February 17, 2002 

Buying in to the Company School 

By JACQUES STEINBERG 

FLINT, Mich., Feb. 13 - An elementary school on a block of boarded-up 

houses here offers a glimpse of how Edison Schools Inc. would remake many of America's classrooms. Its experience is perhaps of most immediate interest to parents and teachers in Philadelphia, which is expected soon to surrender dozens of its worst schools as part of the nation's largest experiment in educational privatization. 

Based on a typical day at the Garfield Edison Partnership School here, Philadelphians can expect 90 minutes of reading lessons each morning, during which teachers follow a common script; swift disciplinary hearings for students who so much as talk out of turn in class; standardized tests administered by computer every few weeks, with answers transmitted instantly to Edison headquarters in New York; and, eventually, a complimentary computer in the home of every child. 

Parents should also get accustomed to their children receiving law-enforcement-style tickets - but for good conduct - which are the currency for admission to school activities like the honors choir and Friday night dances. 

Still, no one in Philadelphia, where an emergency school board installed by the state is expected to hire Edison as a consultant as soon as next month, should anticipate a quick fix. After spiking upward in Edison's first year, standardized test scores at Garfield - whose students, like those in Philadelphia, are mostly poor and black - are now lower than before the company arrived, in 1996. Too, after performing better in reading and math than the district as a whole before Edison, Garfield now performs worse. Just 24 percent of the school's fourth graders passed a state reading test last year. Almost 45 percent of the district's passed. 

"Certainly the schools we gave to Edison were schools that were challenging to us," said Linda Caine- Smith, the deputy superintendent in Flint, which has entrusted two schools in addition to Garfield to the company. "But under Edison they haven't always made the adequate yearly progress they should have." 

The performance of Edison, in the classroom and on Wall Street, is being monitored closely around the country, as more communities consider hiring the company. The company now manages 134 public schools in 22 states. It suffered its most bitter defeat last year, when it lost a vote by parents to manage five schools in New York City. 

Despite their disappointment with the test scores, Flint school officials are negotiating a three-year extension of the company's five-year contract. Other communities have been less forgiving. Last month, the school board in Wichita, Kan., voted to take back two elementary schools that it had given to Edison five years earlier. These included a school at which the principal was recently dismissed on suspicion of encouraging cheating on standardized tests. 

Several hundred parents, teachers and students in Philadelphia have seized on such concerns - as well as Edison's practice of trying to negotiate a school day as much as 90 minutes longer than the norm - to try to block Edison's arrival. But the Pennsylvania governor, Mark S. Schweiker, has expressed confidence that Edison can improve a troubled school system, and Edison is said to have the inside track to win two major contracts to help manage the overall system and to operate most of the 100 schools the board wants to transfer to private management. 

As soon as next fall, those schools could have many of the trappings of Garfield, which Flint children have attended since 1928, long before General Motors began closing the assembly lines that once ran like a roaring river here. 

The few teachers who remain from Garfield's earlier incarnation - most of the staff transferred after the school day was lengthened - say that the deportment of the 500 students, an Edison priority, has been the most noticeable change. Fourth and fifth graders who once cruised the wide hallways as if they were freeways now walk in long slow lines, arms folded, "so we know their hands are on their person," says Georgette Parks, who was hired as principal last school year, after having led an Edison school in Detroit. 

Inside the classroom, during the 90 minutes devoted to reading each morning, the teachers follow a curriculum called Success for All, which provides daily lesson plans that are scripted down to the questions that the teachers are to ask students about particular stories. Each class visits school's media center once a month to log on to Edison's Web site and take exams in reading and math. 

Academic analysts at the company's headquarters - the teachers repeatedly refer to "New York" as if it were the home office and they were salesmen - then crunch the numbers to provide the school with guidance on which students, and teachers, are falling behind. 

Though they start the day earlier than friends in other schools and stay later, Garfield students say they enjoy the rigor and the close attention. 

"It was bad at my old school," said Ashley Callahan, 11, who transferred to Garfield this year on the recommendation of family friends. "My old school had fights. The teachers wouldn't do anything." 

Ashley said she enjoyed the Spanish classes that are required of every Edison student and the programming of the school's closed-circuit television station, a fixture of every Edison school. The programming is produced entirely by students. 

Like teachers at other Edison schools, Garfield teachers are encouraged to solve their most intractable problems as a team. Thus, one morning this week, Barbara Heller took one of her fourth graders before a committee of five of her colleagues to seek their guidance, in the boy's presence, on how to stop him from talking constantly in class. 

"He's either unwilling or unable to do what he needs to do," Ms. Heller said, as the boy convulsed in tears. "Frankly, I don't know what to do." 

After interviewing the boy, the teachers decided that he was lonely, and they promised to ask his mother if he could stay after school to participate in activities like the chess club or chorus. 

So far, Edison has spent tens of millions at its schools on extras like closed-circuit television, as well as on the computers it lends to parents, much to the chagrin of Wall Street, which has grown bearish on a stock that has lost two-thirds of its value in a year. [Edison stock closed at $12.46 a share on Friday.] 

Ultimately, Ms. Parks, the Garfield principal, knows she will be judged as much by test scores as by her fiscal management. Though the number of students passing reading tests at her school doubled to 24 percent, from 12, last year, her first at Garfield, she knows that they are far from good enough - for the district, the state or "New York." 

"There's always a certain amount of pressure," she said.