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OCTOBER 2005

Chris Whittle
Chris Whittle’s Crash Course

By Joan Baum Ph.D.

It’s often the case—terrible irony—that people in the communications field don’t communicate clearly. Enter Chris Whittle, formerly of Whittle Communications and Channel One [news in the schools] and, for the last 16 years, CEO of The Edison Schools, with Benno Schmidt as Chairman. Crash Course, Whittle’s impassioned, thought-provoking program for education reform (“my true life’s work”), could easily be a model for how to write persuasive discourse. First, he lays out his argument in brief; then he delivers a solid piece of reasoning, breaking down his proposal into manageable sections of rationale, supporting data, and challenging questions which he anticipates and answers honestly. Throughout, he keeps to a conversational tone that engages readers with everyday analogies to business practices, common sense appeals to reason, and disarming personal statements about how he has educated himself over the years—admitting to failure and naiveté.

Crash Course makes for easy reading because of the informal and energized style Whittle adopts to analyze an extremely complex and politically charged subject, including funding. He wants nothing less than a radical overhaul of the educational public school system (including large-scale restructuring of sacrosanct givens, such as classroom hours and days and teacher-student ratios and relationships), and he wants change immediately, beginning with congressional legislation that would make it possible to encourage and support competitive administrative and curricular innovation at a funding level commensurate with national need, which is great, especially for poor and minority youngsters, most of whom continue to be ill served, despite good intentions and quick-fix spot successes. Whittle is particularly effective in drawing on comparisons between efficiency models in industry (probably where his argument is vulnerable) to show up, indeed implicitly shame, those who, either out of ignorance or indifference, keep on fiddling to improve the current system.

Whittle neither talks down nor antagonizes. Just the opposite—he so fairly presents the shortcomings of his own learning curve at Edison and sympathetically understands continuing fears and biases, that reasonableness alone suggests Crash Course as required reading. He admires Leave No Child Behind (the right objective and direction) but notes that it’s only a wake-up call, not an R & D incentive (though it should be) to re-conceive an “operating culture,” redo the whole design. Throwing more money into bad investments makes no sense. Though Whittle tends to cite Republicans and corporate leaders for their support of charter schools (he does not particularly vouchers), he does so in a non-partisan spirit (his letter to UFT president Randi Weingarten is a gem of tact and ingenuity). He is proud of being at the head of a for-profit venture that has been invited to partner with a growing number of public schools (over 270,000 students) around the country and in the U.K. Though it seems strange to say so, the passion and the plan as evidenced in this book suggest that Chris Whittle is not in it for the money. He has a “vision”—apparent from the subtitle of the book—”Imagining a Better Future for Public Education”—that he lays out with credible examples, finally inviting political and educational leaders to come together and get going. Now. This is an impressive work that should stimulate dialogue . . . and action.#

Crash Course by Chris Whittle, Riverhead Books, 269 pp., $24.95.

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