The Company Formerly Known as Edison Schools

This from the Quick and the Ed:

After 16 years, endless controversy, and a sea of red ink, Edison Schools is no longer.

CEO Terry Stecz, who replaced Edison founder Chris Whittle as chief executive in early 2007, announced yesterday that Edison Schools would henceforth be known as edisonlearning, and that the company intends to become a player in education software, focusing on student tracking systems and other "achievement management solutions."

Whittle predicted the company would be managing 1,000 school (sic) with a million students by 2010 when he lured Benno Schmidt away from the Yale presidency to help launch Edison in 1992.

But Whittle and Schmidt could never make the company profitable and after reaching a financial high water mark in February 2001, when the company's stock was worth nearly $2 billion, things went South in hurry when venture capital dried up with the Dot Com Bust, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of Edison's revenue reporting, the company lost a string of contracts, a teacher union-led attack on for-profit school managers intensified, and the work of running schools for mostly disadvantaged kids in poor neighborhoods proved a lot tougher, and less profitable, than the company had expected.

Nor has the company been able to scare up much new business in the No Child Left Behind era, a period where states and schools systems have scrambled to find help in turning around the many failing schools identified by the law.

Edison's competitors haven't fared much better...

More at Education Week:

Trace A. Urdan, the managing director of Baltimore-based investment bank Signal Hill Capital Group LLC, and a longtime analyst of the for-profit education industry told Ed Week,

"They started at the much more difficult end of the spectrum, and now they're moving into the less controversial, arguably easier end," he said. "It's getting away from the idea of, 'We’re here to do what you do better than you do' and into, 'We're selling you something you need and don't have.' "

The only people who didn't know how hard the work is, are those who have never attempted to run a school in a high-stakes environment.