Threatened by Success

One charter school's fight against the education establishment.

Joanne Jacobs from the February 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

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 anti-privatization 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.