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'The ultimate sanction'

The state wants to allow private groups to take over "failing" public schools. But privately managed schools don't seem to perform any better.

Having already been used as a tool to flunk third-graders, withhold diplomas from seniors, hand out tuition vouchers and label schools as failures, the standardized Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test is now serving as an invitation to corporate suitors. Come to the Sunshine State, sign a contract and take over a troubled public school.

The state Board of Education began to lay the groundwork last week for private managers to take over public schools, inviting bids to be submitted in March. Even board chairman Phil Handy, a Winter Park financier with an urge to punish and privatize schools, acknowledged the gravity of this next step in the governor's educational accountability plan. Handy called it "the ultimate sanction."

Depending on how the board proceeds, this step also could prove to be the ultimate disaster. No one has determined whether the 14 schools that might first qualify for takeover suffer from poor administrative leadership. They may or may not. But what we do know is that most of them face extraordinary challenges. At Miami Edison Senior High School, for example, three-fourths of the students are poor, one in five speak another language at home, and one in seven are diagnosed with a learning disability.

As Miami-Dade school spokesman Joseph Garcia told the Miami Herald: "The record of these companies in succeeding to turn around low-performing schools is as episodic as the success of the school districts."

Florida is inviting any group to bid on a school takeover, but the most likely candidates are the companies that are looking to expand their corporate empires, such as Edison Schools Inc. Edison, based in New York City, now manages some 157 schools in 20 states. But neither Edison nor any of its competitors can document educational improvement in a way that qualifies them to run Florida's most troubled schools. In fact, Miami-Dade recently ended its own contract with Edison for managing an elementary school, citing poor performance. When the U.S. Government Accountability Office tried in 2003 to measure how well privately managed schools performed, it could find no compelling evidence either way.

"The companies who would likely apply here have no track record of doing any better," says Broward school superintendent Frank Till. "There is no expertise out there that isn't already in the public system."

Handy and the state education board like to call this private takeover part of their "no excuses" plan. But a close look at the checkered record of private management in public schools across the nation shows the companies have offered entirely too many excuses of their own.

[Last modified February 24, 2005, 00:54:17]