
Department of Education refused to investigate. Similarly,
Governor Jeb Bush refused to intervene when the Florida public
school teachers’ pension funds were used to buy Edison
stocks at a time when the corporation was obviously failing. As
Saltman sheds light on these suspicious dealings, readers wonder
about a movement that calls for “competition” and
“choice,” but takes money from public school
teachers’ retirement funds under questionable circumstances
to fund Whittle’s $600,000 salary (p. 59).
“Choice,” it seems, is reserved for the powerful and
the well-connected.
Saltman details the history of Edison Schools’
“Rise and Fall,” showing readers that the
corporation’s founding principles and management strategies
exploited underserved communities rather than helped them. The
for-profit schools were born of Whittle’s belief that
“running schools is the heart of the game,” and sold
to the public as “a fundamental breakthrough” in
American education; “a new dynamic that will light the way
to a transformed educational system” (p. 35). Whittle and
his partners publicly emphasized the “failure” of
America’s public schools, and shifted the language of the
public school debate way from the vocabulary of equity and to the
vocabulary of business. While Whittle promised but never
delivered advanced technology in every classroom, he planned on
increasing efficiency by cutting paid labor costs: “We see
parents and students doing many things that would lower tuition.
Not just cafeteria and janitorial work, but students teaching
students, for instance” (p. 28). In 2002, Whittle proposed
replacing administrators with students, suggesting that
“600 school kids working one hour a day equals 75 full-time
adult staff” (p. 136). This is obviously not the type of
“increased parent involvement” that empowered
middle-class parents know to be successful in their own schools.
Saltman cites this as just one example of a disturbing trend in
American ideology:
The talk of kids taking responsibility for their own
learning and of parents being involved in local schools through
volunteering is part of the larger call on the part of
conservatives for the transformation of universally provided
public services to voluntary organizations. … By the logic
of volunteerism, individual Americans are responsible for the
state of their own communities but all Americans are responsible
for helping massive corporations keep profits flowing to their
CEOs. Considering the radical increases in CEO pay relative to
the steady decline in real wages over the past three decades,
this particular form of socialism for the rich is exceptionally
obscene. (p. 137)
Edison’s ethical problems went beyond these plans for
what critics called child labor. Having promised investors
“accountability,” Edison publicized significant
“achievement gains.” The data, however, turned out
to be highly problematic, counting schools as making
“positive gains” even when the schools had either
dropped contracts with Edison, or were considered by their states
as “failing schools.” Blatant miscalculations
exaggerated Edison’s success. Adding to the charges of
manipulating test score reporting, former Edison teachers told
reporters that they had been forced “to do whatever it took
to make sure students succeeded on standardized tests, including
ignoring time limits, reading questions from a reading
comprehension test aloud and in some cases correcting answers
during a test” (p. 74). Saltman’s telling of this
history leaves readers wondering who Edison is being
“accountable” to, for students, parents, teachers,
and communities did not seem to receive any of the promised
benefits of this market-driven approach to education. In the
end, even stockholders suffered, as the stock plummeted from a
height of $36 to 97 cents a share in 2001.
While Saltman shows readers what was really happening, he
also reminds us how these events were reported by the media.
Because of mass media consolidation, a few large corporations are
able to frame public issues, like the privatization of education,
in the corporate interest. Saltman writes: “In more than a
thousand articles written in the popular press about Edison, the
vast majority focus on its success or failure as a business and
whether or not its test performance indicates that success as a
business” (p. 7). Combined with Edison’s aggressive
marketing campaign, the media’s willingness to print good
news about Edison without checking the data led to serious
misinformation given to parents and students in Edison-served
school districts. Waiting lists for failing Edison schools like
Boston’s Renaissance charter school continued to grow even
as the city was deciding to drop its contract because of
management problems, declining test scores, and evidence that
Edison was turning away students with special needs. Saltman
demonstrates cogently that media bias not only shifts the public
discourse away from issues of equitable funding of public
schools, but also further disempowers poor and minority
families.
Saltman most effectively makes his argument by
emphasizing Edison’s role as a reproducer of existing
social and educational inequalities, and by rejecting the
corporation’s claims of innovation and reform. He
describes Edison’s use of canned curriculum, and
Whittle’s plans for computer-based remediation solutions to
achievement deficits. Both “reforms,” Saltman
asserts, diminish the teacher’s role as what Giroux calls a
“transformative intellectual,” and reinforce the lack
of critical literacy developed in Edison students. He writes,
“Critical literacy is especially important for nonwhite
working-class and poor youth (those whom Edison targets) because
youth with greater critical literacy have a stronger sense of
possibility to challenge and transform stifling and oppressive
conditions rather than merely adapt to them” (p. 80). This
is Saltman’s main point, and his main reason for writing
the book. His passionate call for Americans to remember the
transformative power of education, and reject the stultifying
impact of “remediation” is repeated throughout the
book:
What may be in order to foster democratic education is not
remediation efforts to enforce knowledge that is misrepresented
as objective, neutral and value-free but rather reinventing the
educational process so that teaching and learning focus
specifically on the ways knowledge relates to different and
competing social values, groups and power interests. Learning,
in this sense, is not just about learning to assimilate to the
currently existing social order, but about learning to remake
society in more democratic, equal, free, and just ways. (p.
80)
Saltman argues that critical teaching and learning are
discouraged in Edison’s rigidly scripted curriculum. He
further suggests that Edison students cannot discuss and debate
“the role of the corporate sector in threatening
democracy” because of an inherent conflict of interest
between the corporation’s aims of educating students and
making profits (p. 101). Indeed, Edison’s model for
educating the most powerless citizens seems in direct conflict
with Freire’s idea of education as the practice of
freedom. Saltman does not shy away from naming the practices of
privatized education as criminal, likening the conservative call
for poor black and brown kids to develop a stronger work ethic to
the “lie of opportunity in the wrought iron on the gate of
Aushwitz ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (work shall set you
free)” (117).
The Edison Schools is an important book in the era
of No Child Left Behind, for it powerfully addresses the issues
of race and class that underlie current educational reform.
Saltman writes,
What is most important in all of this is that the federal
initiatives are not designed to invest in public schools and
communities that have been historically underresourced. Rather,
the federal initiatives are designed to demand improvement
without adequate resource improvement and then to allow private
companies to profit from public money on the promise of remedying
the situation after the communities have been denied that
opportunity. (p. 179)
Saltman calls on liberal and conservative politicians alike to
start interrogating terms like “quality education,”
used by both sides without any discussion of defining
ideologies. Both sides are guilty of claiming neutrality, says
Saltman, hence evading the question of the underlying function of
schools (p. 196). Saltman’s engaging and limpid writing
style makes this book accessible to all audiences, and will be
equally useful to researchers, educators, and communities
struggling to decide about privatization in their own school
districts. While Saltman sometimes glorifies public school
classrooms in an effort to vividly contrast EMOs with public
schools, he tempers this romanticizing by admitting that public
education is in need of reform, just not privatization.
The author’s call for protecting public education from the
overpowering corporate influence of neoliberalism may seem
idealistic and grandiose, but he writes to describe what could be
considered real educational “re-form.” Readers who
know that educational reform is about more than raising test
scores, and who believe that all kids deserve to be empowered,
will appreciate this book’s ambitious attempt to challenge
and elevate the current discourse on privatization.
About the Reviewer
Rucheeta Gholkar is a Ph.D. student in the Educational
Leadership and Policy Studies program at Arizona State
University. A former middle school teacher, her research
interests include issues of culture, class, school, and equity.
E-mail: rucheeta.gholkar@asu.edu
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.