How Edison survived: discredited and broke, the school privatizer found an unlikely white knight.(Florida Retirement System and Liberty Partners)

In the early 1990s media entrepreneur Chris Whittle became the darling of the free-market, antigovernment right by promising that private, for-profit businesses could manage schools better than public boards of education. His Edison Schools, he claimed, would grow into a corporate giant by educating children better and more cheaply than public schools. Teachers' unions were initially skeptical, then increasingly critical as the results came in. But Whittle attracted both enthusiastic investors and support from politicians like Republican Governors George Bush, Tom Ridge and William Weld. After Edison went public in 1999, its stock price doubled in two years.

But ...