Synopses & Reviews
Entrepreneurial creativity, private investment, and competition have been among America's great strengths. Can they be harnessed to improve troubled public schools? Or is private management of public schools at best a gimmick, and at worst an undemocratic sellout?
In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. The EMOs promised academic improvement to families and profits to their investors. Wall Street and foundations lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on for-profit and nonprofit start-ups, and thousands of students' educations began to be directed not by school officials, but by private companies.
In Learning on the Job, industry insider Steven Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, including his own, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms. Have they given their students a better education? Can they succeed as businesses? Can businesses in fact run better public schools than school districts?
With remarkable honesty and fairness on an ideologically charged topic, Wilson describes the follies and wisdom, overreaching and real accomplishment, of the first education entrepreneurs. Acknowledging that they had much to learn about the real-world challenges of running schools, he passionately defends the promise of private involvement in public schooling.
Review
Steven Wilson spent years developing a business model that aimed toovercome the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of public schools, and finally launched acompany to run charter schools under contract. Sobered but still hopeful, he here gives thefullest account available of how the model has worked so far, and what it still may do forpublic education.
Review
Learning on the Jobis a fair-minded, thoughtful, and deeply informed analysis of private education management organizations, which are assuming an increasingly important role in American public education. Steven Wilson has emerged from the trenches to give a balanced and perceptive critique of their promise--and their problems too.
Synopsis
In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. In Learning on the Job, industry insider Steven Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms.
Synopsis
Virginia and Warren Stone Memorial Prize, Harvard University Press
About the Author
Steven F. Wilson is Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Table of Contents
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. The Organizations
- 2. Business Models
- 3. School Designs
- 4. School Culture
- 5. Execution
- 6. School Leaders
- 7. Politics and Schools
- 8. Academic Results
- 9. Business Results
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index