After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
Sign up for email alerts, from breaking news to weekly commentary:
Find more content in these topics: Corporate responsibility
Visit Hightower's General Store, to buy high-power Hightower books and other goodies like that.
Home | Contact | RSS | Privacy policy | Copyright Public Intelligence, Inc., all rights reserved 2003-2007
Edison gets the vapors
Not long ago, Edison Schools Inc. was a cocky company. Its executives blustered that America’s public schools needed less “public” and more “corporate”—more of the managerial know-how and bottom-line efficiency that an outfit like theirs could deliver.
Give us your educational money, they told school districts, and by God, we’ll give you back academic excellence—plus we’ll pay a sweet profit to our investors. Wall Street threw money at Edison, while school officials threw their kids at the company, which quickly became the largest commercial operator of our public schools.
But running schools turns out to be a bit harder than the corporatizers figured. Edison has not outperformed publicly managed schools, even though it has gotten more money per student for its schools—and it has never made a profit.
Edison has always relied on bedazzled investors who’ve been kind enough to overlook hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, skyrocketing overhead, and insider dealings.
Now Edison is scrambling to come up with $40 million by this fall just to keep open the 136 schools that it’s under contract to run. Raising this cash is a shaky proposition, for Edison is already mired in heavy debt, and administrative expenses are soaring at its posh Fifth Avenue headquarters in Manhattan.
So much for managerial know-how.