Edison Charter Academy
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How different is a "community school" from a district- or company-run one? On a tour of Edison on a recent morning, subtle differences in spending priorities appear. In the cafeteria, a heap of strawberries sits beside chicken salad sandwiches and pita chips. The school decided to pay extra to contract with Revolution Foods in Oakland for food service, rather than the frozen fare arriving on a truck from Chicago served in district-run schools. In the schoolyard, a rep from the Playworks company leads kids in organized games at recess, aimed at curbing recess bullying and cliques. (Many district-run schools also contract with Playworks, Wynns says.) The hallways are orderly. "A lot of schools have problems with violence and gangs," says Cook, the teacher. "We're able to insulate the kids from that."
Class size is capped at 20 pupils per teacher up to third grade and at 30 per teacher up to eighth grade — slightly lower than the district's 22 and 33, respectively. While public schools are slashing the already slim pickings of arts programming in budget cuts, all Edison students take art, theater, music, and dance classes throughout the year — a holdover retained from the for-profit days. To keep such programs in place, the teachers — who are represented by their own union — agree to slightly lower salaries than the district's unionized teachers ($44,474 vs. $50,000 for a first-year teacher), though they get some superior benefits and are saved from furloughs.
Edison focuses on orienting kids from elementary school toward college, with campus tours and college apparel Fridays. The school counselor helped last year's eighth graders win $200,000 in scholarships to attend private high schools — while public school counselors tend not to urge kids to ditch the district. The afterschool program serves 140 kids until 6 p.m. with tutoring and drumming programs.
The school's biggest selling point? A new dual-immersion program in English and Spanish for kindergarteners, with plans to expand it a grade level each year as the kids grow older. Three mothers told Morrell at a recruitment booth in a Mission market last spring that their children were on a wait-list for the popular programs at district schools. "I looked [dual-immersion programs] up online, and said we could do this," Morrell says.
The school has earned the parents' seal of approval. Many parents at the Fiesta said they enrolled their children on recommendation from friends after the district assigned them to "rowdy" public schools in the Mission, whereas Edison's kids are seen as more "respectful." Others transferred in their children after failing to find a fit elsewhere. One sixth grader studying in the cafeteria says he left his parochial school to avoid a superstrict teacher who wouldn't let the kids speak in class. (His father, picking him up later, adds, "We were not getting what we were paying for.") A seventh grader says that at Creative Arts Charter School, he was the only Latino student in his class, and "they all had more cooler things than me." (His mother adds that he was diagnosed with ADHD and needed more individual attention.)
Other than parental support, there's that more unforgiving measure of a school's success: test scores. An extensive 2009 Stanford study showed that charters do no better or worse than district-run schools on a national level — though some outliers do much worse and some much better. Edison's scores this year are better than 37 percent of district elementaries and smack-dab in the middle of the district's middle schools, more or less where they've been for the last decade. But last year, Edison for the first time scored among in the top 10th of schools educating a similar student population of low-income minorities, known as the Academic Performance Index. The school advertises the success with a celebratory banner on the school's fence facing Dolores Street: "A Perfect '10' Academic Performance Index Compared With Similar Schools."
Would that be enough to persuade the school board that Edison was worth saving? The school's charter was up for renewal this year. Although it is held with the state, the new Edison first has to face the school board, on which commissioner Wynns still sits — and remains skeptical. Morrell, with input from the board and parents, wrote a three-inch-thick charter renewal application. Wynns thought they should be applying for a whole new charter if they purported to be a new school. There were other problems: EdisonLearning had resisted giving the school financial information, making it difficult to project a budget.
"The relationship between San Francisco and this charter is so poisoned, it's impossible for us to renew," Wynns says. "I think they're an okay elementary school, but I don't think they're any better than any publicly managed school in San Francisco, and they're probably worst than a lot of them."
In February, the school board, citing holes in the application, voted against the new Edison school.
But Morrell and the board weren't about to give up. In the two months before the appeal, she and her team filled in the lacking sections, and presented the district with the financial information they'd finally gotten from EdisonLearning. In a special meeting on May 9, the night before the school needed to appeal to the state, the district's school board approved its charter. Wynns' was the only dissenting vote.
School board president Hydra Mendoza warned she'd keep her eye on the school, which now has to get a plan approved with the district annually. "Part of our message is you're going to have to learn to be part of a family; you can't work in isolation any longer," she says.
