Chris Whittle: still thinking big
Politics has certainly been one albatross around your neck. And, in education, teachers' unions are among the biggest political players. Some education reformers think Edison has made too many compromises with unions as the price of entry to some districts. Do you think unions are an obstacle to reform?
Not nearly to the degree that they are painted. This goes both ways: A lot of people on the right would say unions are absolutely the primary problem here, and they have to be busted in some ways. Unions would flip it around and say the problem here is that our schools are just utterly underfunded. What I think you see too often is a kind of polarized sloganeering that goes back and forth and neither side is right. There are plenty of union members out there that really do support changing schools. And then there are those who are absolutely for the status quo. I try to steer clear of that kind of stereotyping of either side.
You seem to believe financial incentives will go a long way toward improving schools, and your book introduces a handful of new ways to do this—including cutting the number of teachers in half and doubling their salaries. This can happen without anyone getting fired, you say, if schools will simply allow attrition to run its course and not make any new hires. How is that going to work?
If you know that raisings taxes is not the way to get to higher pay—and I believe we can't get there with taxation—then how do you get there? You've got only two choices: You can raise class size and reduce the number of teachers. Or you can have half as many classes—and therefore half as many teachers that get paid twice as much. The book proposes the latter. We don't have to design our schools so that students have to be in class in six different classes all day long. We can design schools where kids are in class maybe half the time and working on their own the other half the time.
Have you heard any feedback on that yet?
I do think there's a split on the workability of this idea. Some people say, "You're absolutely right, this will work." Some say you're in fantasyland. Kids can't be trusted to be on their own, even within a school building. They'll just sleep. They won't work. But what the book really is suggesting is, let's not make this my opinion versus someone else's opinion. Let's go try it. That's what development is: Let's go do it, and see what happens. And by the way, we don't even have to do it in the school year, let's test it in the summer. Let's take a school for three months in the summer and run it this way and see what happens.
One of the most controversial components of the educational design you envision is the degree of private involvement in the enterprise. Your experience with Edison, though, seems to be proof positive that public and private can work together in this arena.
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