Whittle was born in Etowah, Tennessee. After graduating from the University of Tennessee with a major in American Studies, Whittle started the magazine Knoxville in a Nutshell with Phillip Moffitt and others. He started the 13-30 Corporation in Knoxville. In 1979 13-30 bought Esquire magazine, where Whittle served as chairman and publisher for a number of years. In 1986, 13-30 became Whittle Communications, which was one of America's top 100 media companies in the late 1980s - known for creating and publishing single-advertiser magazines that were placed in medical office waiting rooms. In 1989, Whittle Communications launched Channel One News, a national in-school television news program. Channel One News' programming reached eight million students daily in 12,000 schools and won the Peabody Award. Whittle sold the company in 1994. He is the author of Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education, published in 2005, and wrote a chapter on the rise of global schooling for Customized Schooling: Beyond Whole-School Reform, published by Harvard Education Press in 2011. Whittle sits on the board of the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C. In October 2010 he received an "accomplished alumnus" award from the University of Tennessee, his alma mater, where he has funded more than 180 full scholarships. Whittle has been criticized, including by Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and author of, for large expenditures at his companies.
Edison Schools
Whittle served on the board of EdisonLearning, the company he founded with Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. in 1992. Edison was an early pioneer in public/private partnerships in K-12 education in America. EdisonLearning now serves 450,000 students on three continents through the schools it operates and a variety of other educational programs. Edison Schools was a public company from 1999 to 2003, with its stock traded on the NASDAQ. After reaching a high of close to USD$40 per share in early 2001, shares fell as low as 14 cents. The company was taken private in 2003, in a buyout which valued the company at $180 million or $1.76 per share.
Whittle was the co-founder of Avenues: The World School, which opened in September 2012 in New York City in the neighborhood of Chelsea. He resigned from Avenues to pursue his next venture: Whittle School & Studios.
Whittle School & Studios
Whittle is chairman and CEO of Whittle School & Studios, launched in February 2015. In the fall of 2019, the first two campuses will open, in Shenzhen China, and Washington, D.C. By 2026, Whittle plans to expand to a system of 30+ major campuses in the world’s leading cities. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop of Genoa, Italy, each campus will have 600,000 square feet and serve approximately 2,500 students, ages 3 to 18, with about 160 students per grade. Roughly 60 percent will be day students, and the remaining 40 percent will be weekly and full boarders. At capacity, Whittle School & Studios will be a highly integrated global learning community with a faculty of more than 10,000 teachers serving more than 90,000 full-time, on-campus students as well as hundreds of thousands of other students joining part-time, either virtually or on campus.
