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Article: Schools, For-Profit
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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SCHOOLS, FOR-PROFIT
SCHOOLS, FOR-PROFIT.
The idea of schools for profit is rooted in the growing discontent with public schools that began in the 1960s, but an experiment in performance contracting, the hiring by public schools of private companies to provide instruction with remuneration dependent on student achievement, was deemed ineffective in a 1972 government report. Responding to widespread calls in the late 1980s for broad educational reforms, the media entrepreneur Christopher Whittle and the businessman John Golle offered for-profit school plans to redesign U.S. schools. In May 1991 Whittle announced the Edison Project, a plan for a multibillion-dollar chain of 150 to 200 ...