Scoring high: a charter school's ups and downs.

• Author: Snell, Lisa
• Position: Citings - Brief Article

SPRING 2002 TEST results gave a much-needed boost to defenders of the beleaguered Edison Charter Academy in San Francisco. Scores were up in every subject and in every grade, exceeding state targets by a large margin.

The school, long embroiled in a battle for survival with the San Francisco school board, had seen a dramatic drop in its 2001 scores after two years of steady improvement. When Edison took the school over in 1998, it was the lowest scoring elementary school in San Francisco.

According to Joanne Jacobs, a former San Jose Mercury News colunmist who is writing a book on charter schools, "One graph [of the spring test results] follows the class of 2002: As second-graders, only 14 percent scored at or above grade level in reading, 26 percent in math; by the end of fifth grade, 43 percent were at or above grade level in reading, 48 percent in math. The spring 2002 scores for second-graders start where the older students ended: 45 percent of younger students [were] at grade level or above [in reading], 47 percent in math." (Jacobs' February...