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

Reason, Feb, 2002 by Joanne Jacobs

The report, presented to the NEA in December 2000, urged the teachers union to "take an active role regarding future collaborations with for-profit companies by creating a set of criteria that will guarantee quality and ensure that all children receive a just and productive education." In other words, if you can't beat 'em, coopt 'em.

The School Board Strikes Back

Whether the unions take the advice remains to be seen. However, in San Francisco, the California Teachers Association sat out the fight to revoke the Edison charter, points out Gary Larson, who volunteered to help Parents To Save Edison Charter. Edison Charter parents and children turned out in force at school board meetings. "The unions don't want to take on the parents," says Larson, now information director for the California Network of Educational Charters.

Opponents will fight fiercely to keep a for-profit school from opening. Unions allied with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a community organizing group, to keep Edison from taking over five failing schools in Harlem. After a bitter campaign, parents overwhelmingly rejected Edison. They preferred the fifth-rate schools they knew to a vague promise of something better. According to Larson, ACORN's attack on "privatization" led some parents to believe they'd have to pay tuition if Edison ran the schools.

But once a school has evidence of improvement and a militant parents' group, only the true believers are willing to fight. In San Francisco, a union town with left-liberal leadership, the school board's anti-privatization campaign drew surprisingly little support. Its charge that Edison Charter was pushing out poor black students fizzled. The black community seemed more interested in starting its own charters than in helping the board close one down.

The corporation's PR effort was simple: Keep talking about the test scores. Stories in the Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco-based Salon magazine stressed the school's rising test scores and satisfied parents. So did a New York Times story. Editorials in local newspapers backed the charter. The Examiner called the board's campaign "bizarre" and "surreal." The Wall Street Journal and The Economist attacked the school board as antiprivatization zealots.

The board's allies came primarily from Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, a "progressive" nonprofit devoted to children's services, and from a small number of parents convinced that Edison Charter was competing unfairly with district-run schools and getting more public money than their own children's schools.

Caroline Grannan, a parent in the district and a Wynns supporter, fired off letters and e-mails accusing Edison of manipulating test scores, underplaying costs, and selecting its students. Traditional public schools look bad in comparison to choice schools because they're stuck with the children of apathetic parents, Grannan argues. "This hit me two years ago, when my son was in a third-grade class with five students (25 percent of the class)--all boys, all ethnicities--that no private school would ever have allowed across its threshold under any circumstances."