Chris Whittle’s
Crash Course
By Joan Baum Ph.D.
It’s often the case—terrible irony—that
people in the communications field don’t communicate
clearly. Enter Chris Whittle, formerly of Whittle Communications
and Channel One [news in the schools] and, for the last 16
years, CEO of The Edison Schools, with Benno Schmidt as Chairman.
Crash Course, Whittle’s impassioned, thought-provoking
program for education reform (“my true life’s work”),
could easily be a model for how to write persuasive discourse.
First, he lays out his argument in brief; then he delivers
a solid piece of reasoning, breaking down his proposal into
manageable sections of rationale, supporting data, and challenging
questions which he anticipates and answers honestly. Throughout,
he keeps to a conversational tone that engages readers with
everyday analogies to business practices, common sense appeals
to reason, and disarming personal statements about how he has
educated himself over the years—admitting to failure
and naiveté.
Crash Course makes for easy reading because of the informal
and energized style Whittle adopts to analyze an extremely
complex and politically charged subject, including funding.
He wants nothing less than a radical overhaul of the educational
public school system (including large-scale restructuring of
sacrosanct givens, such as classroom hours and days and teacher-student
ratios and relationships), and he wants change immediately,
beginning with congressional legislation that would make it
possible to encourage and support competitive administrative
and curricular innovation at a funding level commensurate with
national need, which is great, especially for poor and minority
youngsters, most of whom continue to be ill served, despite
good intentions and quick-fix spot successes. Whittle is particularly
effective in drawing on comparisons between efficiency models
in industry (probably where his argument is vulnerable) to
show up, indeed implicitly shame, those who, either out of
ignorance or indifference, keep on fiddling to improve the
current system.
Whittle neither talks
down nor antagonizes. Just the opposite—he
so fairly presents the shortcomings of his own learning curve
at Edison and sympathetically understands continuing fears
and biases, that reasonableness alone suggests Crash Course
as required reading. He admires Leave No Child Behind (the
right objective and direction) but notes that it’s only
a wake-up call, not an R & D incentive (though it should
be) to re-conceive an “operating culture,” redo
the whole design. Throwing more money into bad investments
makes no sense. Though Whittle tends to cite Republicans and
corporate leaders for their support of charter schools (he
does not particularly vouchers), he does so in a non-partisan
spirit (his letter to UFT president Randi Weingarten is a gem
of tact and ingenuity). He is proud of being at the head of
a for-profit venture that has been invited to partner with
a growing number of public schools (over 270,000 students)
around the country and in the U.K. Though it seems strange
to say so, the passion and the plan as evidenced in this book
suggest that Chris Whittle is not in it for the money. He has
a “vision”—apparent from the subtitle of
the book—”Imagining a Better Future for Public
Education”—that he lays out with credible examples,
finally inviting political and educational leaders to come
together and get going. Now. This is an impressive work that
should stimulate dialogue . . . and action.#
Crash Course by Chris Whittle, Riverhead Books, 269 pp.,
$24.95.
