A Lesson in Mismanagement

Yet Milhomme is receiving active support from some very vocal parents at Reeves, support that has strong racial underpinnings. Milhomme is a Haitian American at a school whose student body is 82 percent black, with a substantial number of Haitian Americans. The teachers who turned in Milhomme are all Hispanic or white. Dyes-Paschal is black, and according to district officials, she is currently under investigation for allegedly violating the corporal punishment school board rule. The community is rallying to support both her and Milhomme against the perceived antagonism of a cabal of nonblack teachers.

Although she doesn't regret telling her bosses about Milhomme's alleged transgression, Norgan worries that this sensational case is only distracting attention from the real issue, the real reason that she and at least thirteen other teachers from the 69-member faculty have applied for transfers to another school: The Edison Project is a failure at Reeves Elementary.

"It's been nothing but broken promises from Edison," she asserts. "It's a joke."

The shortcomings of the public-education system in the United States, from low test scores to school violence, have led many to look for other answers. So far these answers have often involved bringing the private sector into public education in some fashion. School districts of all sizes are experimenting with charter schools, which receive public funds yet design curricula and hire and fire faculty with a freedom usually enjoyed only by private schools.

The 1999 session of the Florida Legislature was consumed with the debate over Gov. Jeb Bush's plan for school vouchers. The controversial proposal, which passed on a party-line vote, allows parents of children at low-performing public schools to take the money the state has allocated to educate their children, and send those kids (and the money) to the public or private school of their choice.

The Edison Project is a completely different model. While some of the 51 schools it operates across the nation are charter schools (which have a great deal of autonomy from local school districts), many of them, like Reeves Elementary, are run as partnerships between Edison and the district. Reeves is the only Edison school in Florida. In its five-year contract with the district, Edison has agreed to use Miami-Dade County Public Schools' employees to implement the Edison Project curriculum. And even though its teachers are paid more to work longer hours (7:45 a.m. to 4:20 p.m) and more days (beginning two weeks before and ending two weeks after the regular MDCPS school year), the Edison Project is set up, in theory, to make a profit.

"That's only in theory," quips Edison's Chris Cerf, pointing out that the company, founded in 1991 by media mogul Christopher Whittle, has yet to move into the black. The theory, he explains, is that an Edison school will receive the same amount of money per student (roughly $4000, a sum known in Florida as the "full-time equivalent" or "FTE") as any other public school, but by spending that money more efficiently, the company will, ideally, have some money left over at the end of the day, i.e., a profit.

How do they plan to pull this off? Because the same curriculum is being implemented at every Edison school nationwide, "we have tremendous efficiencies of scale" when it comes to things like buying books, computers, and software, Cerf says. Indeed because of higher personnel expenses and the commitment to sending a computer home with every student at the second-grade level and above, "our putative [profit] margins are very slim," he allows.

Which means that expansion is Edison's road to riches. But nearly everywhere the company goes, it meets with resistance: sometimes token, sometimes dogged. This past month the teachers union in Peoria, Illinois, rescinded a change in their contract that would have allowed Edison to take over two public elementary schools, and ousted the union leaders who had previously agreed to the change. In San Antonio, Texas, at least two school board candidates have made campaign issues out of bashing Edison and its operation of two elementary schools there. Also last month Knoxville, Tennessee's school system rejected an Edison proposal to take over an elementary school. Even so Edison brass are hoping to have some 70 schools in their stable by fall 1999.

In 1995 Cerf's colleagues were able to convince Miami-Dade County Public Schools administrators, school board members, and the powerful United Teachers of Dade (UTD) union that letting a private company keep the change from the FTE money allocated to an inner-city school would not mean shortchanging students. (The neighborhood around Reeves is hardly "the inner city," yet some 84 percent of the school's 1078 students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.) Edison and the district entered into a five-year contract to run the brand-new Reeves Elementary as a partnership, beginning with the 1996-97 school year.

Year one, by nearly all accounts, was a disaster. Despite a massive upfront investment, Edison was slow to deliver home computers to parents and slow to deliver supplies and support to faculty and staff. Teachers clamored to escape the school, with 22 applying for transfers during the school year. Then-principal Dyona McLean also asked for, and eventually received, a transfer. All 61 teachers signed a petition saying they were overworked and underpaid. On the 1997 Stanford Achievement Test, Reeves students scored below students at four nearby elementaries in all three categories of the test (reading comprehension, math applications, and math computation).