Knowledge for Sale

By DAVID ELLIS

Call it the Perot complex: a successful businessman achieves great wealth early in life and casts about for a higher mission. He sees the paralysis gripping a big national problem and decides the only course is radical change. Ross Perot wants to change the country from the White House; Chris Whittle wants to alter the future from your child's classroom.

The media mogul plans to create a new system of private schooling that he hopes will produce a smarter generation of American kids -- and make him and his partners a profit as well. He also expects to inspire -- indeed, compel -- the existing public school system to change the way it instills knowledge. "Kids today are disconnected from the education process," says Whittle. "We need to figure out how they are motivated and tap into that." At this point Whittle's enterprise is little more than an ambitious blue-sky notion, yet it is attracting considerable interest and some high-level talent: Yale President Benno Schmidt last week resigned his post to head the venture.

Schmidt brings a great deal of credibility to the project. Nonetheless, some educators wonder if access to schooling, long considered one of the most vital public missions of a democratic society, should be entrusted to people also concerned with the bottom line. Critics of the venture argue that it diverts energy and attention from efforts to reform the public education system from within. Every other major democracy educates its children in public schools, they say, so why should the U.S. rely on entrepreneurs? Schmidt's reply: "We need the freedom to try to create new conceptions on a completely clean slate, without the constraints of inherited institutions. I don't think gradual reform is likely to produce the improvements the country desperately needs."

Whittle has already rankled many traditionalists with his profitable Channel One television network. That controversial venture provides a 12-minute morning newscast, complete with two minutes of commercials, to 7.8 million students each weekday. "I dread the thought of the profit motive infiltrating a noble area of public aspiration," says educator Jonathan Kozol. "Do we really want to give that power to Chris Whittle?"

Yet there is a consensus among education experts that the public school system is in desperate need of change, which helps explain why many greet Whittle's project with cautious optimism. "The important thing is that kids ) have a chance to learn," says Gregory Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service. "If Whittle or anyone else can open up some doors, that's a good thing."

The plan, called the Edison Project, envisions a nationwide chain of at least 100 for-profit grammar schools by 1996, serving 150,000 students. By the end of this decade, additional campuses would open, providing day care and primary and secondary education for 2 million students. Tuition for individual students would not exceed the $5,500 current average spent on each child now in public education.

Whittle is confident that private schooling is an investment with the potential to bring a 15% annual return. "The motive of profit and the motive for public good are not mutually exclusive," says Whittle, a stylish 44-year- old who sports fancy bow ties and a shaggy hairstyle. "We are a private institution with a public mission." He has already attracted commitments of $60 million from corporate interests for research and development (including Time Warner, parent company of TIME, which owns 37% of Whittle Communications). Whittle will have to raise an additional $3 billion to implement his plans fully.

A team of experts from the fields of education, business and journalism has been working out the details of the school system since March. The eclectic group includes Chester Finn Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration; John Chubb, an expert on government and public policy; and Lee Eisenberg, the former editor in chief of Esquire.

The planning group dismisses the notion that the only way to impart knowledge is to place a teacher in front of a small group. Technology would play a primary role in Whittle's new classroom. Each Whittle school would be linked by closed-circuit television to a central studio, which might result in a 1-to-1 million teacher-to-student ratio. Interactive electronic data banks would allow students to do comprehensive research on their own. Notebook computers would be as common as lunch boxes.

Over the next two years, the team will design an ambitious core curriculum, which will assume that today's high school education could be completed by a Whittle pupil by the age of 12. The first schools will initially accept children only from three months to six years of age. With each succeeding year, another class can be added, as the system grows along with its first generation of students. Whittle is leaning toward a "campus" approach for the schools, with all grades (including day-care facilities) located at the same site. Working parents are to be offered flexible class times to accommodate their schedules. Admission would be open to everyone. To broaden access, 20% of students would be given full scholarships. Whittle plans effectively to redistribute wealth from richer schools to districts populated mainly by the poor.

Some of the other planned innovations, however, seem clearly driven by the need to cut costs. Teachers might make up only 30% of the total instructional force. The private schools would try to harness the talents of pupils in a variety of ways, including expecting students to tutor their peers as a way to develop leadership ability. Parents could be asked to work one day a month on a volunteer basis, helping out in the day-care center or study hall.

The teachers who join the new schools would be asked to exchange the security of tenure for a potentially lucrative equity stake in the company. Their base salary would be augmented by performance bonuses, a feature that could attract the type of highly motivated, career-oriented men and women who today tend to shun teaching in favor of better-paying professions. Whittle's application of free-market techniques to schooling is what most troubles his critics, who fear that the traditional interaction between teachers and students will get lost amid the high-tech gadgetry and the chase for profits.

Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch thinks the traditionalists aren't recognizing the benefits that come with competition, and says they must abandon the attitude that "if everyone can't have it for free, don't do it at all." She is convinced that examples set by for-profit schools like Whittle's will spur positive change across the board. "You are not betraying the American ideal if you leave a public school," says Ravitch. "It doesn't matter where kids go to school, as long as they get a good education."

The Bush Administration strongly supports the concepts that underlie the Edison Project, but Education Secretary Lamar Alexander has not endorsed the plan publicly because he once served as a consultant to Whittle Communications and used to own stock in the company. Alexander has issued an "America 2000" program to encourage innovative, "break the mold" schools.

Although Whittle's group is not directly federally funded, another Bush reform could benefit the Edison schools. The President's Choice Plan would give parents vouchers that would in effect transfer tax money to whatever school their child attends, even if it is a parochial or private institution. The voucher plan appears politically dead for now, but many observers believe Whittle's long-term plan anticipates the use of these funds. If adopted, the reform could funnel billions of public dollars into private schools.

Whittle is confident that his concept for new schools will be able to survive, even without government assistance, and stay ahead of any potential competitor. "Twenty years from now, there will be three or four major private providers of education," he says. "We will be just the first to get there."

Perhaps. But Whittle's plan leaves many questions unanswered. What about the vast majority of American kids who must continue to rely on public schools? Will they be the victims of a new system of separate but unequal education -- this one based not on race but on income and geography? If Whittle's mission is not simply to educate but to educate for a profit, what happens to his franchise -- and its clients -- if the profits dry up? Do the schools just close their doors or pick up stakes and move to greener pastures, as other industries would do? And if educational entrepreneurs like Whittle succeed at making the public system collapse -- playing "West Berlin" to the publics' "East Berlin," as he put it last week -- what guarantee is there that private providers would or could pick up the slack? Whether the Edison Project becomes yet another failed reform experiment or an agent for meaningful change depends on how well Whittle combines the profit motive with quality education.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston and Sidney Urquhart/New York