Across the country, Advantage has made bold commitments, vowing to make stellar students of children victimized by the worst of public education. The people behind the company - among them, the author of Massachusetts' landmark charter school law and several other Weld-Cellucci aides - say for-profit companies can succeed where bureaucrats have failed.

But while promising to bring higher standards and sharper management of taxpayer dollars, Advantage has misled parents about teacher qualifications, failed to consistently boost scores on high-stakes state tests, and engaged in financial practices that have prompted censure by at least two states, the Globe has found.

A sampling: At Chicago's Octavio Paz Charter School, 30 of the 33 teachers Advantage hired had only substitute certificates, according to a city official. At Jersey City's Golden Door Charter School, class sizes were a third larger than advertised, and Advantage ended up with a $600,000 deficit. And at Albany's New Covenant Charter School, more than 90 percent of the students failed New York State's reading test.

Schools in four cities - Malden, Chicago, Albany, and Rocky Mount, N.C. - have ended their relationships with the four-year-old company. And at least another three of the 19 charter schools Advantage has started have been plagued with problems.

Advantage has used its conservative political connections to drum up business in Massachusetts and nationwide. Cofounder Steven Wilson, a former aide to Governor William F. Weld, tapped state Board of Education member Abigail Thernstrom to serve on Advantage's academic advisory board. And businessman and leading MCAS advocate William Edgerly at one time chaired the company's board of directors.

Wilson and Edgerly could not be reached, and Thernstrom said that the advisory board never met and that she was unaware of Advantage's problems.

Advantage, which serves 9,000 students in eight states and the District of Columbia, says many of its problems reflect the challenges of starting schools from scratch - without the capital dollars that public schools get. (Charter schools do get a set amount of state money per student to operate.)

''These are normal things for a new company to go through,'' said Geoff Swett, Advantage's president. He acknowledged that the company has struggled in some places to build facilities and meet state reporting requirements, but he insists that Advantage's ''school design'' - its overall plan for running schools - is sound.

He points to improving scores on national tests as evidence.

''We believe we have such a robust school design that even when the company stumbles occasionally in other areas, the children still learn,'' he said. ''That's why I believe we'll be an extraordinary force in education for a long time to come.''

But some say Advantage's troubles, and those of some other for-profit education companies, point to a deeper issue: the inherent tension between trying to educate children and making money.

''You have an industry with a lot of Wall Street sharpies and insider wheeler-dealers and a gaggle of marketing executives trying to convince the public that they can reform education and turn a profit and everybody wins,'' said Alex Molnar, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who recently published a critical study of for-profit education companies.

''They had to sign up as many schools as they could and promise them everything,'' Molnar said. ''Now some of those chickens are coming home to roost.''

Promises unfulfilled

At the New Frontiers Charter School in San Antonio, Tracy Fletcher's Texas teaching certificate is stapled to the bulletin board in her classroom.

But Fletcher is not the one quizzing fifth-graders on vocabulary words from ''The Odyssey'' this morning; Veronica Cruz is. And Cruz, who does not have a college degree, has just read the word ''Calypso'' as ''Cyclops.''

''Miss, miss, that's `Calypso,''' one boy protests. But Cruz, a teaching assistant who is on her own because Fletcher is with another group of children today, ignores him and goes on.

Unqualified instructors such as Cruz, who said she often teaches a math class by herself, represent a broken promise by Advantage.

In the school's legally binding charter, Advantage says it will hire a teaching staff with ''a strong undergraduate education'' and ''high scores on standardized teachers' exams'' - yet the company hired several teachers without college degrees, and at least one teaching assistant without a high school diploma.

The charter also promises first-rate facilities. But after three years, children still play ball on the cracked pavement in the alleys between portable classrooms.

And Advantage promises parents that it will deliver state test scores ''significantly above'' the San Antonio public schools' average. That promise has not been fulfilled either - at least not yet. In 2000, 38 percent of New Frontiers students passed math, compared with 77 percent in public schools; 51 percent passed writing (81 percent in public schools); and 55 percent passed reading (77 percent in public schools).

''When we started to read the charter, we were really amazed at what they weren't doing for our kids that they said they would do,'' said parent Rachel Rohrer.

Swett said New Frontiers, which opened in 1998, received high marks from parents who answered a satisfaction survey.

''We are beyond satisfied with the way things are going,'' said Julia Herrera, who said her daughter in kindergarten is doing second-grade work. ''She is so enthused because she's challenged.''

But Rohrer noted that at a school with 656 children, only 129 parents responded to the survey. She also contended that many of them do not know what Advantage committed to in the charter.

''Some of these parents say, `Well, it's better than what we had,''' said Rohrer, who pulled two of her three children out of the school. The third has one year left until middle school. ''I say, `If you only knew what you were entitled to.'''

The low scores on the Texas state exam spurred the New Frontiers board of trustees, which hired Advantage to run the school, to hold the company in breach of its contract last spring.

After that, Advantage shaped up faster than a public bureaucracy would have, said board member Mike Krusee, a state representative.

Swett said the scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills were low because Advantage did not align the curriculum to state standards. ''We didn't prepare them for the TAAS test well enough,'' he said.

In the same year Advantage opened New Frontiers, it launched the Golden Door Charter School in Jersey City. There, too, Advantage has stumbled.

In March 2000, New Jersey's education department put Golden Door on a 90-day probation, ordering it to fix more than a half-dozen accounting and other fiscal problems, including running a $600,000 deficit on a $4.4 million budget the previous year.

''They were working with so many other states that I think the laws and the regulations were getting blurred,'' said Anne O'Dea, head of New Jersey's charter school office.

Advantage did not measure up to the charter for the New Covenant Charter School in Albany, either. Last July, New York education officials found ''numerous substantial and material violations'' of that school's charter.

Among them: New Covenant did not have a facility comparable to the one it promised parents; it was not implementing its stated curriculum, and the one it was using did not conform to state standards; and students, including some with disabilities, were suspended without alternative instruction, required by state law.

A state observer who visited New Covenant on the day students took the state's reading test - which 92 percent of the school's fourth-graders failed - faulted the school for creating a chaotic and noisy testing environment.

Eventually, Advantage and New Covenant's board of trustees parted ways over a disagreement about who was in charge of day-to-day operations, according to the board chairman.

Swett said Advantage did try to open the school too quickly in 1999. But he also noted that a state report alleged that the founder of the school mishandled funds, and that students at the school posted huge gains on national exams during the one year the company ran the school.

Closer to home, the end of the relationship between Advantage and the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden was anything but amicable. A dispute over finances ended up in arbitration, with a ruling in Mystic Valley's favor.

The board of the charter school, which opened in 1998, was happy with Advantage's academic program, but the company's financial practices were another matter.

According to arbitrator James McGuire, the company signed leases without the board's approval, violating its contract, and was slow to produce financial details for the state, which jeopardized the school's funding.

The relationship deteriorated, and at the end of 1999, Advantage decided it would not renew its contract with Mystic Valley, which ran through 2000, a company official testified. Then, even though Advantage was still under contract, it began to withhold resources from Mystic Valley, including MCAS preparation materials, McGuire found.

Deprived of support, the Mystic Valley board decided it would no longer pay for services it was not getting, and suspended the contract.

''The actions of Advantage threatened that fragile trust between parents who know a little and care a lot and those professionals who are entrusted with the care and education of their children,'' McGuire concluded.

`Grew too fast'

Like other for-profit education companies, Advantage has targeted the burgeoning charter school movement as the core of its business. Beacon Education Management, based in Westborough, New York-based Edison Schools, and Sabis International of Minnesota all run charter schools in Massachusetts.

Supported by taxpayer dollars, charter schools are free from many of the rules governing public schools. The idea: Allow teachers and community leaders to experiment, and give parents an alternative to failing public schools. Though charter schools are increasingly popular, there is still resistance to using public money to pay for buildings for them.

Some teachers and parents eager to open their own charter schools look to companies such as Advantage to run them. But Advantage has put people without educational expertise in key positions - a trained nurse, for example, used to oversee Advantage schools in the South - and has struggled to grasp school finance issues.

In its contracts with schools, Advantage pledges to provide a ready-made curriculum, ''Directed Instruction,'' which relies heavily on drill and repetition. Independent research suggests it is effective in teaching younger children reading and math. The company, which also emphasizes character education, hires teachers and buys books. It says it will provide a building and arrange everything from bus schedules to school lunches. And it is supposed to handle finances.

Kathy Madigan, Advantage's former head of instruction, says the company's curriculum, created 30 years ago, is excellent. She insists that for-profit companies can do a good job running charter schools. She says that Advantage started with the goal of lifting up failing students, but that financial pressures - and its own arrogance - doomed it to failure.

''The company grew too fast,'' Madigan said.

Advantage figures it needs 30 schools to turn a profit, according to Wilson's testimony in the Mystic Valley dispute. It currently has 15, so it is under pressure to open new ones as quickly as possible, said Madigan, who was assistant dean of the University of Oregon's education school. She quit Advantage 10 months ago, frustrated, and now heads a Boston-based education think tank.

When Advantage launched in 1997, executives were confident they could run schools. They were reluctant to spend money on outside help and did not hire people who knew how to run school lunch programs and organize bus schedules, Madigan said.

Swett, the company president, acknowledged that Advantage has lost thousands of dollars providing lunches, but he noted that some public schools also lose money on them. Public schools often have a ''no student shall go hungry'' policy. At New Frontiers in San Antonio, students whose parents have not paid up get only a granola bar and milk.

Study in contrasts

The differences between New Frontiers and the Abby Kelley Foster Regional Charter School in Worcester are stark.

Instead of portable classrooms, students at Abby Kelley Foster attend class in an old mill, built in 1920, that Advantage renovated at a cost of $2.4 million. Murals depicting Foster's life - she was an abolitionist and early feminist - decorate the hallways next to student artwork.

In classrooms, students in maroon and khaki uniforms are riveted by their teachers - often two to a class. When principal Doris Schroeder, also a French teacher, walks into her class, the seventh-graders rise in unison and greet her with a hearty, ''Bonjour, Madame!''

Advantage boasts that across all grades and subjects, Abby Kelley Foster students gained an average of 9 points on national tests in 1999-2000.

But Advantage's test results have varied widely from school to school. In Newark, Houston, and Albany, Advantage schools posted overall gains of 22, 19, and 15 points. But in Washington the gain was 2 points, and in Jersey City, San Antonio, and Sugar Creek, N.C., it was only 4.

And even at Abby Kelley Foster, students still scored lower than the Worcester public school average on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System.

Meanwhile, the struggle to educate children and make money has caused an upheaval at Advantage's Canal Street offices.

Shakeup over finances

Concerned about the company's red ink - it has lost about $30 million since 1997 - the board of directors recently removed cofounder Wilson as CEO; he now chairs the board of directors.

Madigan said she and cofounder Ted Rebarber left because they were frustrated by an increasing emphasis on the bottom line. Rebarber could not be reached for comment, but he is no longer with the company.

Swett vehemently denied that the company's struggle to turn a profit has gotten in the way of its educational mission, and he rejected the notion that there is tension between the two. ''If you constantly lose money, you're not going to have an impact on education reform,'' he said.

But Madigan said that as Swett and other executives grappled with the numbers, they forgot the urgency of getting the educational part right.

''They didn't understand that this child isn't going to get back this week of instruction,'' she said. ''It's gone now.''

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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