Can the Edison Project illuminate dim schools.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Edison Project Inc. to operate charter school in Goldsboro, North Carolina

Three computers, a TV, a VCR in every classroom. Each kid gets a PC to take home, and every teacher, a laptop. The reading curriculum was developed at Johns Hopkins University, and the math, at the University of Chicago. The school day lasts up to two hours longer than the typical one, and the school year stretches an extra month. By the time students graduate from high school, that's two extra years.

Sounds like some high-priced private school, right? Starting this year, it's the setup at one of the lowest-performing public elementary schools in the state, Carver Heights Edison School in Goldsboro. And it's run by a for-profit company, New York-based The Edison Project Inc.

Edison is the brainchild of Chris Whittle the Knoxville, Tenn., entrepreneur who built a media conglomerate, then nearly drove it into bankruptcy. In 1994, his Channel One, which beams newscasts - and commercials - to classrooms, was hemorrhaging money, as were other divisions of Whittle Communications Inc. Whittle sold Channel One to K-III Communications Corp., which has turned its promise into profits. Two other operations, which produced newscasts and magazines for doctors' offices, were shuttered.

Almost everywhere Edison goes, hullabaloo follows, as it did in Chapel Hill, where the school board earlier this year rejected its proposal to run a school slated to open in 1999. As elsewhere, some teachers and parents engaged in a sort of liberal McCarthyism, spitting out the term for profit like an insult. Channel One was held out as evidence that Whittle is more interested in commercialization than education.

Edison may be wrong for North Carolina's public schools, but all the hand wringing obscures the real reason: Its business model seems built on shaky ground. "They assume public schools are fat with bureaucracy and waste," says Nick Didow, a marketing professor at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School. But four years on the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board tell Didow different. "I find it difficult to believe they can operate more efficiently than the lean structure in place in most of the better public-school systems today."

Then there's Whittle himself, Edison's CEO and largest shareholder. He has been called both a visionary and a huckster. He dreams up notions such as Channel One with verve and passion, then sells the concepts as businesses. With Edison, he has come up with another fascinating idea - the curriculum combines cutting-edge practices in elementary...