School Daze

Real Conversations
NARRATOR: His employer, Edison Schools, Inc., is engaged in the largest corporate takeover of public schools ever, against the wishes of all the teachers here.

TEACHER: If everything is so great, if everything is so positive, like you're saying, if, you know, everything is so successful, why are we reading over and over again that Edison has failed here and has failed there, and they haven't turned a profit in 10 years? This doesn't make any sense to me.

EDISON REP.: That's a very fair question. First of all, no one is perfect, all right? So I don't want you to think every single one of our schools--

PEGGY SHRIVER, Teacher: I feel like they sidestepped every question. They went around every question, to the point where people forgot what the original question was, and that's why we had to keep asking them the same questions. Everything was a "maybe," "could be" and "they may decide," "it's at your discretion."

NARRATOR: The day did not go as Edison had hoped. In the end, the school salesman was lucky to get out of town with his own shirt. From FrontLine