Edison Charter Academy
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But teachers at San Francisco's Edison Academy say the charter agreement was based on a backroom deal. "Rojas wanted that place off his hands," Spiegel says. She says an assistant to Rojas as well as the school principal intimidated the teachers into signing the charter petition. (Applying for a charter requires gathering signatures from 51 percent of the teachers who would be teaching at the new school.)
Since much of the staff were permanent substitutes, rehired by the district each year, many felt they'd lose their jobs if they refused. Spiegel refused and quit. Even after signing, many other teachers left anyway or were thrown out after Edison took over, says Sanchez. "In my eyes, it was an illegal charter," he says.
Either way, decisions at this local school now came from New York. The school would send every penny in tax dollars it got to the company, which provided all management services and instituted the "Edison design." This involved regular student tests to measure improvement; a scripted reading curriculum called Success for All; increased prep time for teacher collaboration; and extensive art programming and world languages classes that were rarely seen in district-run schools. Edison also lengthened the school day by 90 minutes, and the school year by two weeks. Many teachers quit, complaining of overwork. Still, Edison Academy's test scores — while remaining low compared to the district average — started to rise.
Yet the district was unimpressed, and a progressive majority was voted into office in 2000 on a platform to revoke Edison's charter. School board president Jill Wynns visited the school in the late '90s: "One thing I saw that was disturbing was kids walking in lines with their hands behind their backs chanting mantras they had to say," she says. Wynns, backed by commissioners Eric Mar and Mark Sanchez (the former Edison teacher), blasted the for-profit model and ordered a district investigation. They said Edison's rising test scores simply mirrored rising scores across the city. They also accused the school of "counseling out" low-performing kids, especially African-American and special education students, while attracting the children of parents engaged enough to make an active school choice. (Parents must directly enroll students in charters, rather than allowing the district's lottery system choose for them.)
The national press stepped in to cover the imbroglio, tending to take sides along clear political lines. Liberal The Nation railed against Edison; the libertarian Reason framed the debate as a jealous school district preferring failure for all students instead of a company succeeding with some.
Enter Bonnie Senteno, an outspoken and über-involved mother with a chola-style Virgin de Guadalupe tattooed on her ankle. She was among the parents who showed up with "Save our School" posters at the school board meetings where the commissioners discussed revoking Edison's charter. She says she didn't even know the school was for-profit at the time, just that the teachers were great and her son, Jack, was thriving. "For the district to close down a school where they were working hard and getting good results was a little crazy for me," she says.
Still, the district ignored the parents. Edison threatened years of litigation if the district revoked the school's charter, so the school board settled on not renewing it, opening the door for the school to appeal to the state Board of Education. Given that the state board was stacked in 2001 with pro-charter commissioners, Edison scored its new contract easily. But a couple of months afterward, state test scores gave the naysayers the power of told-you-so: Edison's scores had dropped from the year before, making it the dead-last elementary school in the city on the Academic Performance Index.
Years passed, and though its test scores showed slow progress, Edison Charter Academy remained in the bottom half of the district's elementary schools. The Noe Valley school with a Spanish Mission facade became an island apart from the school district, relations reduced to a rent check and resentment.
The district couldn't win against Edison the company. But Edison the school was gearing up for a fight itself.
Behind school doors, teachers were finding Edison to be a top-down bureaucracy as onerous as any school district. Catherine Cook was hired in 2004 into what she calls "the dark years." "They just burn you out," she says. "They didn't give you any creativity or freedom in your classroom. It was top down and directives — they'd be like, 'Scrap that and let's try this,' and we had no input."
Teachers resented the Success for All curriculum, which taught reading through a series of technical exercises. "You could see the kids were bored to death," Cook says. Worse, it wasn't up to California's standards.
Then there were the cost-saving measures designed to help Edison make a profit. The company would sometimes lag in ordering school necessities like paper, and classrooms would run out. The school tended to hire first-year teachers, 80 percent of whom would dash at the end of the year along with many administrators, Cook says. With no recruiting effort by out-of-town management, the school's enrollment dwindled. The teachers finally organized into a union in 2005, so they could have more of a say in decisions.
Nationally, the decade-old company was suffering major woes as it learned that running public schools wasn't so profitable after all. The feds found the company had misstated its revenue in 2001, and Edison showed a profit for just one quarter in 2003 during the four years it was publicly traded. Eventually the company downgraded its mission from Whittle's original plan of operating 1,000 schools to offering educational software.
Senteno, the mother who had defended Edison during the fight to renew its charter, started to change her opinion when she signed on as a volunteer at the afterschool program in 2004. She was working as a federal government contractor evaluating programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, and turned her eye to Edison. She learned that there was no designated curriculum to target English learners. She also noticed that while her son, Jack, would ace all the Edison benchmark tests, his scores on the California standardized tests were merely average. Obviously, there was a disconnect, and little room for parental input to change anything. "As a parent, I'd bring all the exciting things I'd seen [on the job] back," she says. "We were always kind of prevented from implementing them because they didn't fit in with the Edison design."
