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For-profit school manager Edison Schools Inc. promoted itself as the savior of American public education. Now, the company is struggling for its own survival.
Dell rose to the top by cutting more corners than its rivals. The PC giant is cutting another corner by employing prisoners to handle its new consumer recycling scheme in the US.
Wendy Walsh's seventh-graders at Gillespie Middle School in North Philadelphia have something in common with investors in the for-profit education company Edison Schools. Both fear that Edison, the nation's largest private operator of public schools, may be failing them. ''The children ask me what's going on,'' Walsh says, ''and I don't know what to tell them. We're all facing the great unknown.''
The Preface and Executive Summary of a report by the American Federation of Teachers which looks at student achievment in 13 schools run by the Edison Project.
This morning at 7:30 am the police in Cochabamba arrested Oscar Olivera, spokesperson for the Coordinadora, on his way to work. The charges are ''sedition, conspiracy, instigating public disorder, criminal association, and other charges.''
CorpWatch editor Julie Light reports on a pitched battle for the future of a San Francisco school. The players? The Edison Corporation, the local school board, parents, teachers and students.
Eight Million U.S. students are required to watch Channel One -- a commercial filled current events program every day. Schools get satellite dishes, VCRs and TVs in exchange for providing a captive audience to advertisers. Check out this report from the Center for Commercial Free Public Education.
Berne Froese-Germain and Martia Moll, two researchers with the Canadian Teachers Federation, outline the scope of the problem.
Erika Shaker, an analyst with the Center for Policy Alternatives looks at the education industry's inroads in Canada.
A policy statement by the National Education Association, an organization of 2.4 million educators and public school and university employees throughout the United States. The NEA has compiled extensive research on corporate school management.
In a perfect world, a list like this would not exist. In a perfect world, businesses would be run with the utmost integrity and competence. But ours is, alas, an imperfect world, and if we must live in one where Enron, Geraldo Rivera, and Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes exist, the least we can do is catalog the absurdities.
Stanford University Professor Martin Carnoy, explains that while Chile's voucher experiment did little for poor schoolchildren, it was part of a broad trend towards privatizing social services. Originally published in Selling Out our Schools by Rethinking Schools.
Was your Microsoft Windows 95 packed and shrink-wrapped by a Washington State prisoner? According to one prisoner who works for Exmark, a company specializing in product packaging, approximately 90 prisoners at the Twin Rivers Correctional Center (TRCC) in Monroe shrink-wrapped 50,000 units of Windows 95.