Whittling at the wall

AT FIRST glance, Chris Whittle seems an unlikely entrant to the education business.

He's a yuppie, an entrepreneurial overachiever. He doesn't blush at the prospect of making a lot of money. Education, on the other hand, is usually thought of as a labor of love.

But Whittle, like most Americans, realizes the nation's public schools aren't doing the job. Additional money that goes into them is inversely proportional to the success of their students. For Whittle, today's public schools are the equivalent of East Berlin: "If you want institutions to change, you've got to have a West Berlin that gives them a place to go." Whittle's plan: to open a nationwide franchise of 200 schools by 1996.

All that currently exists of Whittle's venture is a general philosophy, incorporated into its name, the Edison Project: "You can't make a light bulb out of a candle," says the 44-year-old Whittle. "The power sources are different." And, he likes to add, "light bulbs are cheaper." His venture is not about reform, he explains. It's a whole new way of educating America.

He is now spending some $60 million to get his idea into the blueprint stage. He has hired seven core thinkers: John Chubb of the Brookings Institution; Lee Eisenberg, former edltot-in-chief of Esquire (which Whittle used to own); Chester Finn, who served under William Bennett at the Education Department; Nancy Hechinger, an imaginative video producer; Sylvia Peters, an inner-city Chicago principal who transformed a bureaucratic nightmare into a working school; Daniel Biederman, president of the Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships in New York, which cleans public lands with private money; and Dominique Browning, former assistant managing editor at Newsweek. Clearly an assemblage that is far outside the education establishment.

Then there's Benno Schmidt, CEO and president of the venture, who resigned as president of Yale this spring, frustrated at an opposition faculty and student body, and discouraged at the growing bands of multiculturalists.

This brain trust meets fairly regularly, tossing around ideas, hoping a plan will eventually materialize. There's disagreement, but happy disagreement, says Chester Finn. The group is currently in free thought-- no constraints, no limitations on their ideas. Finn hypothesizes that "we may throw the whole education process out the window." Teaching "may not be broken down into subjects, and the schools may not be split up into classrooms .... But we just don't know."

The schools may open for 12-hour days, with pupils and teachers coming in shifts. Summer is not necessarily vacation time. The schools may include children as young as a year old. Time and Newsweek, Whittle says, may be required reading. And it's almost certain that computers and video will play a major role. For instance, when challenged with the prospect that he'll have to have 100 to 1 student-to-teacher ratios in order to cut costs, Whittle says more like 10,000 to 1---or 100,000 to 1--by using electronically the "country'z best lecturers." Another possibility is to have students clean toilets and hallways-you know, it builds discipline, instills pride ... saves money. Not your standard Thomas Jefferson High School.

Benno Schmidt's main task is to raise $2 to $3 billion to get the schools built and running. Schmidt's strong suit as Yale president was his fund-raising ability: the endowment grew from $1.7 billion when he started in 1986 to $3 billion today. But it's one thing to raise $1 billion for one of the nation's most prestigious universities and quite another to do it for something that is just an idea of a man who has made his money not in education but in publishing magazines.

Whittle has already entered the education business, however--with Channel One, a 12-minute news program shown to students in participating schools. Much like MTIFs news, Channel One deals with the day's burning issues--such as how to stop environmental destruction of the world--and does so with slick charts and graphics. News stories are broken up with ads. That's where Whittle makes the money--about $100 million in ad revenue a year.

But parents complain they have a hard enough time keeping kids away from the TV and in front of the books after school. Now what will happen, when kids are in front of the tube during school? In certain school districts, protests are forcing adminstrators to pull the show. On top of that, a study of students who wztched Channel One revealed recently that it had had little success in informing kids about current events. Whittle Communications doesn't dispute the study.

The Edison Project, however, is much more ambitious--and the people Whittle has brought in to run it are motivated to create an enduring system of education and not simply a money-making enterprise. The project is getting rave reviews. Hamilton Jordan has nothing but praise for the brain child, which is why he signed on to help with public relations (with a brief leave of absence to run the illfated Perot campaign).