Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 10, 1994                   TAG: 9407090006
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: E6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHAEL MATZA KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: HARTFORD, CONN.                                LENGTH: Long

SCHOOL LOOKS TO PRIVATE SECTOR TO SOLVE EDUCATION WOES

Like many of the nation's big-city school systems, Hartford has searched in vain for a solution to declining achievement and mounting discipline problems in its public schools.

Now this largely poor city of 140,000 is debating a radical plan: turning over its public schools to a private, for-profit company.

If it does, it will mark the first time a private company has sold management services to an entire school system.

For Peter McCue and parents like him, it's a wits'-end solution worth a try.

"I'm here representing my daughter, a second-grader," said McCue, who spoke recently at a school board meeting interrupted several times because of passionate outbursts. "For the third time this month I put her to bed in tears because of how bored she is in school."

Amid mounting frustration with the slow pace of education reform, Hartford is among scores of school systems throughout the country that are considering a break with tradition. Having tried improvement by other means, they say it's time America's 150-year-old system of public education adopted 20th-century business practices.

With expenditures of $600 billion a year - a full 12 percent of the gross national product - public education already is one of the nation's largest industries. Now dozens of municipalities, including Portsmouth, Va.; San Jose, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Pinckney, Mich.; and Bloomfield, Conn.; are discussing putting their schools in private hands.

In Osceola County, Fla., outside Orlando, the local school board and the Walt Disney Co. have joined forces to build and run Celebration School and Teaching Academy, a $36 million pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school scheduled to open in 1996.

Whittle Schools L.P., created by Knoxville, Tenn.-based media mogul Chris Whittle, recently won the right to run three new publicly funded "charter" schools in Boston; Lowell, Mass.; and Worcester, Mass.

In Baltimore, 12 public schools are entrusted to Education Alternatives Inc., the Minneapolis-based company that has ardently wooed Hartford since March.

"Public education is failing in every major city in the United States. We are the first to stand up and go to the brink [to] debate the question of where education has to go," said Webster Brooks, a Hartford City Council aide.

Touted as a way to bring marketplace efficiency and accountability to the public sector, privatization is an attractive option for low-achieving schools plagued by budget deficits, urban ills and burdensome union contracts.

"Many cities now are essentially in educational receivership," said Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "If somebody comes along on a white horse and says, `I will save you,' it's hard to ignore."

While privatization of schools certainly offers some advantages in cities like Hartford, where 80-year-old classrooms, "portable" outbuildings and paved-over playgrounds are the norm, education experts warn it has limitations and its share of potential problems, too.

"I grew up with a deep commitment to the common school for the common good run by lay boards of trustees," said Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Princeton and a former U.S. commissioner of education. "There is nothing inherently evil in contracting for a service that might make a profit. Textbook companies make profit. Schools contract with catering services to reduce the hassle for [administrators] trying to guide the educational program. But I don't think we can contract to a private enterprise, accountable only to itself, our educational obligations for our children."

A private company is a commercial enterprise, added Harvard's Gardner, and "anybody who ever bought a used car knows that's not a recipe for truth-in-advertising."

Leading the charge for privatization is John Golle, 50, chairman of EAI. Although Hartford must solicit competing bids, Golle's company is the top contender. A former Xerox company executive, Golle formed EAI in 1986.

In 1990, Dade County, Fla., picked EAI to help run a school in Miami Beach. Its contract with the Baltimore schools followed two years later.

A spokesman for Golle said he was vacationing and unavailable for comment. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Golle said he is motivated by "a moral responsibility to do better by our children . . . particularly [the] economically disadvantaged."

Through a confederation it calls the Alliance for Schools That Work, EAI proposes to supply Hartford with a level of services that would otherwise be out of reach. To that end it will work with partner firms Paramount Communications for computer technology, Johnson Controls for building maintenance, and KPMG Peat Marwick for financial management.

Enhancements like a computer lab in every school and four computers in every classroom are part of EAI's appeal, as is its promise to spend $20 million of its own money on physical plant and curriculum improvements. Capital would come from investors' holdings in the publicly traded company. Profit would derive from savings on energy costs and bulk discounts on supplies.

EAI would agree to stay within the Hartford School Board's $171.1 million budget, spending no more than $8,450 per pupil and retaining all current public employees, according to negotiated contracts. The board would determine curriculum content, retain hiring and firing power, and have the right to cancel the contract for any reason with 90 days' notice.

As tantalizing as the proposal is for a district that has an $11 million deficit, not all parents favor it. Lenworth Bunting, PTA president of Annie Fisher, a north Hartford elementary school with 700 students, thinks learning and earning are antithetical goals.

"Who will be [the company's] priority? The stockholders or the children? . . . All the company is going to do is come in and run it to the bone, like a business, to make a profit. Kids that need special attention - handicapped kids, learning disabled kids - are going to get lost in the shuffle," Bunting said.

Moreover, Bunting said, EAI is hawking an unproven product.

Because the share price of EAI stock has fluctuated wildly on the news of its proposal in Hartford - from a high of $49 last fall to below $14 last week - critics also say the company may not have the resources to make the promised improvements.

In Baltimore, where EAI started running schools under a five-year contract that began in September 1992, test scores have not improved, certified teachers have been cut, union paraprofessionals were replaced with lower-paid nonunion aides, and students with special needs were not adequately served, according to a January school district report.

Still, Baltimore School Superintendent Walter Amprey praises the company for cleaning up schools, upgrading security and landscaping - improvements that send a positive message to students about the importance of their education.

In an open letter to the parents of Hartford, Amprey wrote: "Like many other school bureaucracies . . . ours had become so entangled in well-meaning regulations that it took too long to accomplish what students desperately needed to learn efficiently."