Posts about Charter Schools

This issue is not confined to DC or to urban areas. There's a growing consensus that college freshmen from all walks or life and backgrounds spend the year in remedial courses learning what they should have been taught in high school.

But from my experiences, that psychological gulf is deeper and wider for city kids. In conversations with current college students and neighborhood elders, I keep hearing the same thing: folks are going off to college and they're coming right back to the city within a year or so with few credits, mounting debt, and a lack of opportunity.

Our schools perennially dumb down their curricula, continually lower expectations, de-emphasize classroom management, promote students regardless how ready they are. Many rush to label students "special needs" in order to receive more dollars per pupil, while "mainstreaming" students of all levels into one class. They baby students rather than pushing them.

Same soup, just reheated

The problems that Darryl Robinson raised are not new to the pages of the city's paper of record. While he was a student of mine, the Post ran a similar story about the post-graduation struggles of the 2005 class of Cardozo Senior High School in Northwest Washington.

The story opens,

Danielle Chappell had no reason to doubt she was a solid student. She earned decent grades, even scoring some A's in English and math, while balancing schoolwork with basketball, track and a spot on the dance team.

Then she graduated from Cardozo High School and arrived at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where she bombed the placement tests so badly that she had to take remedial English and math. She failed the makeup math course twice before passing it. Low grades overall put her on academic probation. Finally, mid-sophomore year, she was forced to withdraw.

Chappell sometimes thinks back to the Cardozo math teacher who, instead of assigning algebra homework, would have students clip photos of motorcycles from magazines and do other projects unrelated to math. "I thought it was strange and weird," Chappell said, but she did not complain because the class was "an easy A."

She wishes now that she had demanded more from Cardozo, and that Cardozo had demanded more from her.

Beneath the surface of the District's ongoing demographic, cultural, social, and economic shifts is a public school system struggling to succeed. If DC's leaders fail to recognize and tackle these challenges, the District and its students are at grave risk.

Why and how does this occur? Although it's been nearly 5 years since I was last in the classroom, there are many factors I saw as a teacher and continue to hear about today.

Mainstreaming & modification

Back in the 90's when I was a public elementary school student, there was a "Gifted and Talented" program that placed students in classes with similar peers. In this environment students are taught not just comprehension but critical thinking skills through interaction, conversation, and debate.

That's not what happens in most city schools. According to some education theories, gifted and talented programs are biased and detrimental because they discriminate against certain groups of students in favor of others. So what you get (or what I got) was a 9th grade English class that included both a 17-year-old barely reading at a 3rd grade level and a 13-year-old reading at a 12th grade level.

This is a challenge for even seasoned teachers. Teaching to the middle ground of these two students causes both students to tune out: the 17-year-old is lost, and the 13-year-old knows it all already.

The theory that on-grade level and below-grade level students benefit from having above-grade level students in their class is flawed. Teaching to the middle is not the middle; it's accommodating the lowest level student and hurting everyone else.

For example, when deciding on the year's first book, my 9th Grade English Department peers advocated Tears of Tiger, a junior high school book that many students had previously read. The argument against reading Why We Can't Wait, Fire Next Time, or Manchild in the Promised Land was that it would go over the heads of many of the middle to lower level students, instead of pushing those students. We eventually choose one of Walter Dean Myers' books, Monster, that was a success.

In this case we avoided the temptation to select a rudimentary book. But selecting the rudimentary book over the more challenging one is a practice that dominates the majority of the District's schools, according to teachers and students I know.

To solve students' unpreparedness to enter college, some of DC's elected officials have recently advocated legislation that would mandate that students take a college entrance exam as a prerequisite to graduate. But rather than solving the problem, this requirement would merely "mainstream" all students into the same intellectual exercise.

This would do nothing to better prepare students to pursue a trade or enter college. And it would do nothing to help students develop the intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills that Darryl lacked upon arriving at Georgetown University.

In coming posts I'll share some of my other experiences and opinions on why and how the city's school system and politicians continue to perpetuate failure.

Neighborhood preference would strengthen all schools

Some DC officials have suggested requiring charter schools to give the same preference in admissions to neighborhood children as traditional schools do. Currently, neighborhood schools must accept all students living in their boundary, and fill remaining seats with an out-of-boundary lottery. By contrast, all charter school seats are filled through a city-wide lottery, with no priority given to neighborhood children.

Earlier this week, fellow contributor Steven Glazerman, a deeply knowledgeable education researcher, criticized the proposal, saying that the policy would interfere with schools' educational mission for non-education reasons. But there are several educational objectives that this proposal could advance.

Charter school critics often question whether the apparent success of top charter schools just comes from selection bias, the idea that only more dedicated students and families apply to charter schools. Glazerman partly validated this skepticism by saying that "charters need families who are committed to the program, rather than just attending for the short commute."

Traditional schools don't have the luxury of distinguishing between students who are committed to their program and students who are attending for the short commute. Until charters are unable to make these kinds of distinctions, their educational outcomes won't be taken as seriously.

Charter schools aren't alone in preferring students from a city-wide lottery. According to a high level education administrator who served in the Fenty administration, many big-city school systems find that principals try to fill their buildings with out-of-boundary students.

Out-of-boundary students who are admitted through a city-wide lottery, the administrator explained, are more likely to be committed to their program, and less likely to get into trouble around the building because the building is outside of their neighborhood. The kids and their parents are more likely to be grateful for the opportunity to attend the school and less likely to complain about minor issues.

If charters had to give priority in admissions to students from their neighborhood, they would have to face many of the same educational challenges that traditional schools have dealt with for years.

It's important to level this playing field to better bring charter innovations to a real cross-section of the population, and to ensure that we judge their success or failure evenly against neighborhood schools.

Why not bring charter innovation to bear on the most challenging populations? If charters were competing with traditional schools to produce better outcomes for children who are "just attending for the short commute," it's possible they would discover valuable innovations through their entrepreneurial approach.

Until charters do face the same challenges as traditional schools, traditional schools are unlikely to study and adopt successful charter innovations. For example, many top charter schools have found success with an extended school day. But DCPS appears to be doing little if anything to study extended school days or any other charter innovation.

It's safer for kids to get to nearby schools

Furthermore, charters should give priority to neighborhood children in order to help children get to school safely. Lots of kids die or are injured as a result of car commuting to school.

Car crashes are the No. 1 killer of kids. 30 children under the age of 16 died in car crashes from 2000-2009 in DC (though not specifically while commuting to school).

And increasing driving to school also increases fatalities of kids who walk to school. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 50% of children hit near schools are hit by parents of other students driving the cars.

Level the playing field on facilities

Glazerman makes the excellent point in a comment to his post that charters don't face a level playing field with traditional schools when it comes to facilities.

Charters often have to move multiple times in their first years. Once charters do become successful, requiring neighborhood preference could have some perverse consequences, as Glazerman explains.

If neighborhood preferences are passed, charters find themselves locked into an even tighter real estate market or must risk the downward spiral of a move and starting over with a new student population. Or they will be more constrained about where they initially locate. Or they will simply bid up the surrounding property values and become elite schools, attended by those who can afford to buy into the neighborhood.

Glazerman is right, but the solution to one problem isn't to not solve another problem. That's why the DC Council should step in and level the playing field between charter and traditional schools' facilities.

The DC Council could require that school buildings vacant for 3 years be transferred to the Public Charter School Board to rent at below market rates to charters. When the government stops uses other buildings, it could give priority to charters, just as federal excessed properties get first priority to serve as homeless shelters. There are many ways to improve charters' access to facilities.

The bottom line is that the playing field is tilted against traditional schools by the charter citywide lottery and against charters by DCPS' management of its empty schools. The DC Council should level the playing field in both areas at the same time.

Neighborhood preference for charters is an idea whose time has come, and that can garner broad support from charter school skeptics, from parents in neighborhoods with successful charters and from urbanists advocating safe routes to school.

Currently, charter schools by law must admit anyone who applies. If the grade in question has more applicants than seats, charters use a random lottery to determine which students get an offer of a seat. The only exceptions to the lottery are siblings and founders' children.

Neighborhood schools, by contrast, must accept all students living in their boundary first. Remaining spaces are filled through an out-of-boundary lottery, with preferences for siblings, and for families living nearby but outside the boundary.

Unlike neighborhood schools, charters have to struggle to find facilities as opposed to having the District buy and maintain them. This often forces charters to move or split into multiple campuses, where an elementary school feeds into a distant middle or high school.

Charters need families who are committed to the program, rather than just attending for the short commute. Otherwise, if the school moves or when a student graduates to another campus, many of those families will simply leave the school. Too much turnover interferes with building a successful school.

In addition, charters (or any school of choice) without attendance zones can help break the ugly patterns of race and class segregation that divide our city.

With only neighborhood schools, school segregation usually mirrors residential segregation. Open enrollment and a vigorous parent education campaign can help ensure that charters serve all families, including the District's most disadvantaged, regardless of home address.

Public school choice became popular in the late 1970s in places like Philadelphia and St. Louis, where people sought a voluntary alternative to forced busing as a way to reduce segregation. For example, the Minneapolis Public Schools created a vast array of school types to appeal to people in ways that would draw voluntary movement so that formerly segregated groups would mix.

DC now has that possibility too. When affluent families in Ward 3 and low-income families in Ward 7 both want to attend the same school in Ward 5 because its innovative curriculum, we should not stymie the families' efforts.

The only rationale for this policy is a non-educational one: minimizing commuting distance. Sure, we could save a lot of energy and kids' time if nobody had to commute more than a mile or two. It would help children's fitness and neighborhood cohesion if all students walked to school.

Educational excellence should trump these convenience factors. Even a long school commute within DC is around 5 or 6 miles, which is no farther than many typical suburban school commutes. And frankly, most families will voluntarily choose the shorter commutes and safe routes for their kids even without special preferences or government restrictions.

For those families willing to make that tradeoff because they feel so strongly about the quality of the school, they should have the opportunity, or at least the same opportunity as anyone else. (Chairman Brown, for example, drives his child from his home in Ward 7 to school in Ward 3).

One exception where neighborhood preference would make sense is if the charter school's mission involved serving a particular neighborhood, and that mission were made explicit in the charter. It would make sense to try to find a legal way to allow these schools to offer neighborhood preference.

Maybe DC wants a lot of charter schools with such missions. In that case, the District needs to work harder to help such schools locate permanently in the neighborhoods they seek to serve. If charter schools grow in number, this might very well become a priority of the Public Charter School Board, which authorizes new charter schools. Meanwhile, we can have both types of schools, neighborhood and specialty schools, under DCPS and the Charter School Board.

The report authors crunched a lot of numbers in an admirably short period of time and produced some very interesting descriptive statistics, like the percentage of students below 185 percent of the poverty line in charters (75) versus DCPS (67).

The study counts, within each of 39 neighborhood clusters in the city, the number of "performance," or high quality, seats in schools and compares that to the number of school-age students living in that cluster. The difference is called a service gap.

It recommends schools for closure, or in some cases investment, to reduce these service gaps. But it doesn't justify the type of investment. Is it facilities? More teachers? Better teachers?

The authors define a "performance seat" as a seat in a school in the top tier of a 4-tier rating system they devised. Each school's tier comes from estimated percentages of its students who were judged "proficient" on the state assessment test in recent years, projected 4 years into the future assuming a straight line trend.

This study raises a lot of questions for most researchers and even lay readers. Two big flaws stand out, which are so basic and could do significant damage if city leaders overlook the problems.

It uses a flawed measure of school performance. At the heart of this paper is a 4-tier rating of school quality that relies on the percent of students who are proficient on the state test (called the DC-CAS). Never mind the fact that a proficiency rate throws away information by focusing only on whether a score was above or below a fixed cut point instead of how high or low it was.

Student proficiency rates have long been discredited as a school performance measure because proficiency rates capture student achievement at a point in time, but say little about how much the school or its teachers contributed to its current students' performance.

For example, a middle school could have declining proficiency rates if a feeder school begins sending more at-risk students to it, even if the teachers are especially skilled at working with a challenging population.

At a bare minimum, a sensible measure accounts for what a student knew before enrolling in the school (for example, using the student's score from the prior year). This is why more and more states, including DC, have adopted student achievement growth measures instead of proficiency rates for their teacher and school performance indicators.

Using a trend in proficiency rates doesn't help, and only creates a false sense of "gains" which is more likely to measure demographic change and other differences between successive cohorts of students cycling through a school than the performance of the schools' educators. That's because it compares students in one year to different students, instead of students in one year to the same students in the prior year.

By relying on flawed measures of school performance, policymakers risk closing down schools that are best equipped to work with challenging populations and replacing them with ones that would fail miserably if they started working with a different student body.

It ignores human behavior. There is a big difference between bean-counting and behavioral analysis. The latter recognizes that families make choices (within budget constraints) about where they live and where they send their kids to school.

School leaders make decisions too—over what programs to offer and how to allocate scarce resources to produce successful educational outcomes or whatever else they may value. In the case of charter schools, administrators choose whether to open a charter, where to locate, and what to offer.

In modeling supply and demand, however, the report ignored all of these factors. The report makes no attempt to model the behavior of these actors to predict the effect of different policies on outcomes. It is a bean-counting exercise.

For example, this study would say that a neighborhood has no service gap if it had a successful but highly specialized charter school, such as a Spanish immersion school. Obviously such a school could draw students from all over the city and residents of the immediate neighborhood may either not want to attend such a program or not be able to rely on being admitted because the pool of students in the lottery is so large.

Acting on this flawed study could end up making service gaps worse. For example, an affluent neighborhood may have far too many seats for its own students and yet its schools can be overcrowded because families from far flung neighborhoods want affluent peers or a school in a neighborhood with better housing stock.

Building more schools in the less affluent neighborhoods will not necessarily solve that problem. It might just create more under-utilized space. Yet that's exactly what this study recommends.

A smarter policy would strategically locate new schools partway between the current over-enrolled schools and the under-enrolled ones and design curricular offerings to induce the optimal mixing of students. Or better yet, the policy could rely more on information and transportation than simply construction and demolition.

In other words, knowing that a school is under-enrolled is less important than knowing why it is under-enrolled. It's important to know why parents make the choices that they make, not to just tally up their choices at a moment in time like an accountant.

It is possible to model the supply and demand of schooling without making naïve assumptions about schools and families. For example, there is work in progress by economists at Carnegie Mellon University demonstrating how it can be done.

In my own research I have simulated parental choice outcomes using behavioral parameters estimated from school choice data. This analysis illustrated how family preferences over the racial composition of the student body as well as commute distance and other factors such as school program offerings can influence sorting outcomes.

Planners can also consider trends in demographics, housing construction, and transit. They can simulate the results of a wide range of charter school and DCPS policies including not only facilities siting and improvements but varied attendance zones and expanded access to information about and transportation to schools beyond the immediate neighborhood.

The District needs sophisticated guidance to begin comprehensive, city-wide planning of school closures and investments and to help coordinate land use policy with charter school expansion. Unfortunately, this report doesn't provide enough of this guidance.

A fairer solution would be to allocate those dollars according to the uniform per pupil formula that is already in place. That formula is designed to ensure that each DC school child gets the same amount of funding, regardless of where he or she goes to school.

DCPS has completely legitimate funding needs. They want to use the money to increase food service contracts, supplement teacher salaries, and for other personnel costs. DC's public charter schools also have legitimate funding needs. In fact, they have exactly the same needs to feed their students and pay their teachers and other staff.

Public charter schools already have costs that don't apply to DCPS schools. For example, a new charter school has to find, buy, and outfit a building, while a DCPS school does not. But all the charter schools want is equal funding and an equal chance to prove their worth, knowing they can lose their charter if they don't perform well in educating their students.

Mayor Gray still has time to do what's right and fix this by distributing the newfound revenues in accordance with the existing funding formula. Equal funding for all of DC's public school students is not only good politics, it's the law, and it is in keeping with the promise of One City.

The biggest surprise was that the candidate with the longest resume in the education field—Sekou Biddle—had the least specific responses to our education survey. Maybe he's been more specific on the campaign trail.

There is no easy way to summarize the results or say who "won," and my analysis is very subjective, so feel free to read the verbatim responses from verbatim responses and form your own judgment.

Educational opportunity for disadvantaged students

Interestingly, the one question that drew new policy ideas yielded the same policy idea from three of the candidates. When we asked about how we can create more equal educational opportunity for the city's most disadvantaged students, Weaver, Page, and Orange all advocated some form of additional pay for teaching in the poorest neighborhoods.

Weaver's very specific proposal called for up to a $16,000 bonus for a voluntary move and a three-year commitment to teach in the city's lowest-performing schools. Page offered many more specific ideas, but some of them were hard to follow, like paying teachers (doubling the incentives?) if they are effective (based on student input) and teach in a low-performing school. Others included pursuing a balanced plan of facilities modernization rather than favoring selected sites.

Biddle suggested that wide distribution of school performance data was a way to fuel the city's already active system of public school choice to equalize opportunity—the only candidate to take this angle.

But ideas like these were typically sandwiched between platitudes that gave little clue as to the policies we might see him advocate for as a member of the Council. (In fairness, he has already started introducing legislation, such as a bill to make transportation free for low-income families). This may be the strategy of a frontrunner, but it left us to focus on other candidates who provided meatier responses.

Teacher evaluations

Statehood Green candidate Alan Page gave the best response to a question about the the DCPS system of teacher evaluation known as IMPACT. For starters, he accurately described how it currently works, expressing support for it as a good start, suggesting that it could be improved to capture critical thinking, and saying he would hold stakeholder hearings. This would probably fall under micro-management according to Biddle's response, but might help citizens get a better understanding of this fundamental tool for making education policy in the District.

Most candidates did not get specific enough to demonstrate a full understanding of this or other key education policies like management of federal grants like Race to the Top and the lesser known State Longitudinal Education Data system (SLED).

Orange and Bryan Weaver recognized the failure of DC to execute on its SLED grant but nobody offered solutions. Weaver came the closest, asking for transparency in education performance data as well as the issue of surplus properties, advocating for a public database of the city inventory with agency contact information and other data.

Role of the State Board of Education

Vincent Orange had good answers about the role of the State Board of Education (SBOE) and about the disposition of public buildings that once housed under-enrolled DCPS schools. He acknowledged the reduced role of the SBOE, but recognized its value as an elected board that could bring constituent concerns on education to the policy arena. (Though this might be more accurate if so many of its members didn't consider the Board as merely a stepping stone to the Council.)

On buildings, he echoed a concern that other candidates raised for community input and that some raised for revenue generation, but noted that if we don't let charter schools occupy the schools, as they are promised by law, then (non-profit) charter schools will take some other property off the tax rolls.

Charters versus DCPS

We asked a somewhat leading question about whether candidates thought that charter and DCPS schools received fair budget allocations. Charter advocates have long complained that they are not treated fairly relative to the traditional district.

Orange wins bravery points for pushing back on this idea and suggesting that charters in DC are better off relative to their traditional school peers than in other states. He also called for weighted school formula funding and extra funding for magnet programs but did not explain why.

Biddle noted astutely that timeliness of the funds is a critical issue for charter schools. But Weaver really nailed the issue, focusing on facilities allocations and the fact that DC government has exposed itself to a lawsuit over this issue by not taking the issue of facilities funding equity seriously enough.

Vouchers

As readers will remember, Stephen is no fan of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, aka DC vouchers, so he naturally gave points to Weaver and Page for opposing it, while Biddle and Orange said they're for it. Voters who support the program might view this one differently.

Weaver just thinks the dollar amounts are too low to get poor kids into truly elite schools, and added that the voucher program shouldn't subsidize schools to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Biddle defended the program but also referenced a need for funded organizations to comply with the DC Human Rights Act. Orange hinted at the real reason we might want to support the program: the bribe that Congress offered, by including in the program equal funding bonuses for DCPS and DC charters if the program was enacted.

Chancellor selection

We asked some questions that flopped. One was about the selection of a permanent DCPS chancellor. The candidates who responded promptly to our questionnaire (Page and Orange) gave earnest answers and then Mayor Gray announced his selection, prompting the later-responding candidates to say they support Kaya Henderson. Not much to be learned there.

We need more city leaders who are knowledgeable about education and this survey shows is that the choice is not obvious. However, taken together, the candidates' responses can add a new layer to voters' understanding of where the candidates stand, how knowledgeable they are, and what they might do in the education arena if elected.

1. DC is already a school choice Mecca. We're the last places that needs the OSP.

A blogger for the National Review wrote that reauthorizing this program will "breathe life back into school choice in the nation's capital." Huh?

Poor kids in DC have a richer set of schools to choose from than almost any other city in the country. More than 40 percent of DC's schoolchildren attend schools of choice, mostly through charter schools, but also through the public school choice program within DC Public Schools known as the Out of Boundary transfer program.

The array of options and degree of innovation in DC's charter movement is stunning, ranging from a "Hospitality High" vocational high school to residential programs like SEED, from public policy themed schools like Cesar Chavez to a Chinese immersion International Baccalaureate elementary school.

We have KIPP schools, Lighthouse schools, and Friendship Academies. We have award-winning schools like the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia and E.L. Haynes in Petworth. We have bilingual schools like LAMB and Oyster. Parents clamor to get into popular DCPS schools like Stoddert in NW and the "cluster schools" on Capitol Hill.

And 19 new charter applicants are in the pipeline to be approved, expanding the choices even further. There is lots of room for improvement, but DC has an embarrassment of school choice riches.

2. The OSP lacks broad local support and political legitimacy.

Another problem with locating the voucher program in DC is that the site selection for the program is not dictated by a public policy need, but pure convenience. Because of a quirk on the US Constitution, Congress can legislate policy in the District of Columbia without seeking consent from its residents.

To be sure, there are strong local advocates for the OSP: families who stand to gain $7,500 per year, city leaders who want the extra funding for district and charter schools that comes with the program, and the supporters of the Catholic and other private schools whose tuition is offset by the scholarships.

These constituency groups would be created in any subsidy market. But why DC? And how much support does the program have from the broader community of residents and taxpayers in DC? We simply don't know.

The locally elected City Council hasn't voted on it. There has been no ballot referendum. The one locally elected representative to the Congress, non-voting Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, opposes the program. But none of that matters in the strange world of taxation without representation.

3. Public subsidies should come with public accountability.

It seems like a fair proposition that if a school receives public money it should be held accountable for results, even if it is not required to follow any of the regulations of a typical public school. That, in fact, is the premise behind charter schools.

Charters in DC do not have to hire unionized or even certified teachers. They do not have to use the same textbooks or curriculum as DCPS. They can innovate in their staffing models, their methods of instruction, and their school culture, carving out distinct identities and philosophies without seeking central office approval.

In exchange, they must demonstrate that they are teaching children the basic skills set forth in the DC state standards. They do so by participating in the state assessment system known as DC-CAS. They also cannot charge tuition or discriminate in their student admissions. Over-subscribed schools are filled by lottery.

On the other hand, Catholic schools and other private schools in DC do not have to keep up this end of the bargain. They are not accountable for the academic success of their students and they can use tuition and selective admissions to shape their student body as they wish.

Furthermore, unlike publicly funded schools, they can practice religion (80 percent of OSP students attended religious schools in 2008-2009). All of that is fine until they start accepting $7,500 per student through the Opportunity Scholarship Program. At that point, the schools become quasi-public entities but unlike charter schools, with no strings attached.

There are policy alternatives.

Providing educational opportunity for disadvantaged students is a critically important policy goal, but a voucher program in DC is not in the public interest. Instead, there are two policy options that OSP advocates might want to pursue.

First, if they want to keep the program alive, they should seek to move it to Ohio or Connecticut, the home state of the Congressional sponsors, or some other state where the voters can weigh in on whether school vouchers are a good policy and where you can demonstrate a real need to jumpstart school choice.

Second, if policymakers want to promote school choice and educational opportunities for disadvantaged students in DC, they should support policies that affect school site selection, affordable housing, and transportation, i.e. the factors that influence the commuting distance for low-income families and hence their access to school options.

Currently, it is very costly and difficult for charter schools to locate near the city center or near transit nodes. A much more direct method than vouchers for enhancing all forms of school choice would simply be to provide more school bus transportation and more generous facilities funding conditional on site selection that provides easy access to low-income communities.

Risk-averse parents may enter dozens of lotteries. As a result, each school's applicant list is inflated by these extra "safety school" applications. The school has no way of knowing which family on their list is serious about enrolling in their school, even after the lottery is conducted. Since every child can only attend one school, then it's mathematically true that every school will have dozens of phantom applications.

Based on public school choice systems I've studied around the country, most of the real sorting happens after the lottery. School operators spend all spring and summer working down their list contacting "next in line" parents once they learn that students accepted through the lottery are not in fact planning to enroll.

How hard they work to inform each replacement child's family before they move on determines the makeup of the incoming class. School operators can work extra hard to get "desirable" students or even submit to the will of the pushy parent who spends the most time checking in, thereby subverting the intent of open admissions.

Even if the schools do not play games, they must contend with an unstable student count and a miserable months-long process of juggling lists. Who loses in all this? Schools, parents, and most of all students whose parents are not savvy, persistent, or lucky enough to work the system.

Fortunately, the solution is rather simple. Centralize the admissions process so there is a single application that parents fill out, a central (but not exclusive) clearinghouse for information about school options, and a single multi-school lottery that aggregates preferences and gives every family a fair shot at their most- (and second-most, third-most, etc.) preferred school.

Once you have one-stop shopping for the application and notification process, you can realize other benefits, like a highly visible Parent Welcome Center, where parents can turn for information about the schools, much the way our Board of Elections provides voter guides. Parents can be counseled on the options and how to create a rank-ordered list of preferred schools and how to get a good shot at their favorites.

So why don't we have a system like this? The DCPS out of boundary system is centralized. The charter schools, however, have not really organized themselves to get it done. It's obvious why they might be hesitant. The one thing they all have in common is that they value their autonomy. But even autonomy-loving charter schools should be able to see the benefits of collective action in this case.