Charter School’s Scores Up, So Why Is Board Unhappy?

What’s wrong with this picture? The children at Edison Charter Academy--formerly one of this city’s most notorious schools--are learning to read and do math. Their test scores have begun to improve. Their parents are delighted.

But the board of education, here in the nation’s most ideological city, wants to kick out the for-profit corporation that has run the campus for the past three years: Edison Schools Inc., which vowed at its birth to revolutionize education in America.

Critics of the school board argue that the officials are on an ideological jihad against school privatization.

Critics of Edison call the academic improvement a sham and claim that any school would do better if it got more money and could weed out its most challenging students.

The controversy comes at a critical time for the company, which runs 113 schools across the country and trades as EDSN on the Nasdaq stock exchange. With San Francisco poised to become the first city in the nation to show Edison the door, parents in New York City begin voting today on whether to allow the company to run five of that city’s low-performing schools.

The board of education here has begun investigating a range of charges against the company, including allegations that the Edison Charter Academy diverts special education students to other campuses, that its original charter may be illegal and that it has not provided adequate financial information to the school district.

The board could move as soon as next week to revoke Edison’s charter, breaking its five-year contract two years early. The company denies all accusations and promises a tough fight to keep the school open.

Edison Schools operates campuses in 21 states and the District of Columbia, including eight in California. Two school districts have voted not to renew Edison contracts when they expire but the company is expanding rapidly, though it has yet to turn a profit. In Nevada, the Clark County school board recently authorized the company to operate seven schools in Las Vegas.

If the San Francisco board revokes the charter, “we’re going to fight it, and we’re going to keep fighting it,” said Gaynor McCown, a senior vice president at the New York City-based company. “The kids are doing well, and they ought to let us continue through the remainder of our contract.”

The battle over Edison is almost as much about the minutiae of local politics as about the broad issues of educating America’s children. It raises questions about who gets a say in the fate of a school: parents whose children go there or parents whose children don’t.

And it pits a group that says it is fighting for justice and the greater good of this urban school district against a company that says its main concern is children--but it also must protect its shareholders.

“I don’t think it’s fair that Edison is getting more resources and that they’re definitely weeding out the more challenging kids,” said parent activist Caroline Grannan, whose children attend another elementary school.

“I’m philosophically opposed to privatization. If it were obviously working, I might change my mind. But they’re obviously not teaching the same kids.”

San Francisco’s Edison elementary school was named for the inventor of electricity years before it was taken over by the corporation of the same name.

The most recent chapter in the school’s long and troubled history began in 1995, when then-Supt. Bill Rojas singled out the school as one of the two lowest-performing elementaries in the district and notified everyone from the principal to the janitors that they would be replaced.

Reading scores were the lowest in the district, math scores were fifth from the bottom. Discipline was nonexistent. Children roamed the hallways. After two years of monitoring, little had changed.

But the so-called reconstitution of the staff didn’t work either. One year Edison had four principals. Another year, it didn’t have any. Test scores dipped before they began to improve. So in 1998, Rojas began negotiating with the Edison company. That June, parents, teachers, faculty and the school board voted to let the corporation take over.

State law allows campuses to obtain charters from local school districts or the state Board of Education. The parents, teachers and administrators can then establish their own academic programs, salary schedules and budgets.

Subsidies Help Reduce Costs

Unlike other charter schools in San Francisco, Edison pays no rent for the graceful old building in a neighborhood of Victorian homes. Unlike the city’s regular schools, the district pays for Edison’s bus, food and payroll services. As a result, the school is able to direct all the public money it gets toward teaching.

In addition, the company spent $1.8 million in donations from the Donald and Doris Fisher Foundation on fixing up the school, buying computers for every classroom and sending an I-Mac home with every student in third grade and above. The I-Mac is used by parents to communicate with teachers and other parents via an intranet.

The company’s promise: That it could take the troubled school, turn it around with a disciplined approach to the basics and profit financially at the same time.

Indeed, the students’ test scores have risen since the company instituted an eight-hour school day for all children and lengthened the school year from 181 days to more than 200. In a headline to a 1999 op-ed piece, the San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted: “Edison School Rebounding.” Said an Examiner headline: “Edison Project Making the Grade.”

Between 1998 and 2000, for example, reading and math scores for students in grades two through five jumped on standardized state tests that assess students’ skills.

“They’re doing great,” said Laura Baker, who has three children enrolled at Edison. “I have a kindergartner who’s reading . . . books. My second-grader is reading at fourth-grade level.”

So if the children are doing well and the parents are happy, why kick Edison out?

“The problem,” said school board President Jill Wynns, “is that we had a highly questionable and probably corrupt public process to get [Edison] here. . . . Some of us believe the management agreement [with Edison] and the charter are not legal.”

State law requires that teachers and parents must vote to change a regular public school to a charter campus. During hearings on Edison’s fate, Wynns said, teachers said they had been coerced into signing off on the change, their jobs threatened if they didn’t.

And Edison, she said, has never provided quarterly financial reports, as required by the charter.

The company and its supporters strongly deny the charges and argue that the San Francisco imbroglio is about politics, not education, about an activist and newly elected school board flexing its muscles.

“We have no reason to believe, nor do we have any proof that there was coercion to make teachers approve the charter,” McCown said.

Another complaint focuses on the makeup of the student body. The corporation’s claim to fame is the ability to reach students who had been formerly considered unteachable. The company uses a structured curriculum that, for example, requires all children to read for 90 minutes each day and spend an hour on math.

But many here question whether the same hard-to-reach students who attended Edison elementary before it was taken over are still there. Critics claim that the student body today is more affluent and has fewer children with learning disabilities and that the racial makeup has changed.

Edison “is growing in Latinos. Latino kids score better than African American kids in the district,” said school board member Mark Sanchez, a former teacher who taught at Edison before it was taken over by the company.

Bad Students Allegedly Diverted

The changing demographic “is a challenge to their contention that scores are going up because they’re doing a better job,” Sanchez said.

Teresa Gallegos heads a state-mandated committee that advises the local school district on special education issues. In addition, she works for a local mental health agency. She argues that children with learning and other disabilities are being diverted to other schools.

“I have parents on my caseload who have been counseled out” of Edison, Gallegos said, noting that five such families have put their special education children in different schools as a result. They are too ashamed to go public. “What’s up at Edison?”

In San Francisco, parents can apply to send their children to any school in the district, and there is fierce competition to get into the best ones. If parents do not apply, their children are automatically sent to their neighborhood school or bused to comply with desegregation orders.

When Edison was a regular school, children were bused in from Hunter’s Point, a relatively poor, African American neighborhood. Students also came from the nearby Mission District, a heavily Latino neighborhood. Most of the children who lived closest to the school--in what is now a pricey, dot-com neighborhood--went elsewhere.

Charter and magnet schools are attended only by children whose parents request it. Now that Edison is a charter, “all enrollment is by request,” parent activist Grannan said, “encouraged by aggressive outreach to middle-class families.”

“Edison’s percentages of low-income, special education and African American students have plummeted,” she said. “Its challenging students are dumped on other schools. . . . You can’t measure [improved test scores there] as achievement. Different kids in the same building is not the same as improving the school.”

In addition, Grannan and Dana Woldow, another parent activist, argue that other schools in the district with similar demographics and similar problems have improved their students’ test scores even more than Edison--with less money.

McCown finds their arguments completely untenable. Yes, there are fewer children in special education programs at the school, but it’s because they are mainstreamed into regular classes and they are learning.

“It’s really unfortunate,” McCown said, that critics look at Edison, see children doing well and assume that “we must not have poor and minority students. . . . What does that say about their belief that every child can learn? We haven’t weeded out the kids.”

On Thursday, more than 20 Edison parents delivered petitions in support of the school to Arlene Ackerman, the superintendent of schools. The investigation is likely to continue until the end of the month.

Wynns said that unless the charges against the school are “all shown to be false, I expect the investigation to show that there are legitimate reasons to revoke the charter. And I think it’s reasonable to expect the majority of the board to do so.”

In the middle of the controversy, of course, are the teachers and children at the school. No matter what the investigation turns up, no matter how the board ultimately votes, the semester’s uncertainty has been hard to endure.

“What we want to do is teach kids,” said Principal Vincent Matthews. “To have this cloud over our heads is extremely difficult.”