COLUMN ONE : One Giant Leap for Education? : In Tennessee, a team of educators, journalists and technology specialists plots a ‘revolution’ in America’s school system. One big goal: making a profit.

The stately red brick edifice, newly erected in the midst of this small Tennessee River city’s slightly stagnant downtown, seems an unlikely place to plot the rebirth of American education.

But for months, an elite, eclectic group of men and women has been hunkered down in the wood-paneled headquarters of the Whittle Communications media empire, intent on designing a controversial system of private campuses with juxtaposed goals: revolutionizing schooling for the nation’s children and making money for investors.

Like hundreds of others working on school reform across the country, these four men and three women are embracing such concepts as stronger student-teacher bonds, greater parent involvement, a longer school day and year, and higher academic expectations--techniques that are producing results on many public campuses.

Unlike other reform campaigns, the framers of this unapologetically commercial effort expect to have enough cash to realize their vision while charging tuitions roughly equal to the $5,600 per student available to run public schools.

The project is the brainchild of communications entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, who has pledged up to $60 million for research and planning and wants to raise $2 billion to $3 billion more to open the first campuses--perhaps as many as 100--by the fall of 1996. By 2010, Whittle expects up to 2 million students at 1,000 campuses.

Although final decisions about locations have not been made, Whittle officials say that at least one of the initial campuses will be in Southern California, probably in the San Fernando Valley. After trying out their ideas with parents in five cities last month, school designers expect to unveil their plans in the spring.

“This is a big leap,” said Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who boosted the project’s prestige last spring when he resigned as president of Yale University to direct the new venture. “But if I didn’t think the time was ripe for revolution and that new models were just urgently needed, I wouldn’t be doing this.”

Whittle’s well publicized May, 1991, announcement of the Edison Project (so named because the inventor came up with the light bulb instead of merely improving the candle) was hailed by some as the kind of free-market thinking needed to revitalize the nation’s schools. But it was damned by others, including many educators, as a scheme to mine profits while draining public schools of the easier-to-educate students and their families.

Even some who see no problem with the commercial aspects of the project doubt that it can provide a high-quality education at a price that will make the venture profitable.

“I think there are two chances that it will work--slight and none,” said John T. Golle, head of Education Alternatives, a commercial firm that is struggling to turn around several troubled Baltimore public schools.

To devise the model for the Edison school, Whittle recruited two scholars who are prominent in national education circles, two magazine editors, a highly regarded veteran of urban public schools, a multimedia producer and a businessman who specializes in the private management of public services.

Last summer, Whittle moved most of the core team members and their families from their homes in New York, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and London to the Georgian-style, campus-like office complex he built in his home state. Two of the team, plus Schmidt, commuted to Knoxville weekly during the six-month initial planning phase and continue to do much of their work in New York.

Most education experts who have been consultants on the project give team members high marks for intelligence and energy, but a few have questioned the wisdom of including several non-educators.

“These are very bright, alert, intense, very motivated people,” said University of Michigan psychology professor Harold W. Stevenson, who has written extensively about schools in Taiwan and Japan and who led a seminar for the Edison Project designers. “But I was amazed that (Whittle picked) so few people in education. . . . They have a long way to go in knowing the dynamics of schools and teachers and the minds of children.”

Whittle said he was attracted by team members’ brains, creativity and accomplishments. He reportedly courted them with very generous salaries and a chance to make education history.

“For those of us who have existed, at least in part, in the world of theory, this is a chance to do it as opposed to just talking about it. It presents a major challenge and a major opportunity,” said team member Chester E. (Checker) Finn Jr., a Vanderbilt University professor who was a ranking Education Department official during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

The Harvard-educated Finn has long been an advocate for higher academic standards, competition among schools and giving parents vouchers for tax money to spend on private or parochial school tuition. An informal adviser to former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, Finn helped write the George Bush Administration’s education reform proposals, which included national standards and vouchers.

Other team members are:

* John E. Chubb, a Brookings Institution fellow who added to the mushrooming debate over vouchers with the 1990 book he wrote with Stanford Prof. Terry M. Moe, “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools.” Like Finn, he is an articulate, outspoken advocate of high academic standards, which he believes are to be achieved in part by requiring students to spend more time in the classroom.

* Sylvia L. Peters, a seasoned principal credited with turning around a school in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. She met Whittle when they were guests on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour television program a week after he announced his school venture. Peters, who is black, is the team’s only racial minority.

* Nancy Hechinger caught Whittle’s attention with her background in technology, particularly in interactive multimedia--a hot new educational tool that uses computers to allow students to manipulate or interact with text, sound, maps, photos or other images. She co-founded Hands On Media, which has produced learning programs on such topics as U.S. immigration.

* Lee Eisenberg, a former editor of Esquire magazine, which Whittle owned for several years with then-partner Phillip Moffitt. Eisenberg came to the Edison Project from London, where he had opened a bureau for the magazine.

* Dominique Browning, another former editor, who ran the “back-of-the-book” lifestyle sections for Newsweek. Before that, she worked for Esquire and Texas monthly and helped launch two other magazines, Savvy and American Photographer.

* Daniel Biederman, president of two partnerships in New York who specializes in forming private concerns to run--and, in some cases, fund--public services.

From last summer through the fall, the team assembled for brainstorming sessions for half the week, then used the remaining days for individual research. The planning sessions were chaired by Schmidt and usually attended by Whittle, both of whom flew in from their homes in New York.

Most weeks, an expert was invited to lead seminars on school organization, student assessment, learning theories and other topics.

Sometimes team members took turns leading sessions, including some aimed at loosening up thinking. Peters once had the others cut out shapes to form “nonverbal biographies.” In another exercise, Finn had his colleagues write down obstacles to educational excellence, then switch papers and pose solutions, then switch again.

By late fall, the team produced six school designs, each required to cost no more to operate than its public counterpart. The six models have been blended into one prototype, which will be refined throughout the spring as sessions with prospective participants continue.

Whittle has kept a lid on most of the details, barring all but guest lecturers and team members from planning sessions. But based on talks with the project’s key players and parents who attended recent marketing sessions in Los Angeles, it is possible to sketch the broad outlines of an Edison school.

About 1,300 students, ages 3 to 18, would be clustered on a modern, 35-acre campus open 12 hours a day, 11 months a year.

The campus would have two full-time administrators, aided by parents who agree to volunteer their time when they enroll their children. With no state or federal programs to run and report on and few regulations to comply with, the administrators have little paperwork. A computer system tied into other Edison schools would take care of much of the payroll and other accounting work.

Each classroom would have about the same number of students as public schools. But there would be more adults--a teacher, who would be aided, for example, by two volunteers and a student from a teacher training institute that Whittle dreams of opening.

Students would span three grade levels and be with the same teacher for three years. At times, older students would go to the elementary site to help teach math to younger ones--an activity designed to help cement their mathematics understanding through tutoring others. All the students would have laptop computers, purchased from the school, that they tote back and forth each day the way their parents used to lug books. Whittle calls them “the new lunch box.”

A large television would play Channel One, Whittle’s commercial-laden current events program. A typical 10-minute segment would describe Supreme Court decisions and be interspersed with two minutes of commercials for Clearasil, Snickers and Pepsi.

There would be a large, well-equipped faculty work suite, where teachers could hold planning sessions on themes for lessons in mathematics, literature, science and history.

Reflecting the design team’s belief in the importance of teachers, the highest-paid person in the school would be a teacher, who would command twice as much as her public school counterparts. She would supervise her younger, less experienced colleagues, who would earn less than those in public schools. None would have a union contract.

Tuitions for the Los Angeles area would be $7,000 to $8,000--considerably higher than the $4,621 California spends per public school child but slightly lower than tuitions charged by the area’s academically elite, nonprofit private schools.

Staff-to-student ratios would be 1 to 15, and the schools would offer strong and engaging programs in academics, moral and social values, the arts and physical education, assisted by the latest in classroom technology. Parents and older students would help run the school to save money and to foster a home-to-campus connection.

“In theory, it’s wonderful,” said businessman Mark Holden of Sherman Oaks, who with his wife, Jackie, attended a session led by Schmidt. “But it seems much too good to be true--the numbers just don’t add up to me,” said Holden, reflecting a skepticism voiced by several other parents who attended the meetings.

Other parents, noting that most of those attending the sessions were middle-class Anglos, touched on a question that has followed Edison Project planners from the start--how well will Edison schools reflect the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity found in the nation’s public schools? And what, if anything, will Edison schools offer for the handicapped, the learning disabled and other students with special needs?

Although Whittle pledged from the start to include troubled inner-city neighborhoods in his plans, the majority of Edison Project campuses are likely to be in the suburbs. Whittle’s finance and marketing teams--who want to begin buying sites in the fall--are watching rapidly growing areas and looking for communities whose leaders could be helpful with zoning and other regulatory matters.

Concerns about which students Whittle was aiming for caused Nancy Hechinger, the multimedia expert, to hesitate before signing on.

“My biggest worry was over what was the real commitment to all children,” Hechinger said. “I had been skeptical, but I’m convinced there really is a higher mission to what we’re doing.”

Whittle also promised to offer scholarships to 20% of students. But the proportion of students on scholarships probably will vary markedly, he said, from 1% at a campus in a wealthy area to 95% at a school in a poverty-ridden neighborhood. Because tuitions would vary according to the per-pupil spending of local public schools, funds could be siphoned from Edison schools in affluent neighborhoods and sent to poor communities to help offset operating and scholarship costs there.

Such a practice, assuming tuition-paying parents accept it, would add up to the poor, largely African-American and Latino students being isolated from middle class, mainly Anglo and Asian-American students, critics say.

Whittle counters that racial and socioeconomic isolation exist in most public schools, which draw largely from their surrounding, often homogeneous neighborhoods.

Questions about financing and marketability have dogged the project from the start. How can anyone offer a well-rounded, high-quality education in pleasant and functional surroundings with scholarships and attention to special needs for the same cost as a public school and still make a profit?

Besides administrative costs, Whittle believes that significant savings can be realized from having students and parents pitch in. Others working on the Edison Project applaud the parent-volunteers notion as educationally sound but doubt that it will save much money. They also wonder whether people who spend thousands of dollars a year in tuition would be willing to clean classrooms and run cafeterias so investors can make money.

Most project planners expect that the savings--and profits--lie in ancillary services and sales. The company could market the computer programs, curricula and teacher training institutes. It could also contract with public school districts to run programs or entire schools.

To raise capital to build the first network of schools, Whittle is considering taking on “strategic partners,” corporations that could derive spinoff business from the schools, as well as issuing stock and borrowing heavily.

Research and development money came from Whittle and other limited partners: media conglomerate Time Warner; Philips Ventures, a Dutch electronics firm, and Associated Newspapers of Great Britain, all of which would be well positioned to reap profits from spinoff goods and services--such as books, computers or software--if the project succeeds.

“There’s probably nobody in the whole deal who doesn’t occasionally say: ‘Is this thing gonna work?’ ” said Hamilton Jordan, a former Jimmy Carter Administration official who works for Whittle in strategic planning and market research. “But that is where you have to look at Chris’ experience. He’s been a pioneer in making new things happen.”

The task would be easier if states begin to adopt tax money voucher programs to put toward private school tuition. But no state has approved such a controversial notion, and Bush’s defeat last fall dimmed prospects for a federal voucher system.

That means large numbers of parents must be persuaded that Edison schools will be worth the estimated average tuition of $6,000.

“I am convinced it is possible to create a much better school, and you can certainly do it for what the average public school spends,” Chubb said.

“But I’m still not sure you can convince parents that they can have a better-educated child and that it is worth paying for,” Chubb added. “For 95% of families, $6,000 is an awful lot of money.”

Tomorrow in Business: How entrepreneur Christopher Whittle hopes to finance his chain of private schools.