A few days ago, I was invited to a phone conference with Edison Schools, the former Chris Whittle\/Benno Schmidt operation that would be an “educational management organization” and operate hundreds of schools by the end of this decade. A few years ago, the state of Florida’s pension fund bought a stake in a private-equity firm that purchased Edison, a move that rubbed public-school teachers the wrong way given that the strategic goal of Edison was to take over public schools. Given the recent rejection of private management in Philadelphia’s public schools, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be a defense of private management or an attempt to distract bloggers from the bad news.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t feeling well enough to participate in the phone conference yesterday afternoon, and I was intensely curious. It turns out that, according to Thomas Toch<\/a>, Edison is rebranding itself as edisonlearning<\/a>, and it will focus on virtual schooling. So I suppose this counts as both<\/i> distraction from the failures of Edison’s private school management in Philadelphia and also an attempt to get into what Edison’s managers must hope is the next growth market in education. <\/p>\n The practical problem for Edison is that the field is already pretty crowded, and I suspect Edison (or maybe edisonlearning) will have to rely on political connections to get vendor contracts in an environment filled with other companies (including the higher-ed giant Blackboard). I’m surprised that Dean Millot<\/a> hasn’t yet chimed in on this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few days ago, I was invited to a phone conference with Edison Schools, the former Chris Whittle\/Benno Schmidt operation that would be an “educational management organization” and operate hundreds of schools by the end of this decade. A few years ago, the state of Florida’s pension fund bought a stake in a private-equity firm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-mk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}