ged now. Rojas rammed the controversial Edison proposal through the school board, over charges that teachers had been coerced to sign the charter petition -- state law requires a majority of teachers vote to become a charter school -- and that the arrangement was a sweetheart deal for the private company, letting it off the hook from paying the district administrative and overhead expenses other charters, usually nonprofit groups, had to pay the district. Both complaints still dog Edison today, but Rojas had the votes, and the school board passed his charter resolution 5-2 in late June, 1998. That gave the local school two months -- Edison Inc. usually takes a full year -- to go from being the shame of the district to a model, for-profit charter academy by the time its doors opened again in late August. With hindsight, even Edison supporters agree that the company and its district allies moved too fast to implement the new program and enroll lots of new students, in order to get the roughly $4,200 per pupil the district agreed to pay. The school's worst mistake, everyone now agrees, was overworking its teaching staff and failing to respond to their increasing burnout and discontent until it was too late. Of course, the fact that Edison Inc. screwed up its first attempts to reform the school actually gives it something in common with the district, which had screwed up efforts to overhaul Edison for years. The school was "reconstituted" -- the district's most drastic measure, in which all administrators and teachers are removed and new ones hired -- twice in the last two decades, with no appreciable improvement in achievement. The year before Edison took it over, the school had four principals. "There were literally kids jumping off desks, throwing things, throwing themselves out windows," says Health Caceres, who started at the blighted school the year before the charter. "It wasn't teaching, it was crowd control." The new Edison model seemed the school's last, best hope. I visited in February of 1999, and principal Barbara Karvelis, who'd been sent in to do triage just before Edison Inc. came to the rescue and stayed on, walked me through the wide, brightly painted halls, describing the chaos she'd inherited and the order that prevailed now. The pillars of the Edison program, she explained, are a state-of-the-art curriculum and expanded staff development, in which teachers spend at least 10 extra days in intensive training sessions with Edison. A longer school day and year give teachers more time with kids, and a tightly formatted schedule makes sure they get the basics. The whole school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, does nothing but reading, for instance, from 8:30 to 10 each morning, using the renowned Success for All reading program. Even most Edison critics acknowledge the company's curriculum is among the nation's best, thanks to the private firm's investment in research and development and its ability to put staff through intensive training to know how to teach the material. That first year, Karvelis knew kids were making huge gains even without district testing, because Edison requires schools to quiz students every few weeks to track improvement. The veteran principal couldn't say enough good things about the new program, but Edison's enemies were already on the warpath. Some community groups had continued to dog Edison about its so-called sweetheart deal with the school district. They also insisted that the charter was a cover to rebuild the traditionally black and Latino school by attracting an influx of whites from the surrounding, gentrifying neighborhood. "Find me a white child!" Karvelis snapped, when I asked her about the gentrification charge as we toured the classrooms together. And it was tough -- that year, Edison's white enrollment had almost tripled, but from only 10 students to 28, as the school's enrollment jumped from 379 to 517. (Today there are 23 white kids out of 503.) It was still a heavily black and Latino school, with more than its share of behavior problems. A white fourth grader with serious emotional troubles spent most of his time on a chair outside Karvelis' office being soothed by staff, as attempts were made to reach his mother, which was reportedly a daily occurrence. A young, male African-American teacher was being trailed down the hall by several adoring black boys, as Karvelis tried to explain why they had to stay in their classroom and do their work while their teacher was away. One little boy began to cry. But mostly, order prevailed. Karvelis didn't deny the school makeup had changed, to some extent. When Edison took it over, it went from being a school where the district automatically assigned students, to one where parents had to choose to enroll their kids. There were other parent requirements -- four meetings with teachers a year, pledges to read and monitor homework assignments. "You definitely lost some of the absent parents, who just couldn't commit to that kind of involvement," says Heath Caceres, who taught fourth grade at Edison during the transition. (Full disclosure: Caceres is now my daughter's fifth grade teacher at a San Francisco public school across town from Edison). Some activist Latino parents left when Edison abandoned the district's traditional bilingual education program, integrating non-English speakers into regular classrooms and instead offering them an hour of instruction in Spanish. The vast majority of the students who'd been at the school before the charter remained. But the influx of more than 100 new kids indeed changed the mix. They tended to be neighborhood kids, most of them Latinos from the Mission, whose parents lived close enough to meet parental involvement expectations. As predicted, test scores rose that first year. But so did teacher dissatisfaction. Three-quarters left the first year, and in the second, Edison faced a near-mutiny from staff. Edison teachers worked roughly 24 more days than other San Francisco public school teachers, and at least two more hours a day, for only slightly higher wages (plus stock options and other corporate perks). "I remember visiting the school that first year and thinking, 'I could never work here,'" says school board member Mary Hernandez, an Edison supporter. "I told Edison, 'You've got to let them have a life.' And sure, there were all the pressures and stress of a start-up, but it didn't get better the second year." Staff also chafed at the rigid culture of Edison. "I think a lot of people felt like they were corporate clones, all having to teach the same thing at the same time," says Caceres. "People questioned the uniformity of it all. Maybe that works in Texas, or Colorado. But this is San Francisco, and people are used to being able to question, to be themselves." "We feel like we were disposable teachers," one departing Edison teacher told the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the muckraking local weekly that has covered the school and its problems intensively. "They think that they can just plug anybody in - any human thing with a pulse -- train them, and that's it." Inexperienced Edison administrators realized the extent of the mess too late, says Mary Hernandez. "They blew it. It took them too long to get the picture. They made a big mistake. They should have responded to the teachers sooner, but they didn't, so they lost some really good teachers." Edison's staunchest ally on the board, Hernandez gave the company notice she'd vote to pull the contract if the firm couldn't make things right with its local staff. Finally, late in the 2000 school year, Edison agreed to give its teachers an additional 10 percent raise on top of whatever the teachers' union bargained with the district, and to cut back the number of days they worked as well. Caught in the crossfire, Karvelis left as principal, and Edison hired Vincent Matthews, a respected African-American veteran who'd run a nearby middle school. But 17 of the school's 25 teachers had already made plans to leave. "Mr. Matthews came to my house to ask me to stay, and I was torn," Caceres recalls. "He seemed like a neat guy, someone I could really learn from. But I'd signed a contract at another school. It was too late." One year later, everyone agrees on one thing: Vince Matthews is a miracle worker, who took a political and professional debacle and turned it around. He hired 17 new teachers in under two months -- "I didn't know I'd have to do that when I took the job," he admits -- and told them to expect a tough year. "I said it was going to be very hard. This school expects more accountability than most, plus you had all the community pressures." His boot camp worked: More than 90 percent of Edison's teachers say they want to return next year, and more than 80 percent of parents signed a petition asking the school board not to revoke the Edison Inc. charter. Now, even Edison's enemies have nothing but praise for the charismatic principal. "I want that corporation out of there, but we want to keep Mr. Matthews," says school board member Mark Sanchez, a staunch Edison foe. But it seems clear that if Edison's sent packing, Matthews is out of there. "I came back to the district to work at the Edison Charter Academy, and that's all I'll say," he states diplomatically. A graduate of San Francisco public schools, the 39-year-old Matthews started out teaching at George Washington Carver Elementary in the city's mostly African-American Hunters Point district. He was principal for a year at Alvarado Elementary, not far from Edison, and then moved across San Francisco Bay and wound up principal of San Leandro's John Muir Middle School. When Edison began courting him, he jumped at the opportunity. "I was looking for a program that put kids first, and that really worked," he said, and he was happy to take the Edison job, despite the problems he knew he'd inherited. Today, he walks a visitor to a wall outside his office that displays the school's dizzying record of test-score gains on giant charts, for everyone to see. At every grade level, in every subject, for every ethnic group, the improvements have been impressive, in some cases astonishing. While critics say the test score gains have been accomplished by replacing the school's troubled students with a less disadvantaged mix, Edison can also prove that the black and Latino students who attended the school before the company took it over have seen their test scores jump significantly, too. In fact, the gains may be most impressive for African-Americans and low-income kids, according to the state Department of Education's Academic Performance Index, API. Last year alone, Edison's African-American students' API increased by 25 percent -- the largest gain for any school with a significant African-American population in San Francisco. But that doesn't satisfy Edison's hard-core detractors, who insist the school's academic gains have been made by getting rid of the most troublesome students, the majority of them low-income black kids. They charge that such students were "counseled out" -- i.e., convinced to transfer to another public school. In fact, this is a common practice in public school systems -- and before the charter many schools used to "counsel out" their worst kids and send them to Edison. Mark Sanchez, who taught at the school years ago, before the charter, claims that "illegal things were done" at Edison. "They counseled out a lot of their problem kids, their black kids," he says. "That absolutely has everything to do with why their test scores have climbed." Edison defenders note that the school had 154 African-American students when the company took over, and it has 152 now. Blacks make up a smaller percentage of the student body, but that's been because of an influx of Latinos. But the school's opponents insist they're not "the same black kids," in Sanchez's words, that Edison had before the charter. The school district contends that a third of the African-American kids enrolled at Edison when the private company took over have transferred out, compared with about one-tenth of the original Latino students. "They may have the same number of black kids, but the black kids who are there now have higher social and cultural capital than the black kids who were there when I taught at Edison," Sanchez contends. "It's just not the same black kids who were there before." When asked how to contact African-American parents who were driven out of Edison, Sanchez admits, "I don't have any names." He sends me to the district administrator in charge of the investigation into Edison, Roger Tom, who didn't return repeated phone calls. At the school board hearing Tuesday night, one black former Edison parent testified that African-American kids had been subjected to an undefined regimen of "psychological and physical abuse" at the school; then the parent launched into a diatribe against one particular teacher, and had to be interrupted because board policy prohibits public complaints against individuals. Nothing makes Matthews angrier than the charge that his school intentionally "counseled out" its troublesome African-American students. "I would respectfully beg to disagree," he says, with a look of contempt, from behind wireless glasses, that belies his calm words. He questions how the district knows that one-third of the original black student population at Edison left the school, and notes that even if it's true -- which he disputes -- the criticism ignores the gentrification of all of San Francisco over the last three years, when the city's dot-com explosion and rising real estate prices drove the poor of every race out of town. Plus, four of San Francisco's housing projects were torn down in recent years, scattering residents while the sites were rebuilt. But by far the most important factor in Edison's changing demographics is the overhaul of the district's own school admissions policy, after a federal judge in 1999 threw out the desegregation agreement that had imposed a Byzantine system of racial "caps" and quotas, to make sure no school enrolled more than 45 percent of any one racial group, and every school had at least four different populations represented within it. (Edison, it should be noted, never had anything to do with selecting the students who attend the school, before or after the charter; school admissions are the job of central administration.) And though the desegregation agreement poured millions of dollars into improving low-achieving, traditionally black schools, many black parents were dismayed to find their kids couldn't go there, since the schools quickly reached their "cap