It really takes imagination these days to cook up new forms of corporate welfare to bail out businesses failing in the marketplace.

But along comes the School Reform Commission, led by Verizon Pennsylvania CEO Daniel Whelan, just as Edison's stock plunged to just above the $1 level. The Inquirer has reported on CEO-to-CEO lobbying between Whelan and Edison's stock-option heavy Chris Whittle to try to give Edison a much fatter contract than the 20 schools tossed at it.

Even the Bush administration had the good sense last summer not to throw a life preserver to Enron in its death throes. But good sense is not the hallmark of this commission.

Edison was already engaging in what business writer Christopher Byron has termed philanthropic "panhandling." Using foundation funding, especially from the D2F2 Foundation of Gap Inc. chairman Donald Fisher, Edison supports 25 of its schools with foundation grants. To play the tax-exempt-status game, the foundation gives the money to the school, not the for-profit Edison school.

This questionably legal scam is another source of Edison instability, as Edison has apparently reneged on its $4 million foundation pledge to Las Vegas schools, and the local school district will in turn withhold its $3 million quarterly payment to Edison. This type of Edison scam leads Byron to believe Edison stock "will eventually go to nothing."

Whelan himself is fast becoming a subject of controversy, in light of remarks he made at the William McKinley Elementary School on May 16 to a largely Latino audience. According to many there, when Whelan was asked about the difficulty of judging school achievement in bilingual schools with an English-only PSAT, he snapped in a Pat Buchanan-esque reply, "I have to break it to you folks, this is America -- to be successful you have got to speak English."

By gratuitously lecturing an audience of Americans that they live in America, and by not recognizing the value of speaking both Spanish and English, Whelan's condescending response calls into question whether he should be making education policy for tens of thousands of Latino students. Councilman Angel Ortiz, who was there, is moving to file a civil rights complaint based on these remarks.

Whelan has become an unreconstructed Edison apologist. When at a public meeting of the commission a concerned citizen asked him how, in light of the Edison stock nosedive from nearly $40 a share to almost $1 a share, he could put any taxpayer funding into Edison contracts when he would not put his own money into Edison, he cited a recent Maryland report on Edison's three Baltimore schools.

Because I don't consider myself, a lawyer, or Whelan, a utility executive, as experts in school testing, I consulted an independent researcher, Gary Miron of the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, whom the Pennsylvania Department of Education contracted to evaluate charter schools. Miron assumes Whelan could only be relying on an Edison press release issued in April, as the Maryland State Department of Education told him that they had not even received any "official data" on these schools and that the test was not the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP), the only one the state uses for performance reports.

According to Miron, the Edison press release gives a distorted picture by only presenting average results across three schools; it fails to report on students absent or exempted from the tests; and, most typical of Edison, it fails to provide the actual test results as returned to Edison by the testing company.

Miron did look at the MSPAP and found one excelling school (Montebello) and two worse schools (Gilmor and Furman Templeton) one year after Edison's takeover. No Furman Templeton third- or fifth-graders had posted satisfactory performance in math or social studies, and almost none had in reading and writing. Fifth-grade results at Furman dropped from 8.5 percent to 1.5 percent of students meeting state standards --and with 20 percent of the fifth grade absent from this test taking.

Miron says: "Edison has a practice of reporting great results when there is no way to verify data. When the data are finally made available to the public, typically a half-year later, the actual results are substantially different from the misleading press releases. Of course, it's hard to request media sources to retract reported results a half-year later. In the past, journalists have also been uninterested in the fact that Edison is misleading the general public, since there are new press releases and, allegedly, new positive results posted at other Edison schools. Fortunately, the tide has turned, and everything Edison does these days is being questioned."

Jonathan M. Stein is a public interest lawyer in Philadelphia. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.