Over and over that day and into the night, Matthews had answered questions with a diplomat's patience. The San Francisco Board of Education is threatening to revoke Edison's charter if it doesn't right the wrongs the investigation identified, and the principal on the hot seat is promising to work hard to do that. "We'll work closely with the district to address its concerns," he tells reporters repeatedly. "We're taking a look at all the issues that have been raised."

But on the charge that his school discriminates against poor and black kids, anger makes Matthews laconic. "Nope. Not true." There's a long pause. Then he gets going.

"My whole background is kids of color. I've spent 15 years trying to make a difference for kids of color. This model works for them. They were not reading at this school. Now they are." Edison's opponents, he says wearily, "just make up the numbers as they go. Whatever we do to address their concerns -- so far, it hasn't made a difference. But we'll keep trying. We want to continue to teach these kids."

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By the end of the night, Matthews' chances of doing that looked slim. Before a passionate crowd of 400 parents and community activists, most of them supporting the Edison experiment, the school board voted 6-1 to begin the process of revoking Edison's charter, giving the school 90 days to "cure" the ills its preliminary investigation identified, or lose its contract. "The findings are very disturbing," said board president Jill Wynns, who has fought the Edison charter since it was first proposed three years ago. "The board must make sure that every school is run according to the law."

Edison's lone supporter on the board, Mary Hernandez, says there's "almost no chance" the majority will vote to maintain the charter, no matter what happens in the next 90 days. If Edison stays in San Francisco, it will have to endure an ugly legal battle -- which the company seems ready for. Company president Chris Whittle told the New York Times the company would go to court to keep its contract. "The statistics literally speak for themselves here. None of the other 44 cities where we manage schools has ever done anything like this."

The battle over Edison is not so much about Edison's achievements as over two fundamentally different visions of public education. Even the school's critics admit that Edison has dramatically improved student achievement at the long-troubled school, for every racial group, with a combination of enriched curriculum, longer school days, intensive parent involvement and beefed up teacher training.

But to many children's advocates across the country, the fight over Edison is a last-ditch attempt to keep public education public, freely available and accountable to all children, whatever their race or background. The corporate forces behind Edison -- Channel One entrepreneur Chris Whittle, and in San Francisco, Gap company founder Donald Fisher -- have become poster boys for what critics see as a greedy rush to privatize public services in the age of George W. Bush. Bush's education secretary, Rod Paige, is an Edison booster, and New York school chancellor Harold Levy is trying to turn five troubled public schools over to the for-profit chain at the behest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

On Thursday Levy's proposal appeared headed to defeat, as parents from the local schools appeared ready to vote against turning their kids over to Edison, thanks to passionate opposition from community and minority advocates. "We hate Edison because they're going to come in here as a business," parent Kenneth Wilson told the Associated Press. "Each child is a dollar sign."

Edison, for its part, depicts its San Francisco critics as left-wing ideologues, most of them teachers-union militants and race-baiting outside agitators, trying to destroy a school that's succeeding in educating its students because it has the audacity to try to turn a profit -- the "P" word that to Edison's opponents is as out of place in a public school as pedophilia.

In fact, Edison has been a largely successful experiment in school reform, offering crucial lessons about how to help children, especially poor children of color, achieve more. It offers a window onto what the private sector can teach the public sector, and vice versa, at a relatively low cost to the district, and high benefit to most of the kids. All indications are, however, that the school board plans to close the book on this valuable lesson, for political, personal and ideological reasons that have little to do with the 500 students there.

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