Education and the Commercial Mindset

by Samuel E. Abrams,
The Huffington Post, June 2, 2016

In 1992, a year after he launched The Edison Project, a for-profit venture designed to transform K-12 education in the United States, Chris Whittle lured Benno Schmidt, the president of Yale University, to be his CEO. In a front page story about the appointment, Whittle used a Cold War analogy to describe the revolutionary impact of his new company: “You have to have a West Berlin for East Berlin to fall and what we’re really doing here is building West Berlin.” Whittle predicted that by 2010 Edison would design, build, and run 1,000 schools with 2 million students.