Meet the Founders: Caroline Grannan
Third in a series of profiles of PAA’s founding members.
Caroline Grannan, PAA’s Parent Trigger expert, got her start in education reform research more than a decade ago, in the dark days when Google searches hadn’t yet been developed and building a website required a programming expert. Her first focus was Edison Schools, Inc., a for-profit, NASDAQ-traded charter management company that claimed to bring “the efficiencies of the private sector” to public education. “It was really getting hailed as the next big thing,” she explained.Back in 2001, the San Francisco school board became dissatisfied with its Edison school, and began moving to end the contract. The company fought back, creating a national furor that maligned the San Francisco school board members, especially Jill Wynns, a friend of Caroline’s who is an outspoken critic of education “reform” fads and is now president of the California School Boards Assocation.
Caroline and fellow parent activist Dana Woldow began to scrutinize Edison’s record, hunting down numbers and then crunching them to determine whether Edison schools were working the miracles they claimed. They
