Posts about DCPS

With this brave new world of school choice, how should a parent choose a school? There is a wealth of data out there, like the DCPS school profiles and DC Public Charter School Board resources. The problem, of course, is that numbers often don't reflect how "good" a school is. So what should a parent look for?

Here are a few data points that I, and many of my fellow parents, have found useful. It is in no way comprehensive. It is geared to DC public and charter schools, so there is no weighting for cost (if you are considering private schools) or time (if you are thinking of homeschooling).

Nor does it include geographical proximity, as I assume that's a given (and it should be) in evaluating school choices. Finally, there is an inevitable bias towards elementary schools here, as that's where my, and the majority of my compatriots', experience lies.

Here are 7 tips that can help screen school choices.

Wait lists: This may be the very worst single number metric to use to choose a school, except for all the others. After all, you're not looking for the best overall school, you're looking for the school that is the best fit for your child. This is doubly true if you have a special needs child, but you certainly don't need me to tell you that. But, in the big picture, if there's demand for school A and not for school B, that's a sign that school A is worth investigating more deeply.

Morning drop off: Schools are at their most open when children are being dropped off. Is the principal out and engaging with parents and students? Does he or she know their names? Is the process orderly? (It won't be, by the way, but can you find order in the chaos?)

Are the kids eager to go to school? Are they greeting their friends and are parents stopping to chat with each other? A school is a community, not a building. Take this time to chat with teachers, parents, and the principal, if you can do so without getting in their way.

Reach out to them: Drop the principal a note. She's a busy person, but if she doesn't respond personally to you within a day as a prospective parent, she probably won't to an attending parent, either. Your child will almost certainly have an issue or problem of some sort in the many years he attends the school. Do you get a response? Not agreement with your position, necessarily, but an honest engagement with you?

The principal may hand you off to a current parent to answer some of your questions. This isn't a bad thing, but it's another data point for you to evaluate. How smoothly was it done, and do you feel that you are still being engaged or is the buck being passed? Good delegation skills are important, and this is a chance to see if the principal is ducking you or using a strong parent community as the asset it is.

Parents: The other parents will be your allies and often your friends for the next few years. Are the PTA meetings well-attended? In general, I place little stock in the utility of meetings per se, but they are a good indicator of how many people care enough to show up. Talk to friends and friends of friends whose kids attend the school. Find the cheerleaders, and find the complainers. All schools have both, and they both have quite a bit to share.

Library: Frankly, this didn't even occur to me, until a friend of mine, a former DCPS librarian pointed it out. He noted, quite correctly, that the library is a microcosm of the school. Does a librarian greet you, or is the library locked up and only accessible at certain hours? Does the school provide a library budget (some don't)?

Are the books new, or old and worn out? That's a good indicator of how involved the school and/or parents are with the library. In these days of test scores, libraries, and especially school librarians, can easily be regarded as "fat" to be cut, to pay for focused reading instructors for student test takers. Is that the school's priority?

Curriculum: Many parents care deeply about curriculum, and have priorities on this topic before kids even go to school. If that's you, you probably already have a list of questions written already. If it's not you, don't feel left out. But know what you are getting into.

Some schools have strong parental involvement in developing curriculum, some already have it scripted out, and most fall into a spectrum somewhere in the middle. When you talk to the principal and teachers, note if they are engaging in a conversation with you about it, or if they are just telling you what the curriculum is. There are pros and cons about both approaches, but know before you go what you're getting into.

Finally, don't bother: As I noted, wait lists are often a metric of a good school, as is an energetic, noisy parent community. So, nearly by definition, you're not going to get your child into all the schools you're interested in.

Apply to as many as the DCPS lottery will allow, throw in the charters you have your eye on, and walk away. Just walk away. Many a parent has been driven mad by this process. Don't join them.

If your child gets into multiple excellent schools, then start winnowing them down. But you're going to want to keep that to yourself, as other parents are going to view you like a deer that walked in front of the Donner party.

You know what didn't make the cut? Test scores. Because I don't care. As a parent, I don't have to, and I don't want to. The teacher has my child for 8 hours a day, if they can't tell me how she's doing without relying on a yearly standardized test, we've got bigger issues. Relying on test scores to choose a school is like picking a spouse based on taking someone's pulse on a first date.

These are but a few data points I use and recommend to choose a school. Do you have others? Middle schools are coming up for my child, and I'm looking for tips.

Where there is no level playing field, there is no competition. That's why, as I've written before, we will never leverage innovation in education until we level the playing field—in neighborhood preference, common lotteries, funding and facilities access... and maybe expulsion policies, too?

Of course, I don't really support allowing DCPS to expel anyone into DYRS safety net schools. Instead, charters need to operate under the same expulsion policies as DCPS.

That's basically what the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education proposed to do last August. As Brown reported, however, "charter leaders mounted a vigorous opposition."

Why should charter schools get competitive advantages that traditional public schools don't get, and vice versa?

Isn't competition, competition which leads to innovation benefiting students, the point of charters? You'd be surprised how many people disagree with that statement.

Education reformers abandoning competition as a goal

Why do we have choice in education? Is it because we want parents to have a dozen specialty programs from which to choose—Montessori, Chinese-immersion, and so on? That's one benefit, but the reason charters became part of the DC education system is to make schools compete to attract parents and students, creating pressure for them to do better.

Most DC residents still assume that competition is the point of school choice. Post reporter Mike DeBonis, for example, writes that "Charter schools exist to give competition to traditional public schools" and that "debate rages over whether the playing field is level."

However, it seems like the goal for education reformers has drifted from competition to having lots of charters, on the premise that lots of charters is a sign of competition. Proposals that limit charter success, like neighborhood preference or common expulsion policies, are thus anti-reform, even if the point of the proposal is to stimulate competition.

Yesterday, StudentsFirst, the reform advocacy organization led by former DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, released state-by-state report cards grading progress in school reform. Many states, like Tennessee, were graded low for their slow processes for "charter establishment and expansion" and lack of "equitable access to facilities" for charters.

However, no unfair competitive advantages charters enjoy, like freedom to expel, lack of neighborhood preference and lack of a common lottery, were counted against states. Eric Lerum, VP for National Policy for StudentsFirst, told me that "competition isn't [the] goal. Better schools for kids should be."

The Brookings Institution, similarly, recently ranked urban school systems on "choice and competition." DC ranked 3rd, largely because 41% of public school students attend charters. That report distinguished charters from traditional public schools in the report as "schools of choice."

I always thought the point of choice was not to have lots of charters because there's something magical about charters. The point was to have competition, because competition leads to innovation.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is in charge of protecting competition in private consumer markets, said last week that "the FTC's mission is to protect competition, and not individual competitors." Education reformers appear to have lost that same focus on competition, not individual competitors.

Charter autonomy isn't autonomy from educational challenges kids pose to DCPS

Charter advocates challenge proposals to adopt neighborhood preference in charter admissions or common expulsion policies as an infringement on charter autonomy. But the point isn't to grant charters as much autonomy as possible so that they will be as successful as possible.

The point of charters is to provide competition to traditional public schools, competition which leads to innovation. But competition requires a level playing field.

That means it makes sense to give charters autonomy in how they address educational challenges for their students. Their teachers don't have to be union members. Their budgeting doesn't have to follow DCPS budget rules.

However, charters shouldn't have autonomy from the educational challenges themselves from the kids. If they do, then we don't really have competition, which is the point of charters.

Total autonomy isn't what leads to innovation. Competition leads to innovation. In fact, autonomy from the educational challenges posed by kids to DCPS undermines innovation.

I believe in charters because I believe that competition leads to innovation. We won't really know what the charters can innovate, and what DCPS can innovate, until we create a truly competitive market for schools in DC.

Most DC residents are not ideological about education. They don't think charters are a conspiracy to privatize education. And they don't think concerns about charters are a conspiracy of unions to defend their turf. They want innovation in urban education for their kids and kids across town.

It's up to this pragmatic majority of DC residents to start demanding a reasonably level playing field between charters and non-charters through neighborhood preference, common lotteries, common expulsion policies, and equal funding and facilities access for charters.

It's better than leaving kids stuck in a bad school, sure. But this isn't a number we'd like to see go up indefinitely. Far better would be for most kids to want to choose their neighborhood school because it's a good school, while letting those who need or want a different or more specialized educational experience to make a different choice.

Charter schools have brought many educational innovations to DC and helped many kids. Unfortunately, the current track we're on is not to create high-quality neighborhood schools alongside high-quality charters and magnets, but just to eliminate one system in favor of the other.

Would that be a problem? Some proponents of education reform think that it would be just great to chuck our entire public education system and replace it with a collection of different schools, each competing for kids based on how good an education they can provide. That creates a strong incentive for schools to do better or get left behind.

Businesses cherry-pick the highest-margin customers

Would we want the market for schools to look like the market for banks, cell phone companies, or other businesses where you generally have an ongoing relationship with just one? This analogy shows some huge pitfalls for education if the objective is choice above all.

Most banks don't compete to get all customers. They compete primarily for the highest-margin ones: people who keep a lot of cash in their checking accounts, or charge a lot on a credit card. That's why these customers get big cash rewards or miles on credit cards, or perks like free checks, ATM withdrawal fee reimbursement, and higher interest rates.

Schools in the competitive market would have a strong incentive to get higher test scores, and to do so as cheaply as possible. The easiest way to do that is to try to attract the highest-performing kids and drive out the lowest-performing ones.

Test scores reflect a school's performance to some extent, but also the effect of parents and the community. At least right now, we don't have an effective metric that only reflects the effect of a school itself, and experts disagree on how to compare the progress of kid already ahead of grade level, with involved parents and extracurricular enrichment, against one from a kid starting well behind.

A purely competitive system will be a world where successful schools arbitrage flaws in the rating system and industry lobbyists convince legislators not to rejigger the formula in a way that pushes them to educate the more difficult kids.

Meanwhile, traditional neighborhood schools would end up being just a safety net system for any kids left over—the Medicaid of education. They would just serve those who have gotten kicked out elsewhere for disciplinary problems, those whose families lack the basic initiative to research and apply for other schools or the means to transport kids across town, and those whose parents went to the neighborhood school and feel nostalgic.

Charter schools were originally supposed to serve as innovation centers, free to try out new education approaches that, if successful, neighborhood schools could adopt. However, when the number of neighborhood schools is continually shrinking so dramatically, what schools will be left to adopt successful innovations?

While the DCPS's slow pace incorporating validated innovations into neighborhood chools is frustrating, the solution is not to create a two-tier education system with neighborhood schools as the educational safety net or destroy the neighborhood school system completely. For a parent of a child in a neighborhood with a bad local school, it's understandable to want to escape this failing system, but just writing these schools off will not serve DC kids, especially our neediest ones.

DC is splitting into 2 separate school systems

For the past decade, more and more children who live in boundary for some traditional public schools, particularly west of Rock Creek Park, have wanted to enroll. The result has been a network of high-quality and popular local elementary schools—Janney, Key, LaFayette, Hyde-Addison, Murch, and so on—feeding into strong middle schools and ultimately into Wilson High School.

The Wilson boundary runs along 16th Street, next to the park that is re-dividing the city into the educational haves on the west and charter lottery applicants on the east. There are a few exceptions, like schools on Capitol Hill, or Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, but even in these neighborhoods, most families leave DCPS after elementary school because they're not yet comfortable enough with the middle and high schools.

For decades, this boundary mattered far less as schools west of the park had spare capacity for many students east of the park in the out-of-boundary lottery. However, rising in-boundary enrollment west of the park will soon make bus trips across the park a thing of the past.

Wilson High was designed to serve 400 students per grade. Yet there are 750 4th grade students in the schools that feed into Wilson.

In much of the rest of the city, the local elementary school, anchor and civic space of the community, is too becoming a relic. As school closures due to under-enrollment eviscerate the institution of the neighborhood school, car and bus trips criss-crossing the city to charters are increasing in number.

Meanwhile, middle and high schools east of the park struggle to coordinate programming with schools in their feeder patterns as schools open and close and students come and go in droves.

These two public school systems are as separate as they could possibly be. Are they equal?

Is separation a problem?

Should we worry about this? Some, such as perhaps the Washington Post editorial board, might say there's not a problem. If one type of schools works well in some neighborhoods, but is failing in others, why not keep it where it's working and ditch it where it's not? Maybe we need a completely different educational approach for the poorest neighborhoods versus the richest.

However, even education experts still don't agree about whether a system of all charters will actually work better. Charter school critics repeatedly point to studies that show charter schools do not, on the whole, deliver better results than do traditional public schools. Of course, parents across the city know several charter schools that deliver amazing results.

The Public Charter School Board is supposed to address this problem by closing under-performing charter schools. However, they have been more likely to give charters extensions of time to improve. If that works, perhaps that is wise, but there's a real danger it just means more under-performing schools linger for years while doing their students a real disservice.

As out-of-boundary students get pushed out of the most desirable schools, many of them become less diverse. Many wealthier families choosing between public and private school cite diversity, both ethnic, income, and otherwise, as a major advantage of public education. And one of the best ways to help students with disadvantaged backgrounds is to include them in schools with many higher-performing peers.

Having 2 separate school systems could also create political problems. If there is one system that serves rich neighborhoods, and another service the poor neighborhoods, would well-meaning parents in the wealthier and more politically powerful neighborhoods lobby for more funding for traditional public education and inadvertently disadvantage less affluent areas? Or would politicians from the poorer wards of the District end up opposing DCPS's needs? A battle for resources between the haves and have-nots is not what we need, regardless of how it turns out.

From a transportation standpoint, it's not great to have most kids riding buses or being driven long distances to charter schools that might be nowhere near their neighborhoods, if there can be a good alternative nearby.

It's not like residents of the poorest wards want to abolish all of their neighborhood schools. Staffers for Councilmember Marion Barry explained that most of their constituents want neighborhood schools to stay open, to improve and succeed.

What can be done?

Both traditional public schools and charter schools clearly have important roles to play in our public school system. Few deny that. The question is, how do their roles fit together such that we don't end up with separate and unequal school systems?

For one, there needs to be leadership at a high level to reconcile these two systems. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson will come in for the most strident and vocal criticism of the school closures. This is unfortunate, as she only controls DCPS.

It's difficult to fault Henderson for closing schools left under-enrolled by students leaving for charters. What is the alternative—keep many mostly-empty schools around?

The Deputy Mayor for Education and the DC Council are the bodies that should be thinking about the public school system as a whole, not Chancellor Henderson. Yet both bodies claim organizational impotence. The result is that no one is leading our public school system.

Second, these leaders need to think about this problem and explore ways to address it. For the more successful schools, they could consider a "controlled choice" system, which Michael Petrilli mentioned when interviewed for a recent Washington Post article, and which David Alpert discussed in a series of articles this year.

A related idea on the other side, which Councilmember Tommy Wells has been pushing and I previously discussed, is to give children who live near a non-specialized charter school a preference to attend. Charters would set aside some percentage of their spots for in-boundary families.

This would engage charters in the struggles of their community. While many charters will object that they need parents who are committed to their program, these objections miss the point of charter autonomy. Autonomy is supposed to be autonomy from the bureaucracy and red-tape of DC Public Schools, not autonomy from the educational challenges that students in one neighborhood present.

Ideas such as these for aligning and situating our two public school systems for the good of the entire system come up periodically from isolated councilmembers, advocates, and in the press. It's time for someone to rise to the moment, and forestall a return to separate and unequal school systems in the nation's capital.

Matt Johnson made some maps of the proposed closures for neighborhood elementary, middle and high schools. There are also some schools that serve students with disabilities or other specialized groups which are not on these maps as they do not draw from neighborhood boundaries.

Henderson said that DCPS hopes to keep all of the school buildings for the future. The Office of Planning estimates that the number of school-age children in DC, which has been declining for many years, will start rising again in 2015. Therefore, DCPS will likely begin needing more of these schools once more, but not for at least some years.

DCPS has plans for some of the buildings, such as expanding School Without Walls into the Francis-Stevens Education Campus, which is slated for closure. There are some preliminary ideas for some others, like a suggestion for a community arts center in what's now Garrison Elementary. For many, DCPS plans to work with the local community to identify the best use of the building, possibly including housing charter schools in the buildings.

Earlier this year, a report from IFF, a community development and consulting organization, recommended closing many schools with lower rates of student proficiency and moving kids to schools with higher proficiency. This report came under a lot of criticism for allegely oversimplifying and misreading the statistics.

At today's press conference, Henderson made no reference to the IFF report, and when asked said she had seen the data, but it wasn't the basis for her decisions. Instead, she talked about the Census and about data from the Office of Planning, and claimed that she made decisions to close schools simply to align the supply of space with the student demand.

Many families have been "voting with their feet" and moving to charter schools, and in Wards 1, 5, and 6, the majority of students now attend charter schools. Plus, the population of school-age children has been declining. However, forecasts estimate that there will be many more kids by 2020 in many parts of the District.

The demographic trends and growing charter school demand mean DCPS has much more space than it needs right now, and Henderson said this round of school closings is entirely about addressing that mismatch, not about the theory that closing schools with poorly-performing kids and moving them to a different school will make them perform better. One could as easily argue that such a move would instead make the new schools' test score numbers decline, because while a school can have a lot of impact on a kid's test scores, it's far from the only factor.

DCPS has modernized 47 of its 117 buildings since 2007, but 20,000 students still attend the schools that haven't gotten modernized yet. Kids at Ron Brown Middle School in Ward 7, for instance, will go to the recently-modernized Kelly Miller Middle School.

The changes also mean that DCPS is moving away from the model of having pre-K through 8th grade education campuses, such as Francis-Stevens, whose elementary kids will go to Marie Reed while middle schoolers will go to Hardy, and Winston education campus, which is splitting its elementary and middle school students into Stanton Elementary and Kramer Middle School.

Meanwhile, MacFarland Middle School will now move to Roosevelt High School (preventing the idea some have floated of moving Duke Ellington School of the Arts to the unused space at Roosevelt), and Shaw Middle School will locate with Cardozo High.

DCPS' presentation notes that it has the fewest average kids per school building, 384.12 of any jurisdiction in the region; Fairfax County has 926.2 kids per building.

This brings costs to DCPS, though fewer, larger schools also means fewer kids can walk to their neighborhood school. In the suburbs, families travel very large distances by car to go to school, often to the detriment of public health and traffic congestion.

Here is a full list of the schools slated for closure:

High schools:

• Spingarn (to Eastern, Dunbar, Woodson)

Middle schools:

• Francis-Stevens (to Hardy)
• MacFarland (to Roosevelt)
• Shaw at Garnet-Patterson (to Cardozo)
• Johnson (to Hart and Kramer)
• Winston (to Kramer)

Elementary schools:

• Francis-Stevens (to Marie Reed)
• Garrison (to Seaton)
• Marshall (to Langton)
• Davis (to C.W. Harris)
• Kenilworth (to Houston)
• Smothers (to Aiton and Plummer)
• Winston (to Stanton)
• Ferebee-Hope (to Hendley)
• Malcolm X (to Turner)
• MC Terrell-McGogney (to King)

Specialized schools and programs:

• Sharpe Health (to River Terrace)
• Mamie D Lee (to River Terrace)
• CHOICE at Hamilton (to Cardozo)
• Spingarn STAY (to Ballou STAY and Roosevelt STAY)
• Prospect LC (to neighborhood schools)

While the cemetery is visited by millions of tourists every year, it is the solemn destination for thousands upon thousands of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, family members, friends, and brothers-in-arms and sisters-in-arms who will never see their loved one again or hear their voice. It is without question our nation's most hallowed ground.

On May 30, 1871 Frederick Douglass gave a short address, "The Unknown Loyal Dead" at Arlington National Cemetery. An excerpt:

Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.

On this Veterans Day we remember the living and the deceased men and women who have honorably worn the uniform of their country.

Never above you. Never below you. Always beside you.

If you are in Rock Creek Park or Fort Reno and feel a gust of wind from out of nowhere, it's just Julian letting you know he's always got your back, front, and both sides.

The Wilson High School boundary is vast. Located in Tenleytown, Wilson is the public high school for most students west of 16th Street and many in Southwest DC. It's three feeder middle schools are Hardy, Deal, and Oyster-Adams.

Historically, Wilson has accepted many out-of-boundary students from across the city, creating a diverse environment. That was until recent modernization of the building, as well as greater interest in public schools by in-boundary parents, boosted the number of in-boundary kids going there.

Wilson now faces imminent overcrowding. Built for 1550 students, Wilson housed 1633 students last year and houses about 1700 this year according to Wilson parents. As Wilson becomes unable to accept out-of-boundary students, DC could see a new educational dividing line.

Wilson wasn't always the only public high school for such a large swath of the city. From its construction in 1897 until 1977, Western High School in Burleith served much of northwest DC. During the 1970s, the premier Duke Ellington School for the Arts was developed. It has resided in the former Western High building since then.

Most Ellington students are driven or bused to the school on the western edge of Ward 2 from east of Rock Creek Park, many from northeast or southeast DC. Ward 2 councilmember Jack Evans has long favored moving Ellington to a more central location, and returning Western to its historic use. Councilmember-elect David Grosso also supports the move.

When a draft proposal from the office of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee was leaked in 2010, Ellington's board reacted swiftly that it was rightly "appalled" by the proposal to move Ellington to the former Logan Elementary School building on G Street NE near Union Station.

However, the Ellington board was clear that they weren't opposed to moving, but rather opposed to moving to Logan, a building "whose sole qualification is its vacancy." In their letter, they write, "If Ellington were to relocate, it should only be to a building that truly addresses the requirements of a school with Ellington's unique mission."

Any new space for Ellington would have to meet the unique needs of one of the top arts high schools in the US, such as dance and recording studios, gallery space, and so on.

The letter goes on to say, "An example of such a facility is the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a performing arts high school in New York City recently built at a cost of approximately $78 million."

Ellington is about to undergo an $82 million renovation that will require moving the student body to another location for 2 years.

Some might object that moving Ellington out of Burleith is just a ploy to provide wealthy Georgetown residents their own high school. In fact, a new Western High School would draw from Hardy and Francis-Stevens middle schools, both of which currently draw almost entirely out-of-boundary students.

A new Western High School could thus lower the drawbridge of upper Northwest high schools to the rest of the city. Both Western and Wilson would have capacity for out-of-boundary students, thus maintaining diverse, high-quality public high schools in DC.

The move would be a boon for Roosevelt-area families if Ellington co-located with Roosevelt, as some advocates are suggesting. By sharing non-arts courses and pooling their enrollment for budgeting purposes, Ellington could expand in size and both schools could offer more specialized programming.

Preserving diversity in high quality schools should be a top goal as DCPS examines whether to close schools and redraw boundaries. Are there other solutions to maintaining diversity at high-quality public high schools in DC?

Raleigh found that the 35% threshold was a good one to include many kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who could benefit from being a part of a school with more privileged kids, but not so much as to create overconcentration and diminish the outcomes for the highest-performing students.

Should DC set a similar goal?

There are essentially 2 ways to include out-of-boundary, poorer children in the most exclusive public schools: make the schools bigger, and entice some in-boundary families to go elsewhere.

The old status quo was essentially that not enough families felt the school was "good enough" and therefore opted out of public education, making room, but that's ending.

One option is to add more school capacity, creating new space for out-of-boundary kids. Mary Cheh has secured funding to expand Deal Middle School, and is pushing for a new middle school in Ward 3. If there were more and larger schools to fit more kids, then there would again be out-of-boundary spaces.

Some argued, when Wilson High School was being modernized, that it was good to keep the school smaller. In part, the reason was to avoid having a huge high school that could become impersonal, but there was another oft-cited reason: if not all families who want to go to Wilson can, some will go to others, like Eastern, and in doing so make that a better school. Eastern, at Stadium-Armory, does not yet have many well-off families sending kids there, but that is poised to change.

There might be ways to avoid just having another Ward 3 school draw the well-off families from Capitol Hill; for example, DC could dedicate some of the new capacity explicitly to kids in the free or reduced-price lunch program. This would resemble Raleigh's program of explicitly fostering income diversity.

Should specialized or magnet programs migrate eastward?

The second possibility is to create programs that woo families from exclusive schools to go elsewhere. Specialized schools and magnet programs might do this. What if a new technology-focused graduate program at Saint Elizabeths also included a high school component, either at the campus or in one of the nearby schools? Montgomery Blair's nationally-known science and technology program is in Silver Spring, and at one time, Silver Spring was not quite the highly desirable place it is today.

Some of DC's current specialized programs are actually located in some of the most desirable locations. Hardy, in Glover Park, has a specialized arts program. Duke Ellington is an arts-focused high school and is in Georgetown. School Without Walls is in Foggy Bottom; that's because it's affiliated with GW.

Should any of these programs move? When Michelle Rhee reassigned Hardy principal Patrick Pope, the initial objective was to create an arts-focused middle school somewhere else that could draw from the entire city, and let Hardy evolve into more of a neighborhood school.

Should Ellington always stay in Georgetown? Most of its students aren't from the immediate area, and it's not the most transit-accessible location. Could Ellington go into an undersubscribed school building, boosting that school and getting the school closer to more of its students, and making room for a school west of Rock Creek to relieve Wilson?

Certainly, DC already has some of this. McKinley Technology High School is in Eckington. Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School is in Carver-Langston. However, these haven't (yet, at least) created such demand to uncrowd the upper Northwest schools.

Magnet programs could explicitly include kids from the area

If some of the most desirable programs were located in less privileged parts of the District, having the eastward draw would inherently free up space in competitive schools. DC could also consider ensuring that at least some (perhaps about a third) lower-income kids from the surrounding area can go to the competitive school.

Columbia University created a specialized school which included many children of faculty, and quickly became in high demand. However, Columbia also set aside a number of spots for kids living in the immediate neighborhood, which around Columbia are very diverse.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the top magnet school, Booker T. Washington, is in the worst part of town. It draws from all sections of the city, but also has an extra preference for kids from the 2 feeder schools in that area, whose students are almost all lower-income. Not every kid from those feeders gets in, but more do than if the admissions only looked at test scores.

What steps do you think DC could take to foster diversity while also maintaining and even increasing the educational quality of its schools?

Creating a community that crosses racial and class lines is no small feat and nobody would claim that Wilson has completely succeeded in that effort, but it is at least a place where everybody is present and there is an ongoing effort to do so. If we are ever going to overcome our divisions, we need to do just that—try. And, if we don't do it in our schools, the odds of doing it at later stages of life can only diminish.

Social scientists no doubt can offer measurements of how education in a setting of diversity enhances learning, but for us, the proof is in our kids. Their mix of friends and acquaintances. Their ease with people from different backgrounds. Their excitement about the culture and various cultures at their school. They clearly savor and take pride in their experience and have learned very important things from it.

Candice Santomauro wrote in EdExcellence.net about sending her white child to a school that was otherwise entirely African-American:

Every day after school, as she'd happily bound into my office, blond hair streaming, confident, I'd ask the obligatory, "How was school today?" although what I really wanted to ask was, "Are you OK with being the only white kid?" She seemed either not to notice or not to care. Having grown up myself in an ethnically, culturally, and socio-economically diverse Los Angeles suburb, I hoped she would have a similar experience. I wasn't sure though, if this was pushing it a bit. Finally after a few weeks, I had to ask. She responded, "Mom, we're all just kids." Oh, right. Out of the mouths of babes.

In previous parts, we talked about how the peer group can influence a student's performance. For lower-performing kids, going to school with others who perform better can make a positive difference. Teachers might set higher standards and push kids to achieve more, and their peers would encourage success instead of mock or bully those who work hard.

Therefore, besides the value wealthier parents might find in sending their kids to a diverse school, lower-income kids benefit from the arrangement as well.

Is diversity ephemeral?

Look at the trends in DC public schools, however, and diversity doesn't look so likely.

In the most high-performing schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods, public schools are becoming "good enough" that many parents want to send their kids there, but that means no more spots for out-of-boundary kids.

Mary Cheh has introduced a bill to redraw the school boundaries. That will almost surely shrink the boundary of popular schools like Deal Middle School. Wilson High's enormous boundary, which covers almost all of DC west of 16th Street and even much of Southwest, will probably get smaller as well.

The boundary isn't the only factor determining who goes to a school. DCPS also has a system of "feeder" schools, where all kids from elementary school can go to the same middle school, and so on for high school. It's possible some elementary schools will stop feeding Deal; Bancroft in Mount Pleasant and Shepherd in Shepherd Park are geographically most distant of Deal's feeders. But this would only exacerbate the segregation if Ward 3 middle and high schools become primarily places to educate Ward 3 residents.

Hardy Middle School in Georgetown is still very diverse racially, but not as much on income; some have charged that the former principal was deliberately trying not to attract local families, but also trying to weed out poor children. There are many schools on the cusp of drawing residents who might otherwise move or send kids to private school, often in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Diversity also often seems short-lived. At Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, for instance, the school is about one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Hispanic, but that doesn't mean every class is an even mix; the younger grades are far whiter, the older grades far less, as the school's rising reputation drew more of the local residents and their kids. Incoming classes, with no space for out-of-boundary kids, are the least diverse.

As for charters, we already can see that charter schools almost entirely serve people from the eastern side of the District. This makes sense, as some charter programs like KIPP have demonstrated greater success with lower-income kids than other approaches. But is the end of this road one where wards 7 and 8 have no neighborhood schools at all, just charters?

Do we want a world where DCPS is a system that caters only to upper-income neighborhoods, and a totally separate charter system serves DC's poorer neighborhoods? Where some schools are entirely filled with students from well-off families and other schools only serve the poor, where despite going to school in a very diverse city, few children actually interact with anyone from a different background?

How important do you think diversity is in schools? Should DC try to foster greater diversity?