S.F.'s Most Controversial Charter School Throws Off For-Profit Masters

Source: SF Weekly

Stepping onto Edison Charter Academy's schoolyard, you would never guess this is the most contested turf in San Francisco public education. The chapters in Edison's history book have been dramatic: First, the shamefully failed public elementary school. Then the takeover by a company seeking to profit off public education. The high-profile attacks from the school district. The notoriety in the national media. And now, after a decade of controversy, the chapter you probably didn't hear about: the quiet mutiny by teachers against the corporation.

... Education in San Francisco reveals a city divided. The well-to-do and those-with-scholarships have defected for private schools — one in four of all city kids, to be exact. While nearly 60 percent of San Franciscans are white, only 11 percent of the district's students are, while Latinos, blacks, and Asians fill public classrooms in disproportionate amounts. That's especially the case at Edison, an outpost of the other San Francisco in a neighborhood with one of the highest concentrations of white folks — few of whom send their kids to the school. Instead, most Edison students are Latinos walking up from the bordering Mission, or African-Americans riding in from the impoverished Bayview. Nearly 90 percent of the students pay a reduced fee at lunch, because of their parents' income.

... But little did the school district know that its grudge against the Edison company would be matched from inside the Edison school itself. Teachers and officials increasingly resisted applying the New York company's cookie-cutter formula to their local kids. Last spring, 12 years after the out-of-towners took over, Edison Charter Academy finally broke ties with the company and engineered a community school by its own design: that idyllic college-prep academy behind the Fiesta de Familia, a nonprofit aiming for small class sizes, individualized attention, and extensive arts classes most districts can only dream of.

EdisonLearning assured the school it couldn't succeed without the company when it learned about the school's moves to go indie. Two representatives told the board's president, Ed Kriete, "'We're going to do everything in our power to make sure you fail if you leave us,'" he recalls. "And I'm like, 'I guess our meeting is over.'" Edison's biggest trial yet had begun.

Read more: http://www.sfweekly.com/2011-06-01/news/charter-school-thomas-edison-san-francisco-lauren-smiley/

This is about parents and educators who rose up against the out-of-town charter school megacorp and restored it to local control.

charter school.

Hope more places start to do that as the corpo-education complex tries to take over to make a profit by making kids fail.

Charter schools in certain situations can be wonderful. Unfortunately corporate America is ruining the concept.