Watching the numbers: Unlike district schools, Edison Charter must succeed to survive.

WHILE RISING TEST scores on California's statewide test saved Edison Charter Academy from takeover by the San Francisco Unified School District, falling test scores have now put the charter's future at risk.

Spring 2001 test scores were announced August 15, two months after Edison Charter's charter was transferred from the district to the State Board of Education. Edison Charter's reading and math scores, which had risen sharply for the school's first two years, were down in virtually every grade and subject.

On the state's Academic Performance Index, Edison was the lowest-ranked elementary school in San Francisco--just like the district-run school that the charter replaced.

Scores remain above the school's 1999 level, but the numbers are very low. Only 23 percent of students tested at or above grade level in reading, compared to 32 percent the year before; only 32 percent make the grade in math, down from 42 percent. Students do better the longer they attend Edison Charter, says principal Vincent Matthews. Edison's cohort analysis found fourth and fifth graders did better than they had the year before. But third graders did worse than they had as second graders. And the 2001 second grade scores are dismal.

"The amount of time we spent defending ourselves--all those late-night board meetings, all the media tours--we could have used that time to educate students," says Matthews. "It was a distraction."

To Edison opponents, the scores proved the school was a fraud. Caroline Grannan, a critic of the school, e-mailed the press: "After months of publicity by New York-based Edison Schools claiming superior gains and implying superior performance to San Francisco districtwide schools...Edison Charter students scored significantly below districtwide students in every category both in spring 2000 and in the newly released spring 2001 results."

It's not uncommon for schools that post a large rise in scores one year to dip the next year. Statewide, one-third of schools where teachers earned performance awards for gains in 2000 lost ground in 2001. Reading and math scores fell at other San Francisco schools that are comparable to Edison Charter in percentages of black and Hispanic students.

However, no other school is under the scrutiny that Edison Charter faces. The company promised progress. It has to deliver.

Diallo Dphrepaulezz studied the school's progress for the Pacific Research Institute and now serves on the charter's board. He doesn't know if the drop in scores reflects a statistical blip, a leveling-off once the easy progress is made, or the high anxiety that gripped the school in the spring of 2001. He does know that another bad year won't be tolerated.

Edison Charter's scores must start improving again in 2002, warns John Mockler, executive director of the State Board of Education, which is now the school's charter granter. "This year they probably deserve a pass because of all the stuff that was going on with the district," Mockler told the Los Angeles Times. "But if that happened two years or three years in a row, you'd have to say adios, and we will."

Reed Hastings, who chairs the state board, is dedicated to the expansion of charter schools--but only if they work. Hastings urges the speedy revocation of charters when a school isn't performing. Which, after all, is precisely the point. His report, part of a Teacher's College at Columbia University study of Edison's schools, was laudatory: "Parents appear happy with the school's turnaround. After all, they must feel a sense of jubilation to have their children in a safe school rather than in a chaotic environment where real danger was ever present."

The transition was bumpy. Most of the teachers quit in the first two years, complaining of the longer hours, the scripted reading curriculum, the frequent meetings, and the pressure to show results.

Edison Inc. responded by replacing the unpopular Karvelis and offering a 10 percent raise. The current principal, Vince Matthews, is praised by parents, teachers, and even school board members. Teacher turnover is down sharply: 70 percent of teachers returned in the fall.

But while the school was finding its way, Wynns, a long-time opponent of the departed Rojas, was dismantling his pet projects. She got an anti-Edison majority on the board in November 2000, when Sanchez and Mar were elected.

As a former Thomas Edison teacher, Sanchez had told the Chronicle in early 1998--before the charter was proposed--that the school was "in a free fall." As a trustee, he told Edison Charter backers the board would revoke Edison's charter, and then go after the city's other charter schools, all run by nonprofits.

"No charter is good enough for this board," says Diallo Dphrepaulezz of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in San Francisco, who wrote a study on "The Fight To Save Edison Charter." (Dphrepaulezz was so impressed by what he found that he joined the charter school's board.) Led by Wynns, Sanchez, and Mar, the board declared there'd been complaints about Edison Charter and ordered a district investigation. The preliminary report accused Edison Schools Inc. of various misdeeds, notably coercing teachers to approve the initial charter application, failing to provide financial documents, and ending bilingual education classes --instead of flouting the state's English immersion law like the rest of the district's schools.

Parents Don't Count

The school board tried to deny Edison any claim to success by redefining success. Sure, test scores are up, critics said. But scores are up in some other schools, too. Where? In selected grades and selected subjects. Besides, went the board's argument, Edison Charter has attracted new students from less dysfunctional familes. The blacks with rising scores "aren't the same kids" who attended Thomas Edison, said Sanchez, who offered no proof that the school had found a cache of middle-class black families.

At one board meeting, Wynns claimed that a former Edison Charter consultant had described the charter as "two schools," one for African Americans and another for Latinos, in the district's report. (The report also lists a parent's complaint that Latino students were allowed to take more ketchup packets than blacks in the lunch line.) But the consultant, Edee Allison, wasn't talking about Edison Charter Academy. She told the district's interviewer that Thomas Edison was "two schools" before the charter, with teachers and administrators more lax in disciplining Latino students. She actually credited Edison Charter with a "tremendous turn around" of an "out of control" school.

The most damaging allegation was that Edison Charter "counseled out" poor, black, and special education students, dumping them into other schools to improve its test scores. But the district's case was weak. Edison Charter has a slightly lower percentage of poor students than Thomas Edison, as measured by eligibility for a free lunch. But poverty rates for students dropped in schools across the city in the late 1990s. During the dotcom boom, San Franciscans either got richer or were driven out of town by higher rents. Edison Charter educates the same number of black students, almost all bused in from the same area--Bayview-Hunter's Point--as in the pre-charter days. By contrast, black enrollment fell at nearby schools in the heavily Latino Mission District when a judge ended the city's desegregation plan in 1999. However, Edison Charter's percentage of blacks is lower than in pre-charter days because overall enrollment is up by 35 percent. Most of the new students are Latino kids from the neighborhood. (Whites account for 4.5 percent of students.)

As for special education students, the numbers are within the range set before the charter, and district investigators admitted that Edison Charter had followed district policy in telling students who couldn't handle "mainstreaming" that they'd have to transfer to another school for special classes. In any event, an actual decline in the number of such students would be a sign of success. Most special ed students are "learning disabled," which essentially means they can't read. Teach kids to read in first grade, and the special ed numbers will go down.

The board had demanded that Edison fix the problems it found. But it found few problems after the charter's first year, none in its third.

There's no question that Edison Charter is gaining students with engaged parents, the kind who make an active school choice. It's no longer a dumping ground for students whose parents didn't request a school. However, it's not just the new, less needy kids who are learning to read and calculate. Students who attended the school before the Edison takeover boosted their scores in the first two years. According to the Pacific Research report, Edison Charter was the third fastest improving school out of 73 elementary schools in the city.

So when the school's charter was under attack, the old Thomas Edison parents and the newer Edison Charter parents came together to save their school. They organized, they petitioned, they created a web site to make their case. They showed up at board meetings in red T-shirts with kids waving homemade "Save Our School" signs. They were treated with contempt, parents say. Wynns read the newspaper while they spoke.

"They'll start an hour late," says Allegra Harrison, a single mother who has worked her way from low-income to moderate. "Our kids get restless waiting. Then they say, 'Can't you keep your kids quiet?' Jill Wynns told us she didn't have to talk to us. 'You're not district parents,"' she said.

Harrison said she doesn't care if Edison makes a profit. After her son's miserable experience at a neighborhood school, she wants a choice for her daughter. "I don't see who's getting exploited. I just see kids formerly stranded in the gutter finally getting a decent education."

When 150 Edison Charter parents showed up at a May board meeting, an Edison opponent urged the board to ignore them. "Don't listen to them," the young activist said. "Half of them don't speak English. They've been brainwashed by Edison." Sure enough, the board didn't listen.

But the media did listen. They could find dozens of parents eager to talk about how Edison Charter Academy had served their kids. No, they hadn't been bused to the meeting at corporate expense, as the opponents had claimed. They'd come on their own initiative to fight for their school.

Only one disgruntled parent-a woman whose child was suspended repeatedly for fighting classmates and staff--was available to pitch the "counseling out" story. Her child had left Edison Charter after the first year. Principal Matthews, a black male, also proved an effective antidote to stories that Edison Charter is hostile to black males. "I've been an advocate for disadvantaged students for 15 years," he said. "My goal is to educate students. This design does work."

The Charter Compromise

At a special board meeting on June 25, Edison Charter parents and children waited from 8 p.m., when the meeting was supposed to start, till 9:30, when it did. Finally, the public was allowed into the boardroom. The trustees sat at the far end of a huge circular desk, far from the clear plastic chairs set up for the public. Wynns announced the deal: Edison would be chartered by the state and would pay rent on the school building comparable to rent charged other charters; it would give up its students' share of the district's desegregation funds. Edison also would promise not to expand the school or to manage any other charter in the city. Public testimony--the stated purpose of the meeting--would be limited to one minute per person, 10 minutes in all, said Wynns. Normally speakers get two minutes each, with 30 minutes set aside for testimony.

Edison Charter parents were angry. One woman stomped Out after shouting that she'd left the hospital to come to the meeting. Wynns threatened to adjourn with no public comment. Adrienne Johnson used her 60 seconds to announce the formation of Parents to Revoke the School Board, vowing to work to unseat every trustee in the next five years.

An Edison critic tried to redirect the spin. "It was never against the parents;' said Mary Harris of Parent Advocates for Youth, a Coleman offshoot. "It has never been about taking anything away from kids. It's against Edison corporation." In the plastic seats, the red-shirted parents buzzed in anger, because they knew better.

Under the deal, Edison will have to trim its academic program to cover the $350,000 annual rent on the building, and the loss of desegregation funding. "Changes will be minimal," says Gaynor McCown, the company's spokeswoman. The school almost certainly will lose money, with or without a rent to cover.

California's school funding doesn't cover Edison's longer year and enriched program. But Edison didn't lose its charter. "This was an important precedent for us," McCown says. Dphrepaulezz thinks Edison gave away too much. Negotiating away the school's share of desegregation funds is unconstitutional, he says. It's a federal civil rights remedy that belongs to the students, not to the district or to Edison. Beyond that, Edison could have won-eventually--if it had gone to court to defend its charter. "Personally I think Edison should have called the school board's bluff," says Dphrepaulezz. "Now any board can launch an arbitrary attack and monkey wrench you back to the table."

An independent charter, without corporate funding behind it, couldn't have survived the school board's relentless attack. But a for-profit corporation can't survive forever without actually making a profit. Edison's plan says it will break even by 2004. To meet that goal, will it compromise on quality--say, by cutting instruction time and teacher pay? Or will Edison become a nonprofit, with donors making it possible to offer high-quality, full-day, 10-month-a-year instruction to needy students?

In the world of education, accountability is a new and often malleable idea. Financial accountability is well understood and enforced. It could prove a much tougher foe for Edison than the San Francisco Unified School Board.

Joanne Jacobs a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the founder of www.readjacobs.com. She is writing a book on Downtown college Prep, a charter high school in San Jose.