End of School Privatization in Las Vegas
- Saturday, 15 March 2014
Did School District get its $100 million worth from for-profit company?
When Edison came to town in 2001, the for-profit education management company promised to deliver dramatic improvements in test scores among Las Vegas’ lowest-performing students.
Thirteen years later, the Clark County School District has forked over $103.6 million in taxpayer money to Edison with mixed results to show for it.
Last month, Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky announced that the nation’s fifth-largest school system would sever its ties with the nation’s largest school management company by the end of this year.
Skorkowsky’s decision ends one of the longest and most expensive school privatization experiments in the country. With Edison on its way out, education observers are left questioning: Was the pricey school operator worth the money?
“They did show some improvement at the schools,” School Board member Carolyn Edwards told KNPR. “But really, the question for me comes down to: Was it a good return on our investment? I’m not sure that it was.”
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The Edison school model, named for Thomas Edison, reinvented school privatization by combining elements from school voucher programs and charter school management companies.
Instead of forcing districts to cede total control of public schools to a private company, Edison partnered with districts to educate students in so-called Edison “partnership” schools.
Like school vouchers, in which taxpayer money is given to families to send their children to private schools, districts allocated state per-pupil funding and federal grant money to Edison partnership schools.
In return, Edison operated the schools.
By the early 2000s, Edison had scored multimillion-dollar contracts to operate public schools in major cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. At its height, Edison operated more than 150 public schools in more than 20 states.
Edison schools are highly structured, using similar textbooks, instructional techniques and daily schedules. Schools have an hour of additional instruction time, teachers are given time to coordinate and parents are required to attend four parent-teacher conferences a year.
Supporters say the model can save public education, but critics decry the “cookie-cutter approach” to education and are leery of having a private company running public schools.
The concept of bringing outside people into schools was very new in 2000,” Edison Learning spokesman Michael Serpe said. “There has always been that sense that the local community has the best sense of what is the best means of educating their community. We’ve had to fight that.”
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In 2001, the Clark County School Board approved Edison’s initial five-year contract. The company was given $30 million to operate seven campuses: West Middle School and Cahlan, Crestwood, Lincoln, Lynch, Park and Ronnow elementary schools.
Immediately, Edison was greeted with protests from community activists, teachers union members and several political leaders. The Nevada State Education Association launched an unsuccessful lawsuit to try to stop Edison from “taking over” schools and “kidnapping” students.
Some principals and teachers also pushed back against Edison.
“There were quite a few people who were fighting it,” said Elizondo-Edison Principal Keith France. “There was extra paperwork, and expectations were higher for Edison. People were just not going to do it. They wanted to wait it out, but it took.”
The profitability of Edison’s model was questioned soon after it arrived in Clark County. In 2002, Edison’s stock, EDSN — which began publicly trading on End of School Privatization in Las Vegas » Resist the Privatization of America: