Education Inc.: can privatized public education happen in Indiana?

• Author: Kronemyer, Bob

This fall, thousands of children in Hartford, Boston, Miami Beach and Milwaukee are attending public schools managed by for-profit corporations, which are striving to improve efficiency and bolster scholastic achievement. Could private management of public schools happen here in Indiana?

"I think it can happen," says H. Dean Evans, president and CEO of Community Leaders Allied for Superior Schools (CLASS), an Indianapolis consortium of 48 business leaders formed in 1989 to improve area schools. However, cautions Evans, the former state superintendent of public instruction, "The jury is still out as to whether or not that is going to be an effective way to improve learning and achievement."

In 1992, the city of Baltimore turned over the keys of one middle school and eight elementary schools to Educational Alternatives Inc., one of two major players in the private management of schools (the other being The Edison Project). Results so far have been mixed, but have been encouraging enough to persuade the city of Hartford, Conn., to hire the firm to run its entire public school system.

"The innovation holds great promise," says Carol D'Amico, director of the Educational Excellence Network, a project of the Hudson Institute, a not-for-profit research organization headquartered in Indianapolis. "The private sector has the flexibility and the imagination to devise more options for which public education can be delivered." For example, she says, Educational Alternatives in Baltimore has made improvements favored by the teachers.

Still, many teachers have expressed concern that privatization will mean the erosion of organized labor. "Business is always undermining unions,"...