COLUMN RIGHT : For-Profit Schools Would Deliver : Business strives to reduce waste and respond to consumer demand. Classrooms need that creative dynamism.

Would you send your daughter to McSchool?

Within a few years, parents may have a wide array of corporate schools to choose from. Mom-and-Pop schools might bring back the one-room schoolhouse in an entrepreneurial form. One company’s schools might be efficient enough to give your child a full high-school education in an hour a day, while another might promise to stay open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to accommodate working parents.

Profit-making companies are beginning to go into the school business, confident that they can provide better and less costly education than government schools and still make a profit.

Entrepreneur and marketer Christopher Whittle of Whittle Communications recently announced that his company will build and operate 200 schools around the country by 1996. For almost 20 years, Whittle has been finding new ways to transmit information using magazines distributed on campus and in doctors’ waiting rooms, and with free books and specialized television programs for doctors and students. Because Whittle delivers information in new ways and at a profit, he is frequently criticized by competitors, and his new venture is no exception.

California schools Supt. Bill Honig’s immediate response was, “Watch out. Chris Whittle . . . tends to let the commercial side take precedence over the educational side.” Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was more positive, noting that a for-profit school “would have the freedom to try things that the public educational bureaucracy can’t do.” But he, too, warned of “crass commercialism.”

Of course, one of the advantages of a private, for-profit school is that parents would be free to take their children elsewhere if a school was crassly commercial or otherwise unacceptable.

It is parents’ dissatisfaction with government schools that is fueling a growing search for alternatives. People are beginning to notice the success of the “choice” program in New York City’s East Harlem that allows parents to send their children to any public school in the district. In 1988, Minnesota created a statewide choice plan in public schools. Wisconsin state Rep. Polly Williams, chairman of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in her state, got Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson to support her proposal to allow 1,000 low-income Milwaukee students to opt out of government schools and use state-funded vouchers to attend private schools. And Chelsea, Mass., has turned the management of its schools over to Boston University for the next 10 years.

Some education analysts have begun to call for more fundamental reforms. Lewis Perlman of the Hudson Institute points out that we could get 16 years of education--a high school diploma and a college degree--in 10 minutes at a cost of 5 cents if education had improved its efficiency over the past 40 years at the same pace as the computer industry. That may be an unfair comparison, but it is sobering to realize that our classrooms still look the same as they did 200 years ago, except that we have more teachers per student than we did then, in sharp contrast to every industry in the competitive sector of the economy, where firms are continually learning to produce more with fewer employees.

Myron Lieberman, author of several books on educational reform, has long argued that we will not see innovation, cost-cutting and creativity in our schools until profit-making firms get into the business of education. Private companies are constantly striving to reduce waste and respond to consumer demand. Their productivity record is invariably superior to that of government monopolies.

Private enterprise is becoming more involved in education. Many major firms provide vocational training for their employees, and more and more are offering remedial education to high school graduates who never learned to read or do arithmetic. Sylvan Learning Centers and its competitors offer after-school assistance to struggling students; and Ombudsman Educational Services Ltd. contracts with school districts to provide individualized instruction for students about to drop out. The Dade County (Fla.) school system has contracted with a for-profit company to run an elementary school for five years.

Whittle’s undertaking is far more elaborate than those isolated efforts. We may at last see some real educational reform, the kind that doesn’t have to pass muster with a dozen special-interest groups in every state capital and will be focused strictly on delivering the kinds of education that parents are willing to pay for.