So when Norgan, with less than three months left in the school year, got the social studies books all first-grade teachers in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools use, she asked academy director Nancy Rubin if she was supposed to start teaching from the new books.
"Ms. Rubin told me to use them as long as the Edison Project people and the [Miami-Dade County Public Schools] auditors were there," says Norgan, a second-year teacher. "And that once they left, I could do whatever I wanted to do."
Norgan knew the auditors were coming. She was among the five Reeves teachers who complained in late January to the school district about the woeful state of the finances, academics, and technology at the three-year-old elementary school at 2005 NW 111th St., in Northwest Miami-Dade. Like her colleagues Norgan laid blame for the school's problems squarely with the Edison Project, the New York City-based, for-profit education company that operates Reeves in partnership with the school district.
The disaffected teachers' concerns had not fallen on deaf ears. After they brought their complaints to school board member Manty Sabates Morse, then to deputy superintendent for school operations Eddie Pearson, the district moved quickly to check out their allegations. This increased scrutiny galvanized the Edison Project, which had already invested $1.5 million in the school, to throw more money at the specific problems Norgan and the other teachers had spelled out.
It was during this flurry of activity that Norgan received the social studies texts. Edison's academic plan calls for using trade books instead of textbooks, but Edison bought the social studies books during the 1997-98 school year at the urging of the school district. For most of the 1998-99 year, though, they remained under lock and key, unused -- until teachers complained downtown.
Rubin denies telling Norgan or any other teacher to use the social studies textbooks for the benefit of district review teams. She adds that the texts have always been available. "My thing is, whatever works in the classroom," she says. "I would never tell someone how to teach their class."
The book episode convinced Norgan that Edison was only interested in finding a cosmetic solution, if not conning the school district outright.
"They also fixed my schedule to one hour of Spanish a day; it had been 40 minutes every other day," she remembers. That one hour of Spanish is supposed to be a defining characteristic of the curriculum the Edison Project has instituted at 51 public schools nationwide. Others include a longer school day, home computers for students, and computers in every classroom. So in changing her Spanish schedule, was the Edison Project determined to start keeping one of its main promises to the children and parents of Reeves Elementary?
"I was told that it was just for that week," Norgan says. "They said, 'When the auditors leave, go back to the regular schedule.'"
Those auditors have come and gone. Higher-ups from the Edison Project, several teachers say, arrived before the auditors, stayed for the auditors' visits (often accompanying the school district personnel on their inspections), and have remained in the school ever since. Edison officials categorically deny that they tried to hoodwink school district auditors. "No effort was made to shade the conclusions of the audits or limit what they could see," states Chris Cerf, chief operating officer for the Edison Project in New York City. "I think it is an insult to Dade County Schools to suggest that they could be manipulated this way."
Still the constant presence of Edison personnel in the school leads some to conclude that the home office has effectively taken control of the school away from its principal, Diane Dyes-Paschal. This principal was, in fact, assigned to Reeves in order to take control: She was supposed to rescue the school from the shambles that was the first year of the Edison experiment. Although even her detractors acknowledge that Dyes-Paschal turned the school around, some assert that she has gone from being part of the solution to part of the problem.
Auditors are not the only district personnel scrutinizing Reeves Elementary. Most of the complaints Norgan and the other four teachers made had to do with their own classroom problems and Dyes-Paschal's absences. Norgan, though, made a far more explosive accusation: that first-grade teacher Mariefrance Milhomme was beating her students with a stick.
The consequences of that charge have unfolded in the pages of the Miami Herald and on local TV news. After interviewing parents and children at Reeves, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Police arrested Milhomme on March 1, charging her with felony child abuse. A week later at her arraignment, the State Attorney's Office declined to press charges, but Milhomme still faces possible disciplinary action from the school district, whose rules expressly forbid corporal punishment. The Edison Project also prohibits spanking at all its schools.
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).
Parental involvement was low, and some of those who were involved complained vehemently; then-board member Frederica Wilson, whose District 2 includes Reeves, picked up their complaints and began calling for a radical overhaul at the school. Either the Edison Project had to shape up, Wilson said, or the district would consider voiding the contract after the first year.
What followed was a 50 percent turnover of faculty and staff, and a major investment of time, money, and effort from Edison. Cerf describes year two of the contract at Reeves as "a restart," after which Edison's capital investment reached $1.5 million. John Chubb, an Edison vice president, says Reeves faced problems of "leadership and organization" the first year. The woman Edison picked to lead and reorganize the school was one of the district's finest: Diane Dyes-Paschal, the 1996 principal-of-the-year from Phyllis Wheatley Elementary. Several teachers interviewed for this story emphasize that, despite the mass exodus that marred year one, they were willing to come to Reeves Elementary solely for the opportunity to work with a principal as good as Dyes-Paschal.
If these teachers didn't know they were entering a high-pressure situation, they soon found out. "There was tremendous scrutiny in that second year," says a second-grade teacher who asked not to be identified. "The district conducted three program reviews during the year. [The district review teams] were brutal, but this staff has to be the most talented I've ever seen in Dade County Public Schools. I have never seen a staff work as hard as that group of individuals."
Edison knew it was being closely examined as well, and the company made sure it didn't hurt its chances by cutting corners. "It was great," recalls Madeline Norgan, who joined the Reeves faculty at the beginning of the 1997-98 school year. "Whatever we asked for in terms of supplies, we got it." The promised computers, in the classrooms and in homes, arrived on time and in the correct numbers that year.
By the end of year two, everyone was talking about the turnaround Dyes-Paschal and Edison had wrought at Reeves. The district backed off somewhat from its scrutiny of the project, and school board members stopped clamoring for the premature termination of Edison's contract.
The results of the 1998 Stanford tests were better than the previous year's, but not jarringly so. Reading scores went up from 22 to 26, math application from 27 to 32. The reading score tied two other neighboring elementaries, but was still below the districtwide average. The math applications score was middle-of-the-pack among the five schools in the area; the math computation score, however, remained a dismal 36, the lowest of the five. Still the overall improvement, however marginal, was encouraging. This past week brought more good news on the standardized-test front. The school's Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores went up in both the fourth-grade reading test (from 247 in 1998 to 257 in 1999) and the fifth-grade math test (from 258 to 273). Nonetheless these are failing grades. Currently 290 constitutes a passing grade.
There was one blemish on year two, however, over a question of prayer in the school -- not by students, but by teachers. In March 1998, on the day of the Stanford Achievement Tests, teachers and staff entered the school to find that some desks and doorways had been anointed with oil. Some of the marks had been painted in the form of a cross. Several faculty and staff (including Mariefrance Milhomme) acknowledged holding a prayer meeting that Saturday.
Even though the gathering was voluntary, involved no students, and took place outside of regular school hours, several teachers were incensed; many believe a form of Pentecostal/fundamentalist Christianity is the quasi-official religion of the school. Some teachers complained about office workers playing gospel music, and at least one incident of a school employee speaking in tongues.
When the story broke in the Miami Herald, principal Dyes-Paschal denied knowing anything about the Saturday prayer session. But she subsequently told school police investigators she had in fact attended the meeting and opened the school for the participants. She says she was not an active participant in the prayers or anointing. Police determined that the meeting did not violate board rules or any applicable law.
Despite the unease and tension generated by the oily crosses incident, most on the staff realized 1997-98 had been an improvement over the previous school year, and looked toward 1998-99 with optimism. Although thirty teachers bolted after the 1996-97 year, only eight asked for transfers after 1997-98. But according to several faculty members, the current year instead resembles the troubled past. Teachers once again struggled to get by with inadequate materials, lack of substitutes to cover their classes, and equipment that didn't work. So far this year, fourteen teachers have requested new assignments for fall 1999. Several teachers complained to Dyes-Paschal. According to Norgan, third-grade teacher Moses Vazquez, and three other faculty members who asked not to be named in this article, Dyes-Paschal's standard answer to such concerns was, "We have no money."
The teachers knew this wasn't Dyes-Paschal's fault. "The Edison Project wouldn't give her the money," one fourth-grade teacher says. "Last year whatever we asked for, we had in abundance: dry-erase markers, paper, pencils. It was like heaven to a teacher. This year I'm spending my own money buying stuff. The school was giving us nothing this year."
Given that the eventual goal of the Edison Project is to make money, some cutbacks in year three (and beyond) seem inevitable. Chris Cerf explains that the kind of front-end expenditures that Edison poured in must be "amortized" over the life of the contract through the yearly inflow of FTE money.
The effect on the ground has been a feast-or-famine cycle. "It has really been a roller coaster," says Moses Vazquez, one of the few remaining teachers from year one. "If they want this school to be a working Edison Project model, then give us the curriculum. Half of the teachers are teaching social studies with trade books, and we're all teaching language arts differently." Four other teachers interviewed for this story confirm that the school has no consistent language arts curriculum.
The Edison Project's John Chubb explains that Edison's reading, writing, and spelling program is the same as it has been from the start at Reeves. "Writing is taught by writing, not from a grammar book," he says. "Spelling is taught systematically, applied to what kids are reading, not taught from a separate spelling book."
Also troubling to some teachers: the amount of time Dyes-Paschal spent traveling, and away from her job as principal. On various occasions Dyes-Paschal has left town either to train other Edison Project staff, or to lobby for the expansion of the company. One faculty member, in an anonymous letter, complained that Dyes-Paschal was spending 75 percent of her time on the road. In response Cerf says his records show Dyes-Paschal traveling on behalf of Edison for a total of five days during the 1998-99 school year; he adds that the "level of hyperbole" in that accusation has led him to be skeptical of some other complaints coming out of Reeves.
According to district records, between July 10, 1998, and April 15, 1999 Dyes-Paschal has been absent from school 40.5 of 200 working days: 18.5 days of vacation, 5 personal days, and 17 days of temporary duty. She has submitted travel vouchers for seven trips, but asked to be reimbursed for only one of them (for $206.80). The other six trips were Edison-related: her annual review in New York City (two days); a "client conference" in Colorado Springs (three days); an event in Chicago (two days); another nameless event in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (one day); a "principals' meeting" in New Orleans (four days); and an "Edison presentation" in Houston (two days). That amounts to sixteen days of Edison-related travel -- nowhere near 75 percent of her time. Cerf explains that his figure of five days comes from the two trips (New Orleans and North Carolina) that did not have a direct bearing on her job as principal of Reeves Elementary.
Vazquez raised the issues of lack of substitutes and lack of daily Spanish instruction in an October 1998 e-mail to Manny Rivera, an executive vice president with Edison in New York. After first asking Vazquez to tell him "when and with whom these concerns have been discussed," Rivera later responded, "We do not live in a perfect world and there will always be issues and problems that need to be solved." He added, "Your leadership team, I'm certain, is doing as much as it can within the constraints that some of them have."
As far as Vazquez, Norgan, and three other faculty were concerned, that wasn't enough. Knowing that political connections can be a shortcut to making things happen in the school district, these teachers pulled the only string they had at their disposal: One of them is friends with an employee of board member Manty Morse.
In a January 23 meeting with Morse, the five teachers laid out their concerns. "It sounded like everything was back to being as bad as it was the first year," Morse remembers. She then paved the way for a meeting during the following week with deputy superintendent for school operations Eddie Pearson.
The most experienced of the disgruntled teachers was pleasantly surprised by what happened next. "We met with Manty on a Monday; by Tuesday, we had [district] auditors in our school. I've never seen anything like it. There were financial audits, curricular audits, [other] audits. The system actually reacted to us."
The Edison Project, too, was quick to react once its higher-ups knew Reeves was again in the district's cross hairs. Edison staffers from New York and elsewhere have been in the school since early February, and much of their work, according to the disenchanted teachers, has clearly been in response to their concerns.
"All of a sudden money started showing up from nowhere," says a second-grade teacher. "We hired six new tutors; each teacher got $45 to spend on supplies; we got the social studies textbooks; they stopped splitting up classes."
The money was no panacea, though. Moses Vazquez, with a cynicism borne of three years at Reeves, says he saw the improvements as the same kind of damage control that occurred at the end of year one. He also noticed that, when school district auditors sat in on classes or roamed the halls, they were almost always escorted by out-of-town Edison Project employees. "It was funny," he notes. "What kind of audit is this when the auditors can't even walk around by themselves?"
Those auditors did note ongoing problems at Reeves. Their program review stated that substitutes could not be found for 40 percent of teachers' absences, resulting in classes being split. "This failure rate is too high," the reviewers wrote. They also pointed out that technology "is severely underutilized." Further the district identified a "communication failure" among staff. "The potential of this project is being lost due to some serious communication problems," the report's preface concludes.
Meanwhile school police were investigating that corporal punishment allegation against Mariefrance Milhomme.
About 30 people, many with children in tow, all wearing determined expressions, are gathered in the conference room of the Unite for Dignity union offices on NW 167th Street. Some are parents of Reeves Elementary students. Others are teachers there. Milhomme's mother and sister are in attendance. Milhomme herself arrives later, but she doesn't speak publicly (or with New Times). And though many others do speak during the meeting, they spend most of the two hours listening to Daton Fullard talk.
Fullard, dressed in a bright red sweat suit and a wide-brimmed, white straw hat, sits on a folding table and holds forth on Milhomme's situation. By this time the State Attorney's Office has declined to prosecute the 29-year-old teacher for child abuse. Some of the parents at this meeting also had been present at Milhomme's April 9 arraignment, at which they wore T-shirts printed with the slogan "Miss Milhomme, We Got Your Back." Fullard is explaining the school district still might bring disciplinary action against Milhomme for her alleged spankings.
None in the group expresses any concern over whether Milhomme actually did beat her students. Their main concern: getting Milhomme back into her classroom. "Like yesterday," snaps one man, a Reeves parent.
Many also wonder aloud how the investigation of Milhomme got started, and some question how school police conducted that investigation. In his calm yet fluid speaking style, Fullard, father of a Reeves student, offers his assessment:
"Some elements inside the school are trying to fight this principal, and some people at Dade County want to submarine this project," he says, referring to the Edison Project. "We're going to get these things handled. We need to see that this school is cleaned out. This school belongs to us, and we want people in there who have our children's best interests at heart."
All but one of those in attendance are black, and many of them are Haitian. When Fullard talks about the "elements" he wants "cleaned out" of Reeves Elementary, it's clear he's talking about Norgan, Vazquez, and the other white and Hispanic teachers who snitched on Milhomme.
Three parents of Milhomme's former students are in the room, and all say they believe the teacher cares about their children. "Miss Milhomme has a passion for kids," says Anita Latson, mother of one of Milhomme's first-graders. "She made my child comfortable in that class, kept me posted on her progress."
Latson says Milhomme's arrest and departure has left her former students distraught. "One Monday the children were whining and crying in class, saying, 'I thought Miss Milhomme was coming back.'"
She adds that whether or not Milhomme was spanking kids, she wants the teacher back in the classroom.
The teacher's return, at least by the end of the school year, seems unlikely. During their investigation of Milhomme, district spokesman Henry Fraind says, Miami-Dade County Public Schools police videotaped Milhomme spanking one child with a flat, rulerlike stick; they interviewed numerous other children in her class who confirmed that she regularly struck her students.
Fullard and the group of like-minded parents at the meeting are adamant in their belief that Milhomme should not be punished. But they are more concerned with how that investigation got started in the first place, and why. He's correct in linking the Milhomme case to "elements" in the school opposed to the Edison Project: Norgan made complaints about both Edison and Milhomme.
"Maybe two months ago, actually I had some of Milhomme's students for reading," Norgan says. "I heard two of her students talking about how they got beat with a stick in her class. When I asked them what happens when they act up in their homeroom, they told me she beats them with a stick on the rear and on their hands."
Some days later she found a student of hers who had been in Milhomme's class for reading "crying his eyes out" in the hall. He told her he'd been hit with a stick. Norgan says she reported the incident to an academy director (the Edison Project equivalent of an assistant principal). When nothing was done, Norgan told her story to Eddie Pearson in late January.
Norgan refuses to apologize for reporting the violation, pointing out that, if it had been discovered that she had failed to do so, she could have lost her state teaching certificate.
The school police investigation, including covert video surveillance and interviews with children, led to Milhomme's arrest on March 1. In an embarrassing repeat of the arrest a year and a half ago of nine Miami Killian Senior High School students, who were carted off for writing a profane pamphlet, the State Attorney's Office didn't back up the school police with an indictment.
Another parallel with the case of the Killian Nine: The American Civil Liberties Union, at the request of a Milhomme student's parent, is investigating whether the school district violated the children's rights.
"We have very serious concerns about police officers taking children out of class and videotaping them without the consent of their parents," says attorney John de Leon, president of the local chapter of the ACLU. "It's a potential Fourth Amendment violation as an unreasonable search."
Henry Fraind, who, in addition to being the district's official spokesman, also oversees the public school's police department, says any police officer has the right to question a student while investigating a crime.
"If school board policy allows police to take a six-year-old out of class with no parental permission, then there's something wrong with that policy," de Leon says. He emphasizes that the ACLU isn't taking a stand for or against corporal punishment, a practice that Miami-Dade County Schools have forbidden for the past twenty years.
Much of the enthusiastic parental support for Milhomme likely stems from widespread acceptance of corporal punishment within black and Haitian-American homes. Also fueling her defenders' zeal is the suspicion that Milhomme was targeted because she is Haitian American. It has moved the race card to the top of the deck.
"I was at the first PTA meeting after Milhomme got arrested, and all the crowd wanted to know was who were their enemies," teacher Moses Vazquez says. "One gentleman tried to speak against paddling, and he got booed down."
Yet unconditional support for Milhomme is far from unanimous among parents at Reeves. Jasmine Farquharson's son was once in Milhomme's class. She has since transferred him to another school. "He was being beaten, and he wasn't learning anything," she says firmly. She adds that she has spoken to school police about Milhomme striking her son.
"I don't oppose corporal punishment," Farquharson adds. "If a parent decides to do it, it's his or her business. But kids go to school to learn, not to be beaten. If spankings are going to be applied, it should be a parent's place, not a teacher's place."
In the past two months, with all the investigations, accusations, and political agendas flying around the school, an atmosphere of paranoia has descended on Reeves Elementary. In a faxed response to an interview request from New Times, Dyes-Paschal declined to comment. "As you are probably aware, an internal investigation is presently being conducted based on allegations made by several disgruntled employees here at Henry E.S. Reeves Elementary School," she writes. "Until the investigation is completed, I am under strict instructions from my attorney not to make any statements whatsoever."
Dyes-Paschal may not be talking to New Times about her faculty, but she certainly is talking to her faculty about New Times. On April 16 she called an emergency faculty meeting to discuss phone calls she and other faculty had received from New Times. In that meeting Merri Mann, director of education and professional issues from the main office of the UTD union, told teachers they had every right to talk to the press, but that they should be careful of what they say and warned them they could be misquoted. Mann confirms her speech to the Reeves faculty, calling it a primer on dealing with the press.
At this meeting Dyes-Paschal told her faculty she believed hidden cameras and listening devices, like the camera supposedly used to film Milhomme administering a beating, were still in place in the school.
What followed, one witness says, was an impromptu search for bugs in the office area. As some half-dozen staff members looked on, one woman stood on a chair in the hallway near Dyes-Paschal's office, poked a broom into an air vent in the ceiling, and declared, "We've got it. There it is!"
Capt. John Hunkiar of the school police says there is an open investigation at Reeves, but will not comment further. Henry Fraind confirms Dyes-Paschal is being investigated for violation of the school board's corporal punishment rule.
