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

Reason, Feb, 2002 by Joanne Jacobs

But, as parent Linda Gausman notes bitterly, Edison Charter's critics don't have kids at third-rate schools. "They're predominately white women with children at white-Asian schools." Gausman's daughter, who is black, was assigned to a school where crack addicts and prostitutes lounged outside.

Teachers inside had to buy supplies with their own money, says Gausman. By second grade, the girl had fallen behind in reading. Gausman had tried for two years to get a transfer--she tried Grannan's elementary school--but found all the desirable public schools have long wait lists. She was delighted to find a spot at Edison Charter. "I've seen such growth in her," she says of her child, now entering fifth grade. "I started seeing a can-do attitude."

In March, school-board trustees said they'd revoke the charter but keep Edison Charter's principal, staff, and curriculum--with some compromises and cuts. None of the parents believed it. Says Mobley, whose children are in third and fifth grades at Edison Charter, the real message to parents was, "We want to return you to the failure of the past."

The Rebirth of Thomas Edison

Before the Edison takeover, Thomas Edison Elementary was San Francisco's unchoice school. It was the place for kids whose parents, stumped by the district's byzantine enrollment system, had failed to choose something better. Disruptive students "counseled out"--that is, pushed out--of their original schools were dumped at Thomas Edison. White middle-class parents from neighboring Noe Valley abandoned the school. Most of the students were--and still are--Latino immigrants from the nearby Mission, along with black students bused in from low-income Bayview-Hunter's Point.

In the 1980s, the school was cited in a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lawsuit charging that minority students were getting an unequal education. Twice in the 1980s and 1990s, San Francisco Unified "reconstituted" the school--replacing the principal and teachers. It didn't help. Students fought in the classrooms and washrooms, roamed the hallways and wandered the neighborhood. Evaluators noted that reading and math scores were abysmal, even compared to other schools with poor black and Hispanic students. Scores continued to drop at Thomas Edison while other city elementary schools were improving.

Ken Romines, principal from 1993 to 1995, described Thomas Edison as an "academic pariah" in his 1997 book,A Principal's Story. There was no reading program. The average fifth grader read at a second grade level. Each year of his two-year stint, 50 percent to 70 percent of teachers quit.

In 1997, an outside evaluator, Stanley A. Schainker, called Thomas Edison "educationally bankrupt," with the lowest test scores in the city. It was, wrote Schainker, "the most dysfunctional elementary school that I have seen in my 35 years in education." In the 1997-98 school year, Thomas Edison went through four principals. A Chronicle story noted how the survivor, Barbara Karvelis, dealt with the chaos. She "sent children with severe discipline problems to other schools."