PHILADELPHIA
On Jan. 2, students, teachers and administrators returned to school as usual after their winter break. But for the first time in my own long career as an educator, I didn't join them. Having chosen to resign on Dec. 31 as principal of one of the 20 lowest-achieving Philadelphia public schools taken over by Edison Schools Inc. last summer, I spent this Jan. 2 at home. I've had time since then to reflect on what others might learn from my experience and what it says about the Philadelphia experiment in privatizing its public schools, which has drawn national attention.
The first inkling I had that all might not go smoothly with the takeover was a phone call from Edison's Human Resources Office in early July. I was still working as a manager of administrative services and second language instruction in a suburban school district in Montgomery County, Pa. But, excited by the bold idea of improving Philadelphia's schools by bringing in an outside company to run some of them, I had applied in the spring to be principal at one of the inner-city schools slated to go to Edison. As I'd explained to the Edison recruiter, I believed my experience in bilingual (English-Spanish) education and in administration made me a good bet to lead one of the city's bilingual schools. Evidently, the company agreed; I was offered a position as an Edison principal at the end of June. Within days, I visited both of the bilingual schools coming under Edison's umbrella and looked forward to learning which of them would be my new workplace.
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Imagine my surprise when I was told a week later that Edison was considering me for a third, "smaller" school, with a 35 percent Spanish-speaking population, in West Philadelphia. Why the surprise? Because West Philadelphia has no Spanish-speaking population. Even the Philadelphia School District Web site showed no Hispanics at that school. Was this just a slip-up or did it portend something more ominous? It was too soon to tell, and eventually I accepted the job of principal of Morton McMichael Elementary, which has a 100 percent African American student population and is, moreover, the same size as each of the two bilingual schools. That early hint of a clash between expectations and realities was to come back to haunt me.
There were other warnings as well. Our team at McMichael was keen to get started on preparations for the coming school year, so one member tried to reserve the school's conference room for a meeting at the end of July. Yet even though all the staff members were well known to the head custodian, he refused to let us use the room without charging us for "facility usage," since Edison had not yet signed its contract with the Philadelphia School District. This was to prove typical of the reception that those associated with Edison would receive both before and after the contract was signed.
It's clear now that these incidents foreshadowed one of the key challenges facing not just new hires like me, but the whole privatization movement in America's most troubled school systems. Can an outside company come in and do the job without extensive preliminary study of how to mesh the old and new systems and without a long-term effort to win the support of everyone involved -- parents, teachers, unions, administrators and school officials? Are there problems inherent in the very idea of imposing a packaged national model on the local level? The case for privatization -- and there is one -- depends on officials drawing the right lessons from experiences such as mine.
Edison Schools Inc. is a for-profit company headquartered in New York City and traded publicly. Founded in 1992, Edison began with four schools in 1995. Until it took on the Philadelphia project, it had no more than nine schools in any one jurisdiction. Yet with some 80,000 students in 150 schools in about 50 cities, it counts as one of the 40 largest school districts in the nation.
Despite some high-profile financial setbacks and even contract terminations, Edison has continued to inspire educators and parents with its innovative ideas. That's why the excitement was almost palpable in Philadelphia back in the spring of 2002. Certainly I saw this job as an opportunity to be part of a potentially seismic reform movement. At the very least, I thought, Edison's arrival would stimulate a much-needed sense of competition in the often complacent public school system. And after five years in central office administration, I was genuinely looking forward to getting back into the action: closer to instruction, closer to students.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. In the summer, for example, I'd been given a laptop computer with access to Edison-developed materials: curricula, professional development, finances, business operations and more. When I'd expressed concern about the apparent emphasis on business management, I was assured that I would have a business services assistant (BSA) assigned to my building, and that this person, along with the BSAs from three other schools, would report to a business services manager (BSM). Business management would "not be a problem," I was told; my focus would, indeed, be educational leadership.
As a result of the negotiations between Edison and Philadelphia that culminated on Aug. 1, Edison accepted funding of $880 per student -- much less than the $1,500 per student it had sought -- above the regular district per pupil expenditure. That meant the full Edison model could not be delivered. There would be no BSA in each school, as promised. There would be two BSMs for the 20 schools, rather than one for every four. There would be no laptop computers for teachers; no computers in students' homes; no foreign language classes; reduced professional development time; and the loss of some valuable current support staff.
At the end of just the second day of school, a rookie sixth-grade teacher tearfully announced she was leaving. She was already overwhelmed by the behavior problems she'd had to face in the classroom. What followed was a month of substitutes (when they showed up) or splitting the students among other classrooms. Meanwhile I pestered the Edison personnel staffer, who worked with the Human Resources Office of the Philadelphia Schools, to send us a new teacher. The result? I was repeatedly told that the school wasn't entitled to one. Angry parents called the school daily, the students were frustrated, and their behavior reflected it.
Finally, on Sept. 30, I transferred a teacher from the third grade, which had smaller classes, to the sixth-grade class, and the school year began anew for those youngsters. This was an encouraging moment: The teachers rallied round to help their colleague with the transition, and she, without once complaining, took hold of the class -- just in time, too, as the state-level writing exams were looming.
I had always thought that I was hired by Edison to be an Edison principal. In early October, I finally learned from an off-the-cuff comment that Edison and Philadelphia were "co-partnering" in the running of the 20 schools. Apparently, it was not quite an "Edison takeover." This would prove to be a problem not just in personnel issues, but in all aspects of school administration.
In effect, I had two bosses -- meaning a routine of two sets of meetings (often scheduled at the same time), two sets of e-mails, two sets of required reports, two sets of staff development plans, two disparate curricula, two different cultures (corporate and educational) and, politically speaking, two sets of loyalties. By mid-November, I concluded that the conflict would make it impossible for me to do what I'd been hired to do: help this community of impoverished and historically under-served students to learn better.
What should or could Edison administrators have done when it first became apparent that negotiations with the school system would result in a cut in the funds they needed to run their full model? What should we teachers and principals have done when we learned what the cuts would mean?
With hindsight, it's obvious that there was not much that could have been done then. The trains, so to speak, were already rolling. Large truckloads of millions of dollars worth of curricular materials had already been delivered to schools; hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been spent on in-service training.
I'm still hoping that Edison will succeed in raising student achievement in Philadelphia. But there is no doubt in my mind that if it does, the process will have been much harder than it needed to be.
My suggestions for making it easier next time come down to two. First, both Edison and the school system that hires it must build in more preparation time. Time to sort out the implications of bringing the Edison culture into a school environment that is usually resistant to change and in fact reluctant to see Edison succeed. Time for Edison administrators to learn the local terrain. Time for them to get to know new teachers and principals so that their talents and skills can be put to the best use. Time to study the details of union contracts and weigh their implications for daily management at the school level. And, finally, time to craft a workable relationship between the school district and the company, such that day-to-day management of the schools is not so confused and divided.
Equally important is the need to nail down the financial arrangements from the start. If, as happened in Philadelphia, the promised funds don't materialize, the privatizing company will then be in a position to walk away. Indeed, it should walk away, if the alternative is to compromise its vision for failing schools.
The children, of course, are the ones who get lost in the endless shuffle of well-intentioned but mismanaged reform movements. I think often of the ones I left behind at Morton McMichael School -- Alkeria, Khalib, Tihira, Sybree, Kaleisha, Mina and the others, all so eager to learn -- and feel very guilty about being just one more person who has walked out on them. They deserve so much better, from all of us.
Janice Solkov is an educational administrator who is looking for another opportunity to make a difference in students' lives.
