City to Edison: Drop Dead
TUCKER, WILLIAM
City to Edison: i Drop Dead I New York says no to privatizing failing public I schools. BY WILLIAM TUCKER New York City "AMERICAN EDUCATION is about where health care J- A.was ten years ago,"...
...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...
...Anything Mayor Giuliani is for, I'm against," contributed another...
...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...
...To see people opposing the opportunity for a better education is really sad...
...James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan...
...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...
...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...
...After two weeks of attending meetings, however, he came down on the side of the bureaucracy...
...161 in Harlem, where opposition was particularly vocal...
...Under these conditions, of course, an Edison success would have been a colossal embarrassment to the education establishment...
...Two of the schools are scheduled to close next year because of their impossibly dismal performance...
...We had to sit for 20 minutes a day listening to commercials for M&M's and McDonald's...
...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...
...Edison took the New York defeat in stride...
...I should have been home-schooled...
...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...
...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...
...For a while the issue seemed up for grabs...
...The whole episode is a sad commentary on American public education," said mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who initiated the effort...
...On average, 83 percent of their 5,000 pupils read below grade level and almost 90 percent are deficient in math...
...Luckily, my father was a college professor...
...Sharpton sends his own children to private school and promised to keep an open mind...
...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...
...But the wild card turned out to be ACORN, a 1960s-style activist group that the press somehow dubbed Edison's designated adversary...
...Even this lukewarm effort earned him the vitriol of community activists, who repeatedly insulted him at meetings...
...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...
...There are schools that perform just as badly in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge...
...161 and 66 in Harlem and the Bronx, and Middle Schools 246, 320, and 111 in Brooklyn—are among the city's worst...
...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...
...Students and their parents were enlisted in support...
...Our people worked incredibly hard," says Gaynor McCown, senior vice president at Edison...
...challenged Smith...
...The five schools—IPS...
...I went to Catholic schools and it's not much different," says Rabbani Heron, mother of a kindergarten student...
...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...
...In that light, with only 47 percent of parents participating in the highly publicized contest, the result was something of a landslide...
...Yet when a union-backed slate won control of the San Francisco School Board last November, it immediately moved to terminate Edison's contract...
...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...
...Like most such '60s-type organizations, it is staffed by educated, middle-class people living lives of austere dedication...
...In New York it has also co-founded the Working Families party, which gathered 102,000 votes for Hillary Clinton last November...
...We're fearful of change," admitted Laurel Butler, the United Federation of Teachers' representative at PS...
...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...
...solution to the schools is to elect more Democrats—gave the Edison campaign only perfunctory support...
...The statistics literally speak for themselves," says Whittle...
...This is race and class to the max...
...Teachers handed out anti-Edison material in class and picketed polling places...
...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...
...It hardly mattered, since renegade teachers soon slipped ACORN a complete roster of parents' addresses and phone numbers...
...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...
...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...
...Edison was also charged with plotting to round up illegal aliens and turn them over to the INS...
...BY WILLIAM TUCKER New York City "AMERICAN EDUCATION is about where health care J- A.was ten years ago," says Dr...
...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...
...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...
...I got my entire education from him...
...None of the 44 other cities where we manage schools has ever seen anything like our results in San Francisco...
...They're trying to bribe us with computers...
...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...
...Steeped in distrust, however, many parents found all this generosity to be profoundly suspicious...
...Unfortunately, New York City won't be along for the ride...
...Ordinarily only 5 percent of these parents bother to vote in school elections...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...
...School chancellor Harold Levy— who argued publicly that the real William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn...
...The computers alone would have cost Edison $3 million...
...Yes, we're disappointed, but with so many other good things happening around the country, we can't be too discouraged...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In a bold move, the company even invited Al Sharpton into the debate...
...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...
...In fact the vote wasn't even that close...
...Companies trying to crack the public school monopoly always hit their biggest speed bumps in the large union-dominated cities...
...The federal government failed at reform, but private industry went ahead and did the job...
...Hazel Dukes, president of the New York NAACP, said Chancellor Levy should be "put in a dungeon" for making his halfhearted proposal...
...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...
...The students are often recruited to work on political campaigns...
...Our children are not for sale," said one parent at P.S...
...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...
...The same thing may happen with the schools...
...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...
...Indeed, it is the politically charged precincts of New York that will be left behind...
...How did they happen to pick five schools that are entirely black and Hispanic...
...Now why didn't he think of that before...
...Organizing is a way of gaining power...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 30
