Gadfly wasn’t pleased with the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, as the paper saw only bad news in the Philadelphia School District’s decision to take back six of the 38 schools that have been managed by private operators since 2002. Well, Sunday’s Washington Post didn’t find any silver linings either, calling it a “severe setback” and closing with a quote admonishing the supposed “quick fix” mentality behind this reform plan.

We can agree to disagree. But at least the Post did here what it does well—sniff out the politics at play. It reports (and perhaps editorializes) that since 2002, “What has changed in Philadelphia, as elsewhere across the country, appears to be the political atmosphere. Pennsylvania’s governor is now a Democrat, Edward G. Rendell. And the privatization wave now seems a little passé.”

I hope that seeking out quality school managers—and yes, it’s possible those could even exist outside a district bureaucracy—never becomes “passé.” But one fears this could get worse in Philly before it gets better, so I’ll be watching to see if recently-hired schools CEO Arlene Ackerman, a sensible reformer, will withstand or join this anti-privatization wave.

Florida school districts have been recently complaining about state budget cuts in education. Financial management of this sort doesn’t really bolster their case, though.

Some good news from Boston.

Plenty of bad ideas make their way from the business world to education, but here’s a good one: replicate successful school models via franchising. That’s the argument made by business writer Julie Bennett in an essay in the new Education Next. 

In the business world, when the owners of restaurants or retail stores want to expand, they choose between two models: corporate-style growth with central management or franchising. Chains like Starbucks scale up corporately; each of its 7,087 U.S. stores is owned by and managed from its Seattle headquarters. Others, like McDonald’s, follow a franchise model. Though they look and feel much the same, the vast majority of the 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States are operated by a founding franchisee. The advantage of franchising is that it allows an organization to grow rapidly without putting its own intellectual and financial capital at risk. While franchisees are building individual units, the central organization can spend its resources on promoting the brand and developing new products and services.

Bennett goes on to explain that KIPP, the Big Picture Company, and EdVisions Schools belong in the franchise bucket, while Lighthouse Academies, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools are closer to the corporate model. (All of these are non-profit organizations with chains of high-quality charter schools.) Both approaches have their advantages and drawbacks, but KIPP, the Mac Daddy of education franchises, has grown the fastest.

No, schools aren’t businesses and kids aren’t burgers, but neither is education the first field to grapple with replicating success. Which means that our k-12 system shouldn’t be so insular as to ignore lessons from outside its realm. In this instance, a little McHumility might go a long way.

Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of Pinellas County Schools (Florida), the 22nd largest district in the country,  today announced his resignation. After years of controversy, the district just released zoning maps for its new student assignment plan, which doesn’t take race into account when apportioning pupils to schools. The maps are bound to stir things up, and perhaps Wilcox wants to avoid the forthcoming scuffles.

(For fourteen months, Wilcox actually operated a blog, which he briefly shut down, ostensibly because too many comments on his posts were insulting. Flypaper scoffs at such blogging weakness.)

If you’re a school administrator and you want to purchase HDTVs, home-theater equipment, iPods, camcorders (you name it) for personal use on the taxpayer’s dime, then I’ve got a place for you: The Northshore School District in Seattle.

The Seattle Times reports that a Northshore contract provision allows for these kinds of questionable purchases for its approximately 90 top administrators. And here’s the kicker: When the administrators leave their jobs they get to take the equipment with them.

“To buy things for purely personal use out of taxpayer money, that’s what outraged us,” said Donna Lurie, who represents the Northshore Education Office Professionals Association, which represents support staff in the district.

Ms. Lurie should be outraged. Northshore administrators already make, on average, over $100,000 a year along with an excellent benefits package. Unlike, say, teachers, who are underpaid and struggling to make ends meet, these administrators seem to be doing very well for themselves. The last thing they need is to haul off electronic goods at taxpayers’ expense. What makes this even more outrageous is that the district is suffering from a budget crunch, needing to slash $3.4 million in 2008-2009. The administrators’ lavish—and totally unnecessary—perk is siphoning off finite resources, which could be put to better use.

The administrators insist there’s nothing illegal about all of this. True. But it is unethical and unseemly. District budgets should focus on putting the interests of students and teachers first—not padding the expense accounts of already-generously compensated top administrators. Most Northshore taxpayers seem not to be paying attention to this education scandal. Call them asleep in Seattle. They need to wake up and realize they’re being swindled.