New data could help poor kids gain access to nearby charters

A new report showing where students at each DC charter school live could breathe new life into an old idea: changing the law to allow charters to give an admissions preference to neighborhood residents. The new data could help officials pinpoint situations where a neighborhood preference would help rather than harm low-income students.

In the past, some have objected that giving charters the option of a neighborhood preference would exclude disadvantaged students from high-performing schools in gentrifying neighborhoods. Now the DC Public Charter School Board has mapped the geographic distribution of students at every charter campus in DC, revealing which schools attract students who live nearby and which draw them from all over.

Students at almost half the charter schools in DC have an average commute of one to two miles. But the distance students travel can vary widely from school to school.

Those at the Brightwood campus of the Center City charter network have the shortest median commute, at half a mile. (On the maps below, the red dot indicates the school and the blue dots indicate students.)

Those at Washington Latin Middle School have a median commute of 4.7 miles and come from all over DC.

Within DC’s traditional public school system, the vast majority of schools are required to admit all students who live within certain geographic boundaries. As a result, over 60% of DC Public School students live within a mile of their schools.

But DC law bars charter schools from giving a preference to neighborhood residents. They must take all applicants on a first-come, first-served basis. If they have more applicants than spaces available, a random lottery determines who gets in.

If a charter were able to use a neighborhood preference, neighborhood residents would still need to enter the school lottery to apply, but they would get bumped ahead of applicants from outside the neighborhood. Those outside the neighborhood could still gain admission, especially if the school applied neighborhood preference to only a percentage of its seats.

At the same time, neighborhood preference wouldn’t guarantee admission to those who live nearby. If a school got more applications from neighborhood residents than it could accommodate, some would lose out.

Task force recommended against neighborhood preference

In 2012, the DC Council appointed a task force to study changing the law to allow a neighborhood preference for charters. At the time, some charged that those in favor of the idea were catering to white parents in gentrifying neighborhoods who wanted easier access to high-performing charters, like E.L. Haynes in Petworth.

The task force recommended against neighborhood preference, in part because its members wanted to guard against that possibility. None favored requiring charters to give a preference to neighborhood residents. And the majority feared that even allowing some charters to adopt a voluntary neighborhood preference could shut disadvantaged students out of high-performing schools.

Only one member of the task force, the Deputy Mayor for Education, thought a charter should be allowed to opt for a neighborhood preference, “provided that safeguards are put into place to ensure that doing so does not adversely impact students who live in under-served neighborhoods.”

It’s not clear why the rest of the task force didn’t support that view, but some charter leaders have expressed fears that even a voluntary neighborhood preference could be a slippery slope leading to a loss of autonomy. At the same time, charter leaders at some schools located in low-income neighborhoods, like KIPP DC and Eagle Academy, have argued they should be able to give a preference to nearby families.

Recently there have been signs that opposition to voluntary neighborhood preference is softening. Leaders of some 30 charter schools have signed a document saying they’re willing to consider the idea, as long as it’s on an “absolutely voluntary basis.”

Data could help protect disadvantaged students

Now, with the new data in the PCSB report, it’s also possible to determine exactly which charters are drawing students from disadvantaged areas beyond their own neighborhood or ward. Officials could use that data to decide which schools should be allowed a neighborhood preference and which shouldn’t.

There’s no bill pending before the DC Council that would change the law on neighborhood preference. But the PCSB’s executive director Scott Pearson told the Washington Post that the new report could “offer useful information” to District leaders on the issue.

When I asked a PCSB spokesperson to elaborate on that statement, she directed me to Pearson’s remarks on a recent Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU.

On the show, Pearson suggested that with a new mayor and new DC Council members, it might be time to take another look at neighborhood preference. “I hear from parents and I hear from many charter schools,” Pearson said. “They would love a neighborhood preference. But I want to make sure as we do, that we keep in mind the least advantaged children in the city and make sure that this isn’t hurting them.”

Neighborhood preference would likely be limited to low-income areas

It can be frustrating for parents to live near a desirable charter school and not be able to get their child admitted. More generally, parents say the lottery system is too unpredictable and gives them only a chance, not a choice.

But a neighborhood preference along the lines envisioned by Pearson would provide predictability only for a subset of parents: those in low-income neighborhoods where there’s a charter school. For schools located in gentrifying areas, a neighborhood preference could result in excluding low-income students from areas with low-performing neighborhood schools.

If the DC Council passed legislation with safeguards to ensure that kind of exclusion doesn’t happen, those schools wouldn’t be eligible for neighborhood preference. And it’s not clear they would want the option in any event.

One example is Two Rivers, which has the longest waitlist of any school in the District, with over 1,300 names, and employs an expeditionary learning approach that appeals to many middle-class parents. The school is in NoMa but draws students from all over the District.

The school’s executive director, Jessica Wodatch, says she wouldn’t want a neighborhood preference because it would exclude many disadvantaged students, and the school is committed to serving a diverse population.

On the other hand, she thinks neighborhood preference would have been “a good idea” at the campus Two Rivers is opening this fall in Trinidad, which she says is surrounded by low-income residents who lack access to a high-quality school. Two Rivers has made an effort to recruit neighborhood families, but, given the number of applicants from all over, it’s possible few neighborhood children will end up being admitted.

Wodatch says she would support giving the option of neighborhood preference to charters that take over shuttered DCPS buildings, as Two Rivers is doing in Trinidad. That’s a position the 2012 task force endorsed as well.

But if a school like the new Two Rivers campus adopted a neighborhood preference, middle-class families might well move into the neighborhood to benefit from it. And that could have the effect of pushing out disadvantaged students, the very thing the task force wanted to avoid. So, as the task force recommended, a neighborhood preference would probably need to be time-limited to protect the interests of low-income families.

It makes sense that a low-income family that wants their child to go to a KIPP school should be able to send her to the one around the corner rather than the one several miles away. It’s also important to ensure that some charter schools have diverse populations, especially when the student bodies of many traditional public schools reflect the homogeneity of their neighborhoods.

But if DC officials want to keep more affluent families in the District, they’ll need to figure out a way to make high-quality school pathways more convenient and predictable for them as well.

Cross-posted at DC Eduphile.