A Lesson in Mismanagement

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?"