Threatened by success: One charter school's fight against the education establishment.

• Author: Jacobs, Joanne

IN 1998, EDISON SCHOOLS INC., the country's leading for-profit school management company, took over one of San Francisco's worst schools, coincidentally named Thomas Edison Elementary. By its third year, the K-5 school, now renamed Edison Charter Academy, was on the way up. Its once rock-bottom test scores had risen in every grade and every subject for every racial/ ethnic group. Black and Latino students, who make up 83 percent of enrollment, had made the greatest gains. Violence was down. Enrollment was up. Parents were enthusiastic.

"I like it," says Karen Aldana, who graduated from Edison Charter's fifth grade in June. She enjoyed the "Success for All" reading program and the charter school's "specials," music, art, Spanish, and physical education (P.E.) "She can read perfectly in English and Spanish;' says her mother proudly.

"It's so clearly working," says Allegra Harrison, whose daughter is an Edison Charter third grader. Not everyone agreed. In January 2001, halfway through the company's five-year contract, the San Francisco school board launched a campaign to revoke the charter and take back the school. Board president Jill Wynns, who told the press she's "philosophically opposed to for-profit management," was supported by two newly elected trustees, Mark Sanchez, who taught at Thomas Edison in the pre-charter days, and Eric Mar, a lawyer and ethnic studies lecturer at San Francisco State whose wife is active in the local teachers union.

Six months later, however, the board backed down. Edison Schools Inc. now runs the school under a charter from the State Board of Education. The Battle of Edison Charter turned on competing ideas about accountability. To its enemies, Edison Charter Academy wasn't accountable to the public--that is, to the elected school board--but rather to corporate execs in New York City and the company's stockholders. But most people want schools held accountable for their performance, and that is what the school board failed to understand. Edison Charter Academy survived because it had higher test scores and satisfied parents.

Although its school-board critics thought they were mounting an attack on corporate interests, they instead found themselves battling parents. More than 80 percent of those parents signed a petition supporting Edison Charter when it came under attack. In such a face-off, not even the teachers union would side with the board. It was a battle, in other words, between education and a school board's ideology. This time, education won. This is the story of that struggle.

San Francisco's school board oversees a district with dramatic inequities between its best and worst schools, and an enrollment scheme that strongly favors savvy parents who know how to work the system to get their kids into the good schools. That means that the city's bad schools only get worse as they become dumping grounds for the most difficult students.

The board's finances are such a mess that state legislators have threatened to place the district under state receivership. In May, an audit by the Andersen accounting firm found that, since 1997, $30 million earmarked for school construction had been spent improperly on salaries. The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered records showing $60 million in construction bonds diverted to salaries since 1989. Superintendent Arlene Ackerman announced an FBI investigation into the district's handling of a $50 million federal technology grant and a $32 million energy-savings contract.

Given all the problems in the San Francisco Unified School District, why did the school board pick a fight with Edison? In part, it was about money. In 1998, a flamboyant, free-spending superintendent named Bill Rojas had pushed the charter through, shortly afterward decamping for Dallas. (Rojas now works for Advantage Schools, an Edison competitor.) Wynns thought Rojas had given Edison a sweetheart contract that failed to charge the corporation for busing, rent on the school, or administrative services, such as passing through federal and state funding and handing payroll. She claimed the Edison deal was costing the district $1,000 a student. (A charter elementary in a rent-free school typically pays the district 3...