Regarding the Nov. 4 editorial ”Nova burns out“: While it’s tempting to believe that what happened to students and teachers in the Nova fiasco is an aberration, the truth is that as long as education is run as a business similar disasters will occur. That’s because entrepreneurs are interested solely in profits. Unless strict oversight is maintained, they will sacrifice everyone and everything to achieve their goal. In education, economies of scale do not exist. Because education is so labor intensive, it costs as much to open one school as it does 100.
Edison Schools here in the United States serve as an instructive case study. In the early 1990s, investors were convinced that for-profit businesses could manage schools better than public boards of education. But by 2002, Edison was in deep trouble. Its stock had plummeted from $37 to as little as 14 cents. The only reason that Edison is still around is that the Florida Retirement System, a pension fund for public employees of which nearly half are teachers, purchased the company for $182 million.
The irony of a nonprofit pension fund rescuing a for-profit company somehow escaped the attention of the media. In light of the Nova scandal, Japan can’t afford to do the same.
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