The Edison Project (An Experience With a Private Firm)

This firm, then a publicly traded company once ran
seven DISD schools during the early 2000s.

Advocates of public school reform have often pointed out that private firms are a solution to improving the quality of public education.  During the early years of my tenure on the Dallas ISD Board, I have had some questionable experiences with a private firm, called then the Edison Project (now Edison Learning) which is based out of New York City.  The idea for the firm to take over several DISD schools came from a superintendent we hired out of California, named Waldemar "Bill" Rojas.

The firm at the time was a publicly traded company that was struggling to make any profit. The stock price of the company was falling, as a result from my understanding.  (It is now a privately held company again under new management.) In any case, some schools under Edison did better than others.  However, we had shall we say questionable results here in Texas.  Here is a newspaper article from the Dallas Observer documenting their own spin of the story on the beginnings of our involvement in Dallas ISD with this company. 

The Observer wrote another profile about Edison's history with another Texas school distict called "No Class."  PBS did a show (here is the companion site) for a PBS about the company nationally in 2003.  The wikipedia entry on the overall history of the company is here. 

Utimately, we voted to discontinue our contract with Edison in 2002 because we didn't feel we were getting our money's worth after allowing the company several years running seven DISD schools. Test scores or other factors such as staff, parent, and student morale didn't illustrate a significant difference in quality with other District schools.  The Dallas Morning News agreed with our assessment.