Yale President Outlines His Ideas for Private-School Experiment : Education: Benno Schmidt, who is resigning college post, says public systems may also learn from the for-profit project.

Yale University President Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who is leaving his post to head an ambitious venture to create a nationwide system of profit-making private schools, said he sees the experiment “as a way to bring new vitality to public schools in the United States.”

During a news conference Tuesday in New Haven, Conn., at which he announced his resignation from the financially embattled Ivy League university effective later this year, Schmidt explained his reasons for deciding to become president and chief executive officer of the Edison Project.

Since the Edison Project--the brainchild of Tennessee businessman Christopher Whittle--was announced a year ago, educators’ reactions to it have ranged from deep skepticism to great enthusiasm. In 1990, Whittle stirred controversy when his company launched Channel One, a commercial-riddled classroom television news program. “The schools of America . . . are in difficulty and need fundamental structural change, not tinkering around the edges,” Schmidt said, urging Americans to “think in a fresh way about the nature, purposes and scope of schools.”

Schmidt, predicting the Edison Project would be a boon to the movement to upgrade the nation’s schools, said public education is in need of “real reform.”

“If this venture I’m embarking on now will be a failure, it will be a noble failure and we will learn a lot from it that will be of use,” he said.

Knoxville-based Whittle Communications, which conceived the project in partnership with Time Warner Inc., Associated Newspapers Holdings Ltd. and Philips Electronics N.V., plans to open 1,000 schools, the first 100 in 1996. An eclectic, seven-member design team is expected to begin work in Knoxville this summer.

Whittle has said that in order to build campuses and offer scholarships for the expected 20% enrollment of low-income students and still make a profit, he must operate the schools at a cost considerably lower than the average $5,000 per pupil expended by the nation’s public schools today. That amount includes funds for students with special needs.

To cut costs, Whittle expects to rely on technology to replace some teachers and aides, having students clean the campuses instead of employing full-time janitorial staffs and franchising cafeteria operations. He also plans to greatly reduce administrative costs.

He expects to select students randomly from an applicant pool but has not said whether he plans to accept those who have educational or physical handicaps, do not speak English fluently or have other expensive special needs.

That is a key question, according to Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor and education reform expert.

“I can’t imagine he is going to do these schools (at a profit) and take handicapped kids,” Kirst said. “If he is going to take the full gamut of children, including the blind and the retarded and all of that, then I question whether he can do it.”

Nonetheless, Kirst said he is excited about the potential of the project, which he called “the kind of big, bold experiment we need” to engender widespread school reform.

He said Whittle’s goal of demonstrating how public schools can operate more efficiently could be realized if the project can find ways to use technology to save money while improving learning, use classroom space more effectively and reduce maintenance costs.

The Whittle effort comes at a time of intense interest in private schools, with the federal government promoting a voucher system and sponsoring its own New American Schools Development Corp., which soon will announce privately funded grants to design innovative campuses.

But some educators are highly skeptical of Whittle’s plan and other private-sector efforts to treat schools as a business enterprise.

“I’m tremendously distressed that all of this effort is not directed at helping public schools. . . . If this is being done to help public schools, then why not just do it more directly?” asked Roger Soder, associate director of the University of Washington’s Center for Educational Renewal.

The design team Schmidt will head is a varied group and includes some big names in the reform movement. Among them are John E. Chubb, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-author of a controversial book advocating the privatization of public schools; Chester E. Finn Jr., a Vanderbilt University professor and an assistant education secretary in the Ronald Reagan Administration, and Sylvia L. Peters, an elementary school principal from Chicago widely credited with transforming an inner-city campus. Peters is the only panel member who has run a school.