Wednesday, January 12, 2000 in New York Times
By EDWARD WYATT
Having helped transform the American economy over the past two decades, a loosely knit group of corporate titans is now taking its ideas about business, investment and management and applying them to a different topic: education.
The group’s aim is nothing less than overhauling the nation’s system of public schools, eliminating what it calls the government’s monopoly in education and allowing parents to choose which school their children will attend at government expense.
The idea that business offers a model for education is not new. But these participants — wealthy businessmen like Ted Forstmann, the billionaire leveraged buyout specialist; John Walton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, and John Doerr, the technology venture capitalist — are pushing the discussion to a different level, hoping to use their fortunes and stature to steer the debate.
The men, whose preliminary efforts have so far been limited to lobbying, philanthropy and investment but who plan more direct involvement in education reform, envision the government serving as a sort of A.T.M., dispensing to parents the $7,000 or so that public schools spend per pupil. Parents could then use that money to send their children to whatever school they want.
The businessmen hope to draw new providers to education, including, perhaps, companies like Microsoft and National Geographic. If the public schools can compete in that environment, they say, fine. If not, they should be shut down.
“I’ve never led a revolution before,” Mr. Forstmann said. “But I didn’t get here without understanding supply and demand. Parents believe the public school government monopoly produces a bad product at a high price. So why are no suppliers rushing forward to cater to them?”
Mr. Walton, whose family grew wealthy building Wal-Mart stores in suburbs and rural areas starved for competitively priced goods, argues that when stores do not go into the inner city, it is because the residents lack the buying power to allow the stores to be profitable.
But if inner-city parents were given the option of sending their children to a private school with the money that would otherwise go to the local public school, they would have buying power equal to that of suburban parents, Mr. Walton said.
Today, the three men will gather with politicians, educators and investors at a conference in Manhattan to try to stimulate investment in education. The conference is sponsored by Merrill Lynch and the Children’s Scholarship Fund, the organization co-founded by Mr. Forstmann and Mr. Walton, which this year began distributing $200 million in partial private-school scholarships to 40,000 children around the country.
Clearly some of the interests of these new participants in education lie in profits and politics. Mr. Doerr, for example, invests heavily in for-profit educational ventures through the New Schools Venture Fund. Mr. Walton is active in conservative politics, and Mr. Doerr is a campaign adviser to Vice President Al Gore. The men said the profit motive was not a bad sign but a good one.
“I will tell you that some people in this effort are actually going to make money,” Mr. Forstmann said. “They are, like everybody else who does a good job.”
But these men face what might be called the C.E.O.’s dilemma, said Douglas Archbald, a professor of education at the University of Delaware.
“Think about how slow the process of learning to read or write is for an individual kid,” Dr. Archbald said. “It takes years to see the result of changes in education. A new C.E.O. can come in and downsize a company or start a new product line, and those changes can quickly appear on the bottom line. But you can’t just go into the schools and make people more accountable, tweak the budget here and there and see substantially better results in a year or two.”
Those concerns have not dimmed the ardor of Mr. Forstmann and his counterparts, who say they know they are battling something far more powerful than teachers unions, entrenched bureaucracy or special political interests.
“Conventional wisdom just has a choke hold on most good people in America in this area,” said Mr. Forstmann, who bought and turned around Gulfstream, the maker of business jets.
“These people are always telling you how impossible it is,” he said about educational change. “It’s not impossible at all. What do you think’s harder, making jet engines or teaching kids reading, writing and arithmetic? I hope you don’t have to think too hard about that.”
Critics say Mr. Forstmann and his colleagues fail to understand education and how it is run.
“The problem isn’t who provides the schools, whether they’re public or private or for-profit,” said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. “It’s who can beat the achievement gap between blacks and whites and between urban schools and those in the suburbs.”
Other issues will have to be dealt with as well. In a free market system, companies typically spend a large amount of money on marketing and advertising. That would mean that public school dollars would be used to attract more public school dollars — arguably a questionable use of taxpayer funds.