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. 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 families. 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.
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