For-Profit Public Schools Test Is Off to a Mixed Start : Education: Private firm is running nine Baltimore campuses. Some teachers say little has changed.

At the Harlem Park Elementary School here, in a poverty-ravaged area of the nation’s 13th-largest city, they are waiting for the promised benefits of a novel effort to turn around low-achieving schools.

“Nothing’s happening,” third-grade teacher Gussie Goodman said recently. “We still do things the way we always did. We’re just biding our time.”

Harlem Park is one of nine Baltimore public schools, most in poor neighborhoods, that are being managed by Education Alternatives Inc., a Minnesota-based company that is trying to make money running--and improving--public schools.

This is the nation’s largest experiment in privatization of public schools. As such, it has attracted attention not only from educators and teachers union officials across the country, but also from other entrepreneurs.

Unlike the Edison Project, an effort by the Whittle Communications empire to design a new system of private, for-profit schools across the country, Education Alternatives is taking over a group of existing public schools.

The 6-year-old company was called in by politicians and school officials who were desperate to reverse the downward slide of Baltimore’s school system, where 80% of the pupils are black and many are poor.

Absenteeism among students and teachers was high. Staff morale and test scores were low; most schools scored in the 30th percentile or lower on the national Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills last year. There was vague talk that the state of Maryland might be forced to take over the city schools.

Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who appoints the nine members of the Board of School Commissioners, demanded action.

“The mayor thought it (Education Alternatives) was a program that offered some hope,” said Jackie Hardy, a Schmoke aide. “He was fairly frustrated that other programs were failing.”

Faced with these pressures, the school board and Supt. Walter G. Amprey reached out for Education Alternatives, which was then operating two private schools--one in Arizona, the other in Minnesota--and serving as management consultant for a public elementary school in Dade County, Fla.

Promising a high-tech approach that claims to place more adults in each classroom, transform the schools from “teacher-centered” to “learner-centered” and sharply increase parental involvement, the company signed a five-year, $133-million contract with Baltimore officials in late July. Six weeks later, it was operating nine of the city’s 177 schools.

Company officials say their goal in Baltimore is to increase student achievement and attendance and to create a safe environment in the schools, but they have promised no specific results in terms of grade-level advancement or other measurable progress.

Education Alternatives whimsically calls its method “Tesseract,” a term found in “A Wrinkle in Time,” a children’s science fiction novel. The idea is to fashion an individual educational plan for each student, using computers and other technological tools to make sure no student is left behind.

John T. Golle, the company’s chairman, chief executive officer and lead salesman, said: “We stress the three mores-- more technology, more staff in the classroom, more (teacher) training.”

Tesseract is also a kinder, gentler method, supporters say. Teachers sit in rocking chairs among clusters of students or stroll among them, instead of teaching in an authoritarian manner from the front of the classroom.

This kind of education sounds expensive. But Golle and company President David A. Bennett contend that, by eliminating waste, the company can make a profit while spending about the same amount of money as the average annual cost of running other Baltimore schools--roughly $5,500 per student. However, the company has yet to prove that it can do that in any of the half-dozen places where it has operated.

Three months into the new school year in Baltimore, the problems facing Education Alternatives Inc. are much more visible than the company’s successes:

* The computers and related equipment vital to the individualized approach will not arrive until January, if then. The rocking chairs have not come, either, and most classrooms in the nine schools look like classrooms anywhere.

* Many teachers are unhappy because a daily preparation period has been eliminated. Several teachers complained that required weekly classes in the Tesseract method were worthless because the “lead teachers” who conduct them know little more about the method than the classroom teachers they are instructing.

* A decision to replace classroom aides--community residents who earned $10 an hour and received medical and other benefits--with “instructional interns,” mostly younger college graduates who are paid $7 an hour and have no benefits, triggered storms of protest.

* The company’s efforts to “mainstream” children with learning disabilities into regular classes, instead of special education programs, have met with strong parent resistance. At one school, no parent has agreed to the change; at another, parents have agreed to mainstream only eight of 30 children.

On the bright side, the Tesseract schools are clean, newly painted and, school veterans say, better maintained than they were by the public school system. Principals of the nine schools proudly lead visitors to the restrooms, where they express amazement that leaky faucets have been fixed and broken toilets have been repaired.

The educational management company contracted with Johnson Controls, a firm with long experience in school maintenance, to provide custodial services. The result, Golle said, is better, faster maintenance, even though the number of custodians has been cut in half.

It also has hired Peat Marwick, the international accounting firm, to scrutinize school expenditures in an effort to eliminate waste.

“Personal educational game plans” have been developed for most of the children in the nine schools, after parent-teacher conferences that have lasted as long as 90 minutes.

“The parents were really pleased. It wasn’t what they expected,” Julia Dozier-Winder, principal at Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights Elementary School, said of the conferences. “The teacher and the parent established goals for the child together and I believe a level of trust was established.”

The 420 students at Dozier-Winder’s school are poor children. The school is across the street from a housing project and not far from Ft. McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Each school begins the day with a 10- or 15-minute “community meeting” to build a spirit of cooperation among students and staff. The heavy barrage of publicity that has attended this experiment in privatization has done much to increase the self-esteem of teachers and learners.

Despite these flashes of success, there are vexing problems at each school.

Students cannot begin to pursue the personal education plans that have been so painstakingly worked out until they have computers and other equipment needed for individualized instruction.

“It’s not going smoothly at all,” said Joyce Williams, a second-grade teacher and Baltimore Teachers’ Union representative at Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights. “A lot of things that were promised, I haven’t seen.”

Each principal designates a “lead teacher” to attend weekly classes in the Tesseract method and then return to the school to spread the word among other teachers.

Asked how this was working out, Williams replied with a smile: “Well, at least (the lead teacher is) a step ahead of us.”

In the absence of the new equipment and a clear understanding of the Tesseract approach, “I’m teaching the same way I have for 15 years,” said a teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School. “A lot of us are.”

Perhaps no part of the Education Alternatives approach has been more controversial than the replacement of classroom aides, or paraprofessionals, as they are called in Baltimore. About 90 aides--people who lived near the schools and were among the relatively few who held jobs in those neighborhoods--were dropped in favor of the college graduates who were willing to work for less money and no health benefits. This is one way the company hopes to save money and make a profit.

The decision to use lower-paid interns caused problems in the schools and neighborhoods.

“We had a sense of family,” said Myrtle Washington, principal at Malcolm X, which lost five aides this year. “We had developed a trust level and a comfort level that now were gone.”

Education Alternatives “said they would use existing personnel and that simply wasn’t true,” said Loretta Johnson, co-president of the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, which includes 1,800 paraprofessionals.

Union members picketed City Hall and boycotted Education Alternatives’ teacher-training sessions. Mayor Schmoke had to step in to negotiate an agreement that has left some aides in the nine schools and has found jobs elsewhere in the school system for the rest.

Having a certified teacher and an “instructional intern” in each classroom is key to the Tesseract approach, Golle said, because “we want both of them to play the role of teacher. We want both of them to be teaching children.”

Replacing relatively expensive classroom aides with the college graduates is also an important part of the profit-making plan. The company can claim to be reducing student-teacher ratios while saving money.

Education Alternatives now claims to have 120 of the 160 interns needed for the nine schools.

However, visits to the schools indicated that many classrooms have neither an aide nor an instructional intern, that turnover among the interns is heavy and that some interns are unhappy about working long, hard hours for low pay.

“It’s a really difficult situation,” said Andrew Basoco, who is assigned to a second-grade classroom at Malcolm X. “We have a lot of people who really care about the kids here, but it’s hard work, and the truth is, we could be making more money doing substitute teaching.”

Some problems could have been avoided, many in Baltimore believe, if there had been a longer planning period before Education Alternatives jumped in, just six weeks after signing its contract to manage the schools.

“This all happened too fast,” said Robert Wilson, president of the Baltimore City Council Parent-Teacher Assn. “There was confusion, secrecy and lack of communication. The parents, who are supposed to be such an important part of this Tesseract process, felt left out. I think a lot of this could have been avoided if they had delayed implementation by six months or a year.”

But Amprey, fearing opposition from the teachers union and others, said he had to move fast.

“I knew this was the only shot I had,” the superintendent said. “I knew we were going to have to put this plane together while we were flying or we weren’t going to put it together at all.”

Golle, former superintendent of schools in St. Paul, Minn., acknowledges that company officials “could have managed expectations better than we did. Expectations were way too high. We told them the computers wouldn’t be there until January and it would take at least a year to get those schools in good physical shape and a lot longer than that to change the paradigm of the teacher’s role. But I guess we didn’t communicate that well enough.”

Education Alternatives claims to be spending no more in the nine schools than the $5,500-per-pupil average for the entire Baltimore system.

But Judson Porter, director of finance for the Baltimore schools, said the company is being paid $2.7 million more this year, or about $560 more per student, than the nine schools would have received otherwise.

“Why? Because these improvements cost more,” Porter said. “The equipment, two people in each classroom, staff development and all that. They’re doing more, so they’re getting more.”

Many observers wonder how the company, even with additional revenue per student, can make a profit running what Loretta Johnson of the teachers union called “these poor, starved schools.”

The company must honor the school district’s contract with the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, calling for average pay of $30,000 a year. Company officials claim to have spent $500,000 on repairs at the nine locations. Rewiring the schools for computers and providing a telephone in each classroom as promised will be expensive.

But Bennett and Golle insist that they can do all this and still make money.

“Everybody says: ‘Show us the pot of gold you’ve found,’ ” Golle said. “There is no pot of gold. It doesn’t exist. But what does exist is thousands of variables within a school that can be better managed.”