Punching Out

By David Hill

Kathy Fleming and Dina Deligiorgis were in a hurry. It was late on a Friday afternoon last May, and the two teachers were driving through downtown San Francisco, rushing to get to the board of education office before it closed at 5:30. "We were almost out of gas," Fleming recalls. "We were hoping we'd make it."

Arriving a few minutes before the doors locked, Fleming and Deligiorgis dropped off seven envelopes, one for each board member. Inside each envelope, on which the teachers had written "URGENT," was a copy of a letter signed by all but six of their 31 colleagues at Thomas A. Edison Charter Academy. For much of the past year, the faculty at the school had complained of long hours and a crushing workload. Now, with the letter, the teachers issued an ultimatum: Do something, or we will quit.

Within days, the contents of the letter had been leaked to the press, and a simmering debate over whether private companies should run public schools was boiling over. Edison Charter is one of 79 schools in 16 states managed by Edison Schools Inc., the controversial New York City-based company started by entrepreneur Christopher Whittle. (It is a coincidence that the school and the company have the same name.) Two years ago, former San Francisco school Superintendent Bill Rojas turned to Whittle's company, formerly known as the Edison Project, as a sort of last-ditch effort to save the troubled elementary school, long considered one of the city's worst and well-known for its rock-bottom test scores, racially divided faculty, and high staff turnover. Most students at the K-5 school are low-income minorities who are bused in from other...