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Special Report
 
 
 

Classroom Consciousness
by Alissa Quart
 
 

In mid-December, 2,500 teenagers walked out of their Philadelphia public high school classrooms and into the city's intersections. They traipsed through the city's center, a mélange that includes a giant nineteenth-century library, a bank-turned-hotel and thousands of handsome brownstones, winding up at the school district building. The marchers included 500 students from the poorer Strawberry Mansion High School, along with a sizable contingent from magnet schools like Masterman and Central.
 

These kids were not slackers eager to cut class. They were activists
committed to defeating the privatization of their schools by Edison
Schools Inc., a publicly traded company based in New York that operates
more than 136 public schools in twenty-three states.
 

They partially succeeded. Originally, Pennsylvania Governor Mark
Schweiker proposed letting Edison manage the entire public school
system's central administration, along with up to sixty individual
schools. But on April 17, a state panel voted to give only twenty city
schools to Edison--the rest are to be run by two universities and a
range of smaller for-profit and nonprofit educational companies. As the
panel conducted its deliberations, the student activists were rallying
around the building. Few in the media have picked up on the critical
role played by the students--which has been overshadowed in recent weeks
by stories about the company's sliding stock price and desperate (though
finally successful) quest for a new infusion of funds.
 

Early last year, neither the diminished role of Edison nor the
protracted battle between the school privatization forces and the high
school students seemed likely. At that point, city community groups and
parents were supportive of the idea of Edison managing the
seventh-largest school district in the country. They imagined Edison
might be able to create charter-school-like entities but with more
muscle and more fixed curriculum than the typical charter, a potentially
expedient way of improving the ailing district, where some textbooks are
so old they inform students that one day "man will walk on the moon."
But the faith started to fade in September, after Edison was given $2.7
million to produce a report on the state of the city's educational
system. According to its critics, the report tacitly made the case for
Edison's own management. Using the SAT, a test not typically invoked as
a yardstick of the success of urban school districts, Edison claimed the
schools had simply been mismanaged, without even mentioning the role of
underfunding and urban divestment in creating the system's ills.
 

The evidence of underfunding is hard to ignore. For example, according
to the Philadelphia Inquirer's yearly survey of the schools, in
2001 instructional spending per student in Philly was $4,747. In
contrast, in the mainline suburb of Radnor, instructional spending per
student was $9,120. As for teacher salaries, Philly's instructors topped
out at $62,600, while suburban districts paid as high as $79,371.
 

When Edison attempted, with the full backing of the state's governor, to
win a contract for management of the school system in fall 2001, the
company was derided by many Philadelphians, who felt insulted by the
out-of-town educators denigrating their children's scholastic
performance to demonstrate the need for their own services. Parents also
detected an alliance of state and corporate power against Philadelphia
dwellers, a familiar dynamic in Pennsylvania. Schoolteachers, too,
voiced worry about whether they would get to keep their contracts under
privatization--which they have--and fear about a new Edison curriculum
that would be too corporate and one-size-fits-all to fit individual
students' learning needs. School employees and their labor unions, faced
with the prospect of job losses because of the privatization, also
rallied to the cause. Their case against the company revolved around the
spotty record of Edison schools in places like Baltimore. They also
raised questions about whether a public school system should be run by a
privately owned company at all, especially at a historical moment marked
by an uncertain stock market and massive corporate scandals. Local
journalists even dubbed the messy takeover plans "Edron."
 

But despite the widespread anti-Edison sentiment, the most powerful
opponents of the takeover were and continue to be those most affected by
it--the students.
 

"The students have provided the spark for opposition," says Paul
Socolar, editor of Public School Notebook, an independent
quarterly newspaper about the schools. "The student actions have been
the most visible and the loudest, and have had a real consistency."
 

The public high school students who continue to oppose Edison do so on two main grounds. First, they see it as part of the larger corporate culture that considers young people, and young people of color in particular, just a demographic to be exploited for profit. Second, they see it as the final stage of high schools' longstanding plan to increase policing of students, with measures like metal detectors and security guards.
 

"I don't have a price tag, and my education shouldn't be for profit,"
said student activist leader Day Augustine, 18, who attends West
Philadelphia High School.
 

"Do I want to learn that one plus one equals Pepsi?" he added.
 

"Students are not property."
 

Ashley Smith, 16, a sophomore with a headful of cherry-red braids,
expressed similar sentiments: "A company running a school can only
really teach you how to work for a corporation," she said. "I don't want
to work for someone's corporation."
 

When I visited Philadelphia this winter, Ashley and Day sat in a group
of fifty teen activists at the headquarters of the Student Union, a
nonprofit group devoted to school reform and youth activism that holds
weekly meetings. The teen members sat harem-scarem, some on chairs, some
on the floor near emptied pizza boxes. They were discussing further
student responses to the threat of school privatization. The student
activists evenly divided up into arty white teens in postpunk clothes,
fingerless arm-length gloves made from cut-up sleeves of shirts, and
more conservatively dressed African-American kids, hair dyed the
occasional shade of blonde. A male activist arrived with his toddler son
and sat next to a female activist just a couple of years younger but
with a much more teenager-like mien, multipiercings and a radial tire
belt. One girl was giving her friend a new set of cornrows, and another
girl was giving a boy a friendly massage.
 

"Why are schools being privatized?" Eric Braxton, 26, one of the Student
Union's three adult organizers, asked the group.
 

Hands shot up.
 

"They are trying to set up a franchise," said one teen. "Education as a
franchise, like Burger King."
 

"Because they are preparing us for prison," one boy joked. The kids
laughed but also looked uncomfortable. The students often compared
public schools to prisons, with fear in their voices mixing with
bravado. In conversation, they extended the metaphor of the prison to
the Edison schools, where classes would be taught from mass-produced
scripts by teachers responsible to a home office, with students
potentially having to walk in straight lines down hallways in single
file, hands at their sides or behind their backs, halls divided by
yellow lines like highways.
 

(According to Edison Schools Inc., school uniforms and walks are
instituted on a school-by-school basis and not as a blanket policy. Both
exist not to police students, according to Edison, but to promote "core
values" like respect and order.)
 

The students then wrote a series of recommendations to send to the district to improve schools. More computers, wrote Ashley. Involving kids and teachers in the voting process about what to do about privatization, wrote Ebony. One activist, Jacob Winterstein, a 15-year-old clad in Pumas, a leather and shell bracelet around his slender wrist, spoke angrily of the "cookie cutter" education and the "falseness" of Edison.
 

"This is happening in Philly, not in Ardmore [a wealthy suburb], because
we are a poor and minority community," Jacob said. Like many of the
student opponents of Edison, Jacob cited the low funding of Philadelphia
schools relative to schools in suburban districts as the major reason
for the public schools' difficulties, a problem that has led to the
district's $216 million deficit. As school funding would not change
under private management, the students and the city's other Edison
opponents believe the schools would be as or more likely to fail anyway
when run by the company than if they were to remain under the auspices
of the city or state.
 

Edison's corporate identity also rankles the students and is one of the
major themes of their rallies and meetings. Edison's current CEO Chris
Whittle founded Channel One, the advertising-laden high school
television station that broadcasts to 12,000 schools a day. The teens
mocked Whittle's stuffy bow tie and railed against the specter of Wall
Street investors profiting from their education.
 

"Edison is like Channel One," said one teen activist, Max Goodman, 17, a
rosy-faced senior. "It will have an unconscious effect on all the
students just like advertising in the schools. And the Gap has money
into Edison so maybe one day they'll say, 'This lesson is brought to you
buy the Gap.'" She compared it to other corporate investors in her
school and recalled how, at a fundraising bake sale, "our principal told
us we couldn't serve juice or hot chocolate because it competes with
Coca-Cola, the brand in our school's machines."
 

"The branding of the schools is not going to make people who get ahead,"
added Jacob. "We want proper funding for public school, rather than
bringing in a for-profit organization."
 

For Jacob and many of the others, the battle against Edison is the first
political movement they have encountered. And in the course of the
fight, they have used their teen sensibility to get their message
across--turning Sean "P. Diddy" Combs's commercially motivated tune "Bad
Boy for Life" into antiprivatization chant: "We Can't Be Stopped
Here--Coz It's Philly for Life" and holding a sleep-out with pizza on
the steps of City Hall.
 

The students have also joined up with others in the larger anticorporate
movement. That very day in January, the anti-Edison teens were planning
a march with Spiral Q Puppet Theater, a Philadelphia-based band of
political puppet-makers who participated memorably in puppet-waving
actions against the Republican National Convention in summer 2000.
Together, the teens and the puppetistas planned to build images of Chris
Whittle out of papier-mâché.
 

What is perhaps most striking about these teens at the Student Union,
and at their sister organization Youth United for Change, is that they
defy the stereotype of their generation, besotted with corporate
culture. In one pithy expression of the movement, blue stickers pasted
on backpacks read: I AM NOT FOR SALE: SAY NO TO PRIVATIZATION.
 

While theirs has been only a partial victory, it is a victory
nevertheless; with some help from adults, a bunch of adolescents have
managed to considerably diminish Edison's role in their future. "We want
all the real cliché things--smaller class sizes, to feel part of
the schools, to be part of the decision-making," Jacob said. "The way
the world is set up not everyone can be a doctor and lawyer, but now
they decide for you before you get to kindergarten. All we want is for
us all to have an equal chance."