The School Reform Commission was to consider terminating contracts with Edison Schools Inc. and the five other managers by its Wednesday meeting under a draft timeline the commission released last month.

The managers, hired in 2002, are working under a one-year extension of their original five-year contract. The extension expires June 30.

Cassandra W. Jones, the district's interim chief academic officer, said last week the district was not finished with its review of the managers' performance but expected to make recommendations to the commission after a task force meeting next week. The commission could opt to keep some or all of the managers, take away some schools from them, or fire them.

Edison, Victory Schools Inc., Foundations Inc., Universal Cos., Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania are running the schools - 16 of which are among 70 of the district's lowest-performing schools targeted for overhaul.

They are known as "educational management organizations" or EMOs. Edison, a for-profit company, operates about half of the schools.

The delay in making a decision upset Parents United for Public Education, which was part of a coalition of education advocacy groups that wanted the contracts terminated a year ago. The groups cited studies that showed the providers did not generate more improvement in test scores than regular district schools, despite receiving $90 million in extra funding over five years. The managers were given some of the lowest-performing schools in the district.

The commission, however, said it did not have enough time to make a decision and opted for the one-year extension.

"We're not going to be in the same position we were last year - holding onto these failing EMOs and floating the bill just because we missed a deadline," parent Gerald Wright said in a statement.

Jones said no notice was required because the contracts were an extension.

But she said the district did want to give the managers as much notice as possible if their contracts were going to be terminated or scaled back.

"We want to try to get that to them by April because we're dealing with people's lives," she said, "children's lives."