Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education by Chris Whittle. Published by Riverhead Books, 2005. 269 pages.
The author is the founder of Channel One, a TV news channel designed for schools that has provided programming and video technology, along with some controversial advertising, to America's public schools. After a few years experience with Channel One, Whittle started the Edison Project in 1992 to manage public schools.
In this book he argues, using reading and math test scores, that public education is failing to do its job. He blames education's problems mainly on the local nature of education that keeps districts small, unable to capture economies of scale, and unable to do large-scale research and development to improve school operations.
His recommendation is to have much greater federal involvement in public education. This would primarily be large scale funding of experimental schools to try out new educational methods, along with universities to teach principals and teachers, and think tanks to develop new curricular programs.
Although the general thrust of his recommendations are pretty blatantly self-serving – he obviously sees the Edison Project as the future Microsoft of public education – some of his reform ideas are interesting and worthy of consideration.
Bob Sibert
