Threatened by Success

One charter school's fight against the education establishment.

Joanne Jacobs from the February 2002 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

"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.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.13.10 @ 3:19AM|#

mhd

log in or register to reply