Threatened by success: One charter school's fight against the education establishment.

IN 1998, EDISON SCHOOLS INC., the country's leading for-profit school management company, took over one of San Francisco's worst schools, coincidentally named Thomas Edison Elementary. By its third year, the K-5 school, now renamed Edison Charter Academy, was on the way up. Its once rock-bottom test scores had risen in every grade and every subject for every racial/ ethnic group. Black and Latino students, who make up 83 percent of enrollment, had made the greatest gains. Violence was down. Enrollment was up. Parents were enthusiastic.

"I like it," says Karen Aldana, who graduated from Edison Charter's fifth grade in June. She enjoyed the "Success for All" reading program and the charter school's "specials," music, art, Spanish, and physical education (P.E.) "She can read perfectly in English and Spanish;' says her mother proudly.

"It's so clearly working," says Allegra Harrison, whose daughter is an Edison Charter third grader. Not everyone agreed. In January 2001, halfway through the company's five-year contract, the San Francisco school board launched a campaign to revoke the charter and take back the school. Board president Jill Wynns, who told the press she's "philosophically opposed to for-profit management," was supported by two newly elected trustees, Mark Sanchez, who taught at Thomas Edison in the pre-charter days, and Eric Mar, a lawyer and ethnic studies lecturer at San Francisco State whose wife is active in the local teachers union.

Six months later, however, the board backed down. Edison Schools Inc. now runs the school under a charter from the State Board of Education. The Battle of Edison Charter turned on competing ideas about accountability. To its enemies, Edison Charter Academy wasn't accountable to the public--that is, to the elected school board--but rather to corporate execs in New York City and the company's stockholders. But most people want schools held accountable for their performance, and that is what the school board failed to understand. Edison Charter Academy survived because it had higher test scores and satisfied parents.

Although its school-board critics thought they were mounting an attack on corporate interests, they instead found themselves battling parents. More than 80 percent of those parents signed a petition supporting Edison Charter when it came under attack. In such a face-off, not even the teachers union would side with the board. It was a battle, in other words, between education and a school board's ideology. This time, education won. This is the story of that struggle.

San Francisco's school board oversees a district with dramatic inequities between its best and worst schools, and an enrollment scheme that strongly favors savvy parents who know how to work the system to get their kids into the good schools. That means that the city's bad schools only get worse as they become dumping grounds for the most difficult students.

The board's finances are such a mess that state legislators have threatened to place the district under state receivership. In May, an audit by the Andersen accounting firm found that, since 1997, $30 million earmarked for school construction had been spent improperly on salaries. The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered records showing $60 million in construction bonds diverted to salaries since 1989. Superintendent Arlene Ackerman announced an FBI investigation into the district's handling of a $50 million federal technology grant and a $32 million energy-savings contract.

Given all the problems in the San Francisco Unified School District, why did the school board pick a fight with Edison? In part, it was about money. In 1998, a flamboyant, free-spending superintendent named Bill Rojas had pushed the charter through, shortly afterward decamping for Dallas. (Rojas now works for Advantage Schools, an Edison competitor.) Wynns thought Rojas had given Edison a sweetheart contract that failed to charge the corporation for busing, rent on the school, or administrative services, such as passing through federal and state funding and handing payroll. She claimed the Edison deal was costing the district $1,000 a student. (A charter elementary in a rent-free school typically pays the district 3 percent of its revenues-$125 to $180 per student--to cover administrative and building costs.) Yet at the same time, Edison's critics were complaining that the corporation was putting too much money into the school. With donations and stockholders' money, the company was able to fund extras--musi c, art, Spanish, P.E., technology, a longer school day--that other city elementary students don't get. It wasn't fair.

Ultimately, the school board kept coming back to intangible reasons for revoking the charter. "I am absolutely thinking about what's best for kids and parents at Edison;' Wynns said in January when she announced her crusade to revoke the contract. "I truly believe that Edison has damaged our sense of cohesiveness about public education. This has fractured our community."

But Edison Charter principal Vincent Matthews questioned the board's motives. "Is their bottom line ideology or student achievement?" The school's parents believe they know what's best for their own kids. The problem with Edison Charter, they say, is not that it's not educating Latino and black children. It's that it's educating them too well. According to them, San Francisco Unified can't stand to see a corporation succeed at a school where the district failed for so many years.

"What are they really afraid of?" asks Lupe Hernandez, parent of a second grader. "That the success will continue? That people will find out about it?" Hernandez chose Edison Charter for its curriculum, longer day, and uniforms; she also wanted her son taught in English, but with the chance to develop his Spanish in World Languages class. Despite his Attention Deficit Disorder, her son learned to read in kindergarten and now reads above grade level. "It has been nice to see how far he can go;" she says.

Hernandez looked at private school alternatives when the board threatened to revoke Edison's charter and take back the school. To get the same quality at a private or parochial school would cost her $7,000 a year, she says.

Robyn Amos, a high school teacher in a neighboring district, was impressed by the challenging curriculum, engaged students, and community spirit. Teachers are willing to work with difficult students, says Amos, who is black. Her fourth grader is now on track in reading, after falling behind at her old school. "I see sparks now," says Amos. "It's happening for her."

Heather Mobley praises the quarterly meetings in which parent, student, and teacher agree on shared objectives. "I'm a business person;" says Mobley, who works in marketing. "This is how you track progress." She doesn't care if Edison makes a profit. "If I'm getting everything I dreamed of for my children, why would I care if they're able to return a profit to their shareholders?"

The Charter Revolution

Charter schools are tax-funded, tuition-free public schools with some of the freedoms of private schools. Instead of regulating how charters teach, states are supposed to judge by results: Are students learning?

The first charter school opened in 1992 in Minnesota. Now, more than 2,000 charter schools are educating half a million students in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Most are started by teachers, parents, universities, community groups, and other nonprofits.

Typically, these schools are underfunded, thin on management, and dependent on donated legal services. However, about 10 percent are run by school management companies that are--in theory, if not in fact--for-profit businesses. They are run by professional managers, staffed by lawyers, and much harder to bully. Their pitch is simple: If we succeed in running good schools, we'll attract students and make a profit. If we fail, take back the school and try something else. That's not the way things are usually done in the public school system. Traditionally, nothing succeeds like failure. Failure is rewarded with more money for more programs, more specialists, and, of course, more failure. Success, on the other hand, is a risky business. It destroys excuses. It raises expectations. It's even worse when a profit-seeking business succeeds with high-risk students. If customer-serving, bottom-line-adding businesses can run schools, that opens the door to a host of market evils: Independently run charter schools staff ed by non-unionized teachers. Voucher-empowered parents shopping for their schools of choice. Teachers deprived of political power and turned from selfless public servants to soulless corporate employees.

In many cities, school officials have given up on improving schools that serve large numbers of low-income minority students from troubled families. If school districts really are held accountable for results, they'll be motivated to turn over their no-hope schools to outside management. If scores remain low, it's the charter's fault. If scores rise, the board can take credit for bringing in new management.

In the short run, it's a low-risk strategy. In the long run, it's a significant threat to public education as we know it. If corporate profit-seekers can out-educate the educators, why not privatize the whole system? Pennsylvania, planning to take over the troubled Philadelphia schools, hired Edison to analyze the district's academic and financial chaos. Edison came back with a bold proposal to take over management of the district itself, handing the lowest-performing schools to private managers, including Edison and its competitors.

For-profit education is a $100 billion industry, says Michael Sandler of eduventure.com, which analyzes the education sector. That includes companies that supply books, desks, crayons, and computers, as well as firms that offer distance-learning systems, tutoring, and counseling services. School management companies are the most controversial, because they're in direct competition with public school bureaucracies.

When the Education Industry Leadership Board, a new industry advocacy group led by Sandler, met with Education Department officials, the talk was about measuring results, says program director Lenore Ealy. "They want proof, proof, proof. Show us you're improving performance."

While school management companies remain a small force in public education, they're growing rapidly thanks to the charter school movement. Edison runs 113 public schools in 45 cities, contracting with local districts to take over failing schools or to set up charters. The company says it can create efficiencies by centralizing business services, curriculum design, and teacher training, eventually turning a profit. Also in the business are Mosaica Schools, National Heritage Academies, LearnNow, Advantage Schools Inc., Beacon Management, The Tesseract Group, Sabis Educational Systems, The Leona Group, and Charter Schools USA.

Some offer a structured curriculum, using programs such as Success for All reading, Core Knowledge, and Direct Instruction. Others lean to the progressive side of education, promising lots of hands-on, thematic learning. A few companies let each school develop its own style. Most offer a longer school day and year, which raises costs; they often hire lots of young--often uncredentialed--teachers, which is cheaper.

Test results for Edison-run schools are mixed; in some cities, there's little evidence Edison is outperforming its district-run competition. However, the company's school design gets high marks from educators. A study by Columbia University's Teacher's College, done for the National Education Association (NEA), praised the company for investing in teacher training and holding schools accountable. "The cohesiveness of the curriculum, the quality of the curriculum, and the breadth of the curriculum gives [sic] teachers (including experienced teachers) a set of guidelines, activities, and assessments upon which they can rely," the report said. "The classroom culture promotes learning....Most Edison schools are safe, orderly and energized, although some of the schools are experiencing difficulty in implementing the Edison design because of its complexity."

The report, presented to the NEA in December 2000, urged the teachers union to "take an active role regarding future collaborations with for-profit companies by creating a set of criteria that will guarantee quality and ensure that all children receive a just and productive education." In other words, if you can't beat 'em, coopt 'em.

The School Board Strikes Back

Whether the unions take the advice remains to be seen. However, in San Francisco, the California Teachers Association sat out the fight to revoke the Edison charter, points out Gary Larson, who volunteered to help Parents To Save Edison Charter. Edison Charter parents and children turned out in force at school board meetings. "The unions don't want to take on the parents," says Larson, now information director for the California Network of Educational Charters.

Opponents will fight fiercely to keep a for-profit school from opening. Unions allied with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a community organizing group, to keep Edison from taking over five failing schools in Harlem. After a bitter campaign, parents overwhelmingly rejected Edison. They preferred the fifth-rate schools they knew to a vague promise of something better. According to Larson, ACORN's attack on "privatization" led some parents to believe they'd have to pay tuition if Edison ran the schools.

But once a school has evidence of improvement and a militant parents' group, only the true believers are willing to fight. In San Francisco, a union town with left-liberal leadership, the school board's anti-privatization campaign drew surprisingly little support. Its charge that Edison Charter was pushing out poor black students fizzled. The black community seemed more interested in starting its own charters than in helping the board close one down.

The corporation's PR effort was simple: Keep talking about the test scores. Stories in the Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco-based Salon magazine stressed the school's rising test scores and satisfied parents. So did a New York Times story. Editorials in local newspapers backed the charter. The Examiner called the board's campaign "bizarre" and "surreal." The Wall Street Journal and The Economist attacked the school board as antiprivatization zealots.

The board's allies came primarily from Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, a "progressive" nonprofit devoted to children's services, and from a small number of parents convinced that Edison Charter was competing unfairly with district-run schools and getting more public money than their own children's schools.

Caroline Grannan, a parent in the district and a Wynns supporter, fired off letters and e-mails accusing Edison of manipulating test scores, underplaying costs, and selecting its students. Traditional public schools look bad in comparison to choice schools because they're stuck with the children of apathetic parents, Grannan argues. "This hit me two years ago, when my son was in a third-grade class with five students (25 percent of the class)--all boys, all ethnicities--that no private school would ever have allowed across its threshold under any circumstances."

But, as parent Linda Gausman notes bitterly, Edison Charter's critics don't have kids at third-rate schools. "They're predominately white women with children at white-Asian schools." Gausman's daughter, who is black, was assigned to a school where crack addicts and prostitutes lounged outside.

Teachers inside had to buy supplies with their own money, says Gausman. By second grade, the girl had fallen behind in reading. Gausman had tried for two years to get a transfer--she tried Grannan's elementary school--but found all the desirable public schools have long wait lists. She was delighted to find a spot at Edison Charter. "I've seen such growth in her," she says of her child, now entering fifth grade. "I started seeing a can-do attitude."

In March, school-board trustees said they'd revoke the charter but keep Edison Charter's principal, staff, and curriculum--with some compromises and cuts. None of the parents believed it. Says Mobley, whose children are in third and fifth grades at Edison Charter, the real message to parents was, "We want to return you to the failure of the past."

The Rebirth of Thomas Edison

Before the Edison takeover, Thomas Edison Elementary was San Francisco's unchoice school. It was the place for kids whose parents, stumped by the district's byzantine enrollment system, had failed to choose something better. Disruptive students "counseled out"--that is, pushed out--of their original schools were dumped at Thomas Edison. White middle-class parents from neighboring Noe Valley abandoned the school. Most of the students were--and still are--Latino immigrants from the nearby Mission, along with black students bused in from low-income Bayview-Hunter's Point.

In the 1980s, the school was cited in a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lawsuit charging that minority students were getting an unequal education. Twice in the 1980s and 1990s, San Francisco Unified "reconstituted" the school--replacing the principal and teachers. It didn't help. Students fought in the classrooms and washrooms, roamed the hallways and wandered the neighborhood. Evaluators noted that reading and math scores were abysmal, even compared to other schools with poor black and Hispanic students. Scores continued to drop at Thomas Edison while other city elementary schools were improving.

Ken Romines, principal from 1993 to 1995, described Thomas Edison as an "academic pariah" in his 1997 book,A Principal's Story. There was no reading program. The average fifth grader read at a second grade level. Each year of his two-year stint, 50 percent to 70 percent of teachers quit.

In 1997, an outside evaluator, Stanley A. Schainker, called Thomas Edison "educationally bankrupt," with the lowest test scores in the city. It was, wrote Schainker, "the most dysfunctional elementary school that I have seen in my 35 years in education." In the 1997-98 school year, Thomas Edison went through four principals. A Chronicle story noted how the survivor, Barbara Karvelis, dealt with the chaos. She "sent children with severe discipline problems to other schools."

That was when Rojas, then the school superintendent, cut a deal to hand over the school to Edison Schools Inc. Karvelis stayed on as principal. The company got a rent-free building, $4,200 per student from the state, plus federal and state grants for low-performing, low-income, and non-English-speaking students. Don Fisher, a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist, promised $1.5 million to refurbish the school and fund technology.

As Edison Charter Academy, the school offers a longer day and year and a structured academic curriculum, including Success for All, a national reading program used in all Edison Inc. elementary schools. All students take Spanish, taught as a foreign language. Students in third grade and up get a laptop to take home. Teachers spend two periods a day meeting with colleagues to discuss improving teaching. They meet every few months with parents.

In 1999, Schainker returned for another visit.

After 22 years, JOANNE JACOBS left the San Jose Mercury News to do what most would dread: She went back to high school. In this issue, she offers "Threatened by Success", which describes the vicious turf war between San Francisco's Edison Charter Academy and the local school board. Her book-in-progress, Start-Up High, documents another charter school, San Jose's fledgling Downtown College Prep, where she's volunteered since January 2001. Says Jacobs, "There are times when it drives you nuts to see how weak the students are after years in schools that couldn't meet their needs." She frequently discusses education in her feisty weblog, readJacobs.com.