City to Edison

Unfortunately, New York City won’t be along for the ride.

In a long-anticipated anticlimax, parents at five of the worst New York schools voted 4 to 1 last week to reject a proposal to have Edison Schools manage their failing institutions. In fact the vote wasn’t even that close. According to ground rules set up by the state, Edison had to get approval by a majority of all parents in the schools — failure to vote counting as “no.” Ordinarily only 5 percent of these parents bother to vote in school elections. In that light, with only 47 percent of parents participating in the highly publicized contest, the result was something of a landslide.

“The whole episode is a sad commentary on American public education,” said mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who initiated the effort. “To see people opposing the opportunity for a better education is really sad.” The mayor vowed to pursue privatization by perhaps letting Edison manage several schools anyway, but it is getting late in his term and anything he does now will undoubtedly be overturned by his Democratic successor next January.

School chancellor Harold Levy — who argued publicly that the real solution to the schools is to elect more Democrats — gave the Edison campaign only perfunctory support. Even this lukewarm effort earned him the vitriol of community activists, who repeatedly insulted him at meetings. After the vote, Levy vowed “dramatic, not incremental improvement” at the five schools and promised to make them “places that parents are clamoring to get their kids into.” Now why didn’t he think of that before?

In truth, the New York City project was a huge risk for Edison, a Nasdaq-traded company that has lost $ 200 million since 1995 in an effort to pioneer privately run public schools. Founded by Chris Whittle, whose “Channel One” once brought news and advertisements into middle and high school classrooms, and directed by Benno Schmidt, the former president of Yale, Edison runs 113 schools in 45 cities around the country. Flush with success in receptive states such as Michigan, Texas, and Colorado, Edison had been shooting for a high-profile success in a media capital. The company’s stock climbed from $ 20 to $ 37 after the New York initiative was announced last May but eventually sank back to $ 20 when the outcome of the vote became clear.

Like many a previous reformer, Edison ran into the immovable object of New York’s education bureaucracy, plus its residents’ well-known disdain for private enterprise. Hazel Dukes, president of the New York NAACP, said Chancellor Levy should be “put in a dungeon” for making his half-hearted proposal. Irving S. Hamer, Manhattan representative on the Board of Education, compared the Edison idea to “experiments in giving syphilis to black people at Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s.” Edison was also charged with plotting to round up illegal aliens and turn them over to the INS.

The five schools — P.S. 161 and 66 in Harlem and the Bronx, and Middle Schools 246, 320, and 111 in Brooklyn — are among the city’s worst. On average, 83 percent of their 5,000 pupils read below grade level and almost 90 percent are deficient in math. Two of the schools are scheduled to close next year because of their impossibly dismal performance.

Edison promised to tackle the situation with its traditional dose of discipline and technology — longer hours, school uniforms, rigorous remedial programs, and free computers both in the schools and at home. The computers alone would have cost Edison $ 3 million. While the city now spends $ 10,000 per pupil to create the present mess, Edison would have run the schools for only $ 6,600 per pupil. Under these conditions, of course, an Edison success would have been a colossal embarrassment to the education establishment.

Steeped in distrust, however, many parents found all this generosity to be profoundly suspicious. “They’re trying to bribe us with computers. Our children are not for sale,” said one parent at P.S. 161 in Harlem, where opposition was particularly vocal. “Anything Mayor Giuliani is for, I’m against,” contributed another.

For a while the issue seemed up for grabs. Former congressman Floyd Flake, whose Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Queens runs a 500-pupil charter elementary school, was enlisted as one of Edison’s representatives. In a bold move, the company even invited Al Sharpton into the debate. Sharpton sends his own children to private school and promised to keep an open mind. After two weeks of attending meetings, however, he came down on the side of the bureaucracy. “People who want a private school experience should pay for it,” he intoned.

The United Federation of Teachers, the reigning teachers’ union in the city, reacted with predictable fury. Teachers handed out anti-Edison material in class and picketed polling places. Students and their parents were enlisted in support. “We’re fearful of change,” admitted Laurel Butler, the United Federation of Teachers’ representative at P.S. 161.

But the wild card turned out to be ACORN, a 1960s-style activist group that the press somehow dubbed Edison’s designated adversary. A national organization that claims 100,000 family members belonging to 500 chapters in 40 cities across the country, ACORN (the Association for Community Organizations of Reform Now) organizes people around rent strikes, unionization, the minimum wage, and other social and economic issues. In New York it has also confounded the Working Families party, which gathered 102,000 votes for Hillary Clinton last November. Like most such ’60s-type organizations, it is staffed by educated, middle-class people living lives of austere dedication.

ACORN is heavily involved in the schools itself, having founded three alternative institutions, ACORN High School for Social Justice in Bushwick, ACORN Community High School, in Crown Heights, and Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School in Washington Heights. Although ACORN does not actually manage the schools, it sits on a board of directors and keeps a full-time, paid organizer on the premises. “We visualize these schools as a way of introducing social justice,” says Nathan Smith, a 28-year-old former United Farm Workers representative who earns $ 18,000 a year as ACORN’s lead organizer. “Organizing is a way of gaining power.” The students are often recruited to work on political campaigns.

Against Edison, ACORN quickly jumped into the fray, packing public hearings and filing a lawsuit to prevent the election on the grounds that ACORN itself had not been given the same access to parents as Edison. (It hardly mattered, since renegade teachers soon slipped ACORN a complete roster of parents’ addresses and phone numbers.) “What happens with these five schools will reverberate all over the country,” pronounced Bertha Lewis, a 49-year-old former off-Broadway actress who is ACORN’s New York executive director. “This is race and class to the max.”

Oddly, although Edison was making a generous public-relations gesture by volunteering to take on five of the worst schools in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, this good will was somehow interpreted as “racism.” “How did they happen to pick five schools that are entirely black and Hispanic?” challenged Smith. “There are schools that perform just as badly in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. [In fact there are not, but why argue?] I’ll bet if Edison tried to take over a school in Park Slope [an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood], those people would run them right out of town.”

In fact, Edison is doing very well in suburbs and smaller cities across America — even as 70 percent of its students are still black and Hispanic. Right across the river in Jersey City, 500 elementary school pupils attend Edison’s Schomburg Charter School, brought in by reform mayor Bret Schundler. “I went to Catholic schools and it’s not much different,” says Rabbani Heron, mother of a kindergarten student. Edison will take over more than a dozen new public schools next September in Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York while continuing to run several private academies in Washington, D.C. “Edison is a competent, capable organization,” says Michael Williamson, deputy superintendent of education in Michigan, where Edison runs 27 of the state’s 183 charter schools. “What they’re doing in the classroom isn’t revolutionary, but what they’re doing with the management system that supports the classroom may be.”

Edison and other companies trying to crack the public school monopoly always hit their biggest speed bumps when they enter large union-dominated cities on the East and West Coasts. At the Edison Charter Academy in San Francisco, the number of students scoring in the upper half on national math and reading tests more than doubled within two years of the school’s opening. Yet when a union-backed slate won control of the San Francisco School Board last November, it immediately moved to terminate Edison’s contract. “The statistics literally speak for themselves,” says Whittle. “None of the 44 other cities where we manage schools has ever seen anything like our results in San Francisco.”

Edison took the New York defeat in stride. “Our people worked incredibly hard,” says Gaynor McCown, senior vice president at Edison. “Yes, we’re disappointed, but with so many other good things happening around the country, we can’t be too discouraged.”

Indeed, it is the politically charged precincts of New York that will be left behind. “I went to a public school in Gainesville, Florida, that had Chris Whittle’s Channel One,” says Smith, sitting in ACORN’s spartan Brooklyn headquarters just above a welfare office. “It was the worst educational experience I ever had. We had to sit for 20 minutes a day listening to commercials for M&M’s and McDonald’s. Luckily, my father was a college professor. I should have been home-schooled. I got my entire education from him.”

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of the children in those five New York City schools, there will be no college professors at home to pick up the slack.

William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn.