The charges against the Edison Charter Academy by the San Francisco School Board are completely without merit, according to a report from the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute, released a week before the board’s vote on the disposition of the Academy’s charter. Despite this, the school board used the threat of charter revocation to force the Edison company into accepting an unattractive deal, said the report’s author, PRI Policy Fellow Diallo Dphrepaulezz.

Edison was freed from district control and allowed to apply to the state for a five-year renewal of the charter, but the agreement also imposed the following conditions on the company:

“The board’s latest move has changed the local school choice debate forever,” said Dphrepaulezz. “The traditional cast that has for years decried the plight of underachieving minorities now finds itself at odds with those same groups, particularly African Americans and Latinos.”

In his report, The Fight to Save the Edison Charter in San Francisco, Dphrepaulezz examines the charges against Edison and finds them all without merit, including the charges that the school “counsels out” minority and special education students. He shows that students at the Edison charter school achieved dramatic improvements in test scores. From 1999 to 2000, only two of San Francisco Unified School District’s 73 elementary schools showed better test score improvements than the Edison charter.

For More Information: Diallo Dphrepaulezz’s 24-page report, “The Fight to Save the Edison Charter in San Francisco,” published on June 22, 2001, is available from the Pacific Research Institute website.

Diallo Dphrepaulezz is a policy fellow at the Center for School Reform at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He can be reached via email at diallod@pacificresearch.org.