Salon.Com’s Joan Walsh has an excellent, in-depth look at the San Francisco Board of Education’s impending decision to close the relatively successful Edison Charter Academy school. Edison took over what was one of the worst schools in San Francisco and managed to turn it around, which, of course, is precisely the problem for its opponents. Walsh writes,
In fact, Edison has been a largely successful experiment in school reform, offering crucial lessons about how to help children, especially poor children of color, achieve more. It offers a window onto what the private sector can teach the public sector, and vice versa, at a relatively low cost to the district, and high benefit to most of the kids. All indications are, however, that the school board plans to close the book on this valuable lesson, for political, personal and ideological reasons that have little to do with the 500 students there.
According to Walsh, some of the academic gains made by Edison students are astounding. Last year, for example, African American students’ scores on the Academic Performance Index jumped 25 percent — the largest for any San Francisco school with a large African American population.
The pretext for revoking the school’s charter are allegations that it intentionally “counseled out” the poorer performing students. As Walsh documents, however, there seems to be no evidence to substantiate this claim. In fact, Edison has managed to keep its minority population high (there are actually a couple more African American students at the school than before it was a charter school), where other predominantly African American schools saw black enrollment drop after a mandatory desegregation plan was ruled illegal a few years ago and African American parents could choose to send their kids to schools in their neighborhoods rather than having the school system forcibly bus them to schools such as Edison.
As current Edison principal Vince Matthews told Walsh, “The fact is, it’s really a miracle. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before. Instead of trying to learn from it, the district is trying to shut it down. You have a school that’s never worked for African-American and Latino kids, and now it is, and the district wants to take it away from them. I just find it so sad.”
Source:
The shame of San Francisco. Joan Walsh, Salon.Com, March 29, 2001.