For a few weeks in March, a fight over
school privatization made headlines in New York City. Edison
Schools, Inc., the nation's largest private operator of public
schools, with 113 schools and counting, was at first heavily
favored to win. But parents at the five schools slated for
takeover dealt the company a knockout blow, voting Edison down at
all five schools by an overall margin of 4 to 1.
The five primary schools and junior highs
that Schools Chancellor Harold Levy had targeted for private
management were all in working-class, immigrant-heavy black or
Latino neighborhoods—Crown Heights, the South Bronx, Bushwick
and Harlem—and all had been listed as failing schools for at
least two years. Though charter law requires approval by a
majority of parents for conversion, an Edison victory was touted
as a sure thing: the parents were seen as either too apathetic to
care or too desperate to forgo a change—any change. When the
results were announced on April 2, the mayor sputtered like a
bettor who’d just been betrayed on an inside tip.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has argued for
privatization as a solution for many of the city’s problems. The
public schools were an early target: first, his program to place
poor kids in Catholic schools in 1997; then his unsuccessful 1999
battle for publicly funded vouchers. But higher education was not
far behind. In May 1998, the mayor packed his CUNY task force with
privatization backers such as Heather MacDonald, Richard Roberts
and Benno Schmidt, now a CUNY trustee. While the Commission’s
report did not call for fully privatizing remediation, as Giuliani
had proposed, it did advocate partial privatization "to
stimulate competition." These same players reemerged as part
of the formidable force behind Edison.
Schmidt is Edison’s chairman of the
board. Richard Roberts was a consultant for Edison before he took
over the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and
Development. And MacDonald is a senior fellow at the right-wing
Manhattan Institute, which has been stumping for Edison for years.
Edison CEO Chris Whittle (the founder of
Channel One, the firm that brings television news—and ads—to 8
million schoolchildren) was highly conscious of New York’s
symbolism for his growing company: "These are going to be
five of the most watched schools in America," he said in
January. "Failure is not an option here." Edison spared
no expense, flooding the streets with 200 staffers and volunteers.
Whittle made the Harlem school, I.S. 161, a top priority, saying
in January that "Benno is heading up that very important
project for us"—though in the end Schmidt left most of the
front-line advocacy to others.
So how did Edison lose? It didn’t hurt
that the powerful United Federation of Teachers got involved,
distributing anti-Edison literature through teachers at contested
schools in Harlem and Crown Heights. Or that community organizing
powerhouse ACORN, which runs alternative public schools of its
own, had anti-Edison organizers knocking on doors in Crown
Heights. But those efforts bore fruit because Levy’s decision to
try his privatization experiment on poor students of color had
struck a chord, angering both community leaders and a quiescent
parent electorate. At a March 24 anti-Edison rally at I.S. 161,
City Council member Guillermo Linares asked the crowd, "Why
do they always come to our communities to rape us, privatize our
schools, and take away our dignity and our future?" Says
Crown Heights school board member Agnes Green, "We didn’t
like the idea of taking an institution that is there to serve the
public and changing it into a for-profit company. If they don’t
make money, they can just cut bait and leave the fishing pond—and
that’s too large a gamble."
An astonishing display of grassroots
activism unfolded on 135th Street, spearheaded by brothers John
and Carlos Perez, who each have kids at 161—and went there
themselves. The parents, John Perez says, were offended that when
Edison first came to the school, all of their handouts were in
English—"that right there was a slap in the face"—but
they became even more concerned when parental research uncovered
Edison’s dubious track record. Though the city’s many
columnists were happy to assume, as voucher proponent John Tierney
did in the Times, that Edison would "do a better job of
educating children," the only independent study so far,
conducted by the AFT, found that Edison’s teacher turnover rate
was double the national average, and that most Edison math and
reading scores showed no change or mild to substantial declines.
Most disturbing, the AFT found that many schools showed a drop in
free-lunch students after Edison’s takeover, a sign of possible
class bias in admissions.
"From what they’ve been able to
pull at the university level, folks like Benno thought this would
be a romp," says ACORN head Bertha Lewis. "But they
miscalculated." And the Edison loss hurt major stockholders
like Schmidt personally, as well. While Edison stock spiked to a
high of 383¼4 in early February, despite a bear market, by time
the vote was over the stock had plunged to 201¼4. A March 20 SEC
filing, in connection with a new public offering by Edison, stated
that Schmidt owned 1,148,150 shares of the company’s stock. This
means that losing the parent vote may have cost Schmidt more than
$20 million.
Schmidt’s central role with Edison may
well have hurt the company’s chances of winning community
support. "The minority community, backed by the Faculty
Senate at CUNY, were opposed and incensed by the [1999] report
authored by Benno Schmidt," Merryl Tisch, a member of the New
York State Board of Regents, told the New York Observer. Schmidt’s
role was seen by many as an "insult," she said. City
College is close to I.S. 161 (and to Edison’s future corporate
headquarters in Harlem), and its student government co-sponsored
the March 24 protest. Anti-Edison buttons popped up on campus as
the vote drew near.
Columnists and editorial boards took the
no vote and the 50 percent turnout as a sign of parent apathy or
worse. Several commentators concluded, in essence, that the
parents were just too dumb to be trusted with democracy. Levy
"could have handed the schools to Edison by contract,"
moaned the Daily News (April 11). "Why was a vote even
held?" Giuliani demanded that Levy do exactly that, for 20
schools, the day after the voting ended. But that would violate
the state’s charter law, and Levy told the News that in any
case, "Privatization without parental support is doomed to
failure." (April 1).
In fact, once the vote was finished Levy
had a positive spin. He compared the 50 percent turnout to the 3.3
percent turnout for the last school board race, saying, "The
result today indicates that many parents have a real sense of hope
for their schools. I ask that all of those involved in the
election come to the table to discuss real initiatives to improve
student performance." This time, his call may be answered.
Perez says Edison "woke up the
community." He describes with glee the moment he walked into
his alma mater with the election results—495 to 88: "The
kids at the school were yelling, ‘We won! We won!’ The
teachers all started clapping. The morale is so high now,
everything’s going to be different." At that anti-Edison
rally a week before, Jeanne Ollivierre, an adjunct professor at
the City College School of Education who’s placed teachers in
training at 161 for 15 years, had already begun to channel her
anger over Edison’s "disrespect for the community"
into a vision: What if City College began a formal collaboration
with the school? Brooklyn parents have speculated about linking up
with Medgar Evers, too.
But school privatization isn’t over for
New York City yet. When asked whether he’d give the city another
go, Edison CEO Whittle said, "We’ve worked through similar
legal issues elsewhere. If there’s a will, I bet there will be a
way." And during the final days of the Edison vote, CUNY
chairman Herman Badillo proposed a new privatization scheme:
turning over the University’s remedial reading exam to a private
firm.
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