In 1991 Christopher Whittle, a media entrepreneur, and Benno Schmidt, a former president of Yale University, founded theEdisonProject, with plans to create a chain of 1, 000 for-profit schools.
Similarly, preliminary evaluations of theEdisonProject, a private firm which manages 12 local schools, demonstrate that students have made significant academic gains on student achievement tests in three of the four Edison schools that opened in 1995.