Charter Schools - Greater Greater Washington

DCPS and charters team up to improve Chinese instruction

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:04:00 EDT

Photo by the author.

With help from DC's Office of the State Superintendent of Education, students from 3 DCPS elementary schools are brushing up on their Chinese with help from students at Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School in Ward 5.

Can "restart" turn around low-performing charter schools?

Fri, 31 May 2013 10:41:00 EDT

by Natalie Wexler

Photo by Paul Downey on Flickr.

When a traditional public school is failing, officials often decide to apply a turnaround strategy rather than to close it. Is it time to apply a similar approach to failing charter schools?

School buildings to charters

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:47:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A new DC government website will help charter schools use vacant DCPS buuildings after 16 schools close this fall. All will go to charters, as the law requires, rather than some to city agencies. (City Paper)

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KIPP will have to wait for Randall

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:54:00 EDT

by David Alpert

DC will continue with a deliberative process to create a Small Area Plan in Southwest, instead of letting KIPP build a campus there. (Southwest TLQTC) ... The Post editorial board is very disappointed.

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Education leaders want to end application "madness"

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:26:00 EDT

by Laura Dallas McSorley

Photo by jeffk on Flickr.

Parents trying to apply to out-of-boundary DC public schools or charter schools have to deal with a dizzying array of separate applications and last-minute shuffles. "It's madness we've sent parents through," said Councilmember David Catania last night, and called for a unified application and lottery for DCPS and charter schools.

Charter can't expand

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:10:00 EDT

by Rahul Mereand-Sinha

The PCSB won't let the BASIS charter school expand. It's gotten high test scores, but 10% of students withdrew, including 7 with disabilities, prompting questions of whether it's cherry-picking the student body. (Post)

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Should charters also be neighborhood schools?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:58:00 EDT

by Rahul Mereand-Sinha

Image from Capital City PCS.

At-large councilmember David Grosso has introduced a bill to allow DC charter schools to give priority to students in their neighborhood for admissions. Supporters say it will strengthen neighborhoods, while opponents worry it would further disadvantage children from poorer areas.

Charter preference lives

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:48:00 EDT

by Nick Casey

David Grosso introduced a bill that would allow (but not require) charter schools to give preference to local children. (Examiner) ... A task force recommended against this, but many people feel they ignored many factors.

Comment

Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
Level the playing field for charters and neighborhood schools (Feb 24, 2012)
Don't favor local kids in charter admissions, says task force (Dec 17, 2012)
Gray budget funds school modernizations and more (Mar 28, 2013)
DC drifting towards separate school systems. Are they equal? (Nov 16, 2012)

How school tiers match up with Walk Score

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:11:00 EDT

by David Alpert

One of the best effects of open data is when people correlate data sets from very different places to generate interesting information. This graph cleverly combines DC's school quality tiers (known as "accountability categories") with Walk Score:

Sandra Moscoso wrote yesterday about how Code for DC's School Decisions Project has been gathering coders who want to use open data to help parents, students, and policymakers. This is one of the graphs they created at the recent Open Data Day using data from the Office of State Superintendent of Eduaction (OSSE).

I've asked to get access to the raw spreadsheet for this graph so we can look at, for example, which schools each dot represents. Here are the accountability categories by school. I will add the spreadsheet with WalkScore matched up with category when it's available. Update: here's the data as a CSV file.

A few things immediately jump out. The most successful DCPS schools have high Walk Scores, while the least successful ones mostly (but not entirely) cluster in the lower range. This may reflect the fact that a public school's success has a lot to do with the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, and the local retail that is a big part of Walk Score locates in areas with higher incomes.

That income effect is also very pronounced in the graph Sandra posted yesterday:

That's not the case with charter schools. 3 of the 5 "reward" charters are in low-Walk Score areas (which could mean something, or just be a consequence of little data), while the "Rising" charters are basically all over the place. This may have a lot to do with the simple fact that since charters have to find and pay for their own space, they're in all manner of locations.

An interesting future step might be to correlate the school tiers with some data set about land prices or rents, or resident incomes. That could help illuminate whether charters end up locating in less-expensive areas, because they want to serve poorer residents and/or because they need cheaper land.

What do you see from looking at this data?

10 comments

Too many schools?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:37:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Are we building too many schools? Richard Layman calls the rush to build schools even though enrollment is relatively flat "the market run amok."

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DCPS schools absorb 561 charter transfers per year

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:53:00 EDT

by Ken Archer

561 students in public charter schools, or 1 in 56 charter students, transferred to traditional public schools during the 2011-2012 school year. That means that, in addition to the 277 students charters expelled during that year, another 284 transferred to DCPS schools.

Photo by Bludgeoner86 on Flickr.

The Washington Post profiled involuntary transfers, students who were offered the chance to withdraw under threat of expulsion. Expulsions become part of a student's record, while transfers do not.

Only 44 students transferred from DCPS schools to charter schools in the 2011-2012 school year, according to new data released by the State Superintendent of Education. DCPS schools expelled only 24 students in that year.

DCPS teachers have long complained of having to absorb mid-year transfers of disruptive students into their classrooms. The newly released data appears to validate their claims.

The 561 students transferred from charter to DCPS schools makes up 1 in 80 of the total DCPS enrollment. That means that each year 1 in 4 DCPS classrooms, on average, absorb a transferred charter school student mid-year.

Because students who were expelled, or involuntarily withdrew, from charter schools are unlikely to apply again, the cumulative affect of transfers over multiple years is notable. Over 4 years, every DCPS classroom on average would have a student who transferred or was expelled from a charter school at this rate.

Is this a problem?

The discrepancy between the expulsion and involuntary transfer rates of charters and traditional public schools creates several problems.

First, parents rely on test scores when comparing schools. Transparent, comparable test scores are thus critical to school choice.

However, neighborhood public schools are disproportionately burdened with disruptive students expelled or involuntarily transferred from charter schools. This casts doubt on the comparability of test scores between charter and non-charter schools.

Second, charters are not given the opportunity and the challenge to innovate ways to reach these students when they can expel and involuntary transfer them at rates far in excess of DCPS schools.

Charters are supposed to be test beds of innovation, and they must have autonomy in how they teach students in order to innovate.

However, granting charters autonomy from the students themselves who are disruptive and problematic undermines the very structural incentives to innovate that led to the granting of charters in the first place.

Are there any viable solutions?

Advocates have offered three solutions to the discrepancy between the expulsion and involuntary transfer rates of charters and traditional public schools. Unfortunately, none of them seem to be politically viable.

Harmonized disciplinary rules: OSSE proposed a harmonized set of expulsion policies last year that would apply to all public schools, both charter and traditional.

While youth advocates testified in strong support of the move, charter operators and advocates launched a coordinated opposition to the proposal. They argued that OSSE had no legal authority to dictate disciplinary policies of charter schools.

OSSE has not replied to questions asking for their response to the legal claims of charter operators.

Greater charter accountability: Charter advocates generally called for greater accountability and investigation of "problem" charter schools with particularly high expulsion and transfer rates.

However, charter advocates contend that no one has the authority to authorize investigations except for the Public Charter School Board. PCSB has been criticized recently for a lack of charter accountability.

StudentsFirst, the national school reform advocacy launched by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, last month created report cards for each state including DC. The DC report card gave the PCSB a 0 out of 4 grade in charter accountability.

Allow DCPS to expel students at same rate as charters: Many advocates, particularly charter parents, have defended charter schools' expulsion policies. DCPS should be allowed to expel students at the same rate, they argue, into a school that is specialized to meet their needs.

However, if DCPS schools had the same rate of expulsions and of transfers, the total number of students expelled or involuntary transferred per year would be 1,364.

After 6 years, a school absorbing all of these students would have 8,184 rejected students, or 11% of all public school students. There appears to be little to no political will to segregate such a large portion of DC schoolchildren into a safety-net school system.

Drifting towards an outcome that no one wants

The fundamental problem with education reform in DC is that we are drifting towards an unattractive outcome with little discussion or debate.

It's now painfully clear that we are drifting towards a set of parallel, unequal school systems. First, we have thriving neighborhood schools west of Rock Creek Park and on Capitol Hill. Second, we have charter schools and magnet schools east of Rock Creek Park.

Third, and most distressingly, we have neighborhood schools east of Rock Creek Park that are becoming safety net schools. We can think of them as Medicaid for education.

There's a common misconception that DC is on the cutting edge of charter development because DC has the highest rate of charter enrollment except for New Orleans. New York City, Denver, Chicago and other cities have charters. New York City has more charters than any city.

Where DC lags, as the StudentsFirst report card made clear, is in the development of institutions and policies that align charter schools with the interests of all students across the public school system. The other cities with charters have a common lottery, neighborhood preference and greater charter accountability.

Without these policies aligning charters with the interests of all kids, not just their own, charters possess competitive advantages that have led to overwhelming demand from parents. It's this discrepancy with other cities that accounts for the high rate of charter enrollment in DC.

Are there viable solutions to this discrepancy between charter and traditional public schools in DC? Do you find the outcome towards which DC schools are headed to be acceptable?

47 comments

Should we just let DC public schools expel anyone?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:40:00 EDT

by Ken Archer

If DC Public Schools are to compete with charter schools, let them expel any students who keep other students from learning. Special safety-net schools, perhaps run by the Department of Youth and Rehabilitative Services, could fulfill our duty to provide mandatory education.

Photo by Sean MacEntee on Flickr.

Does this sound crazy?

Charter schools get to do something similar. If that's fair (and some say it is), shouldn't DCPS get to do the same?

Emma Brown reports in the Washington Post that "DC charter schools expelled 676 students in the past three years, while the city's traditional public schools expelled 24."

Charter schools thus get rid of the problem students and often boost their own average test scores in the process. DCPS schools cannot expel elementary students and must convince judges to expel older students. Charters have no such restrictions.

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.

119 comments

Level the playing field for charters and neighborhood schools (Feb 24, 2012)
Don't favor local kids in charter admissions, says task force (Dec 17, 2012)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
DC drifting towards separate school systems. Are they equal? (Nov 16, 2012)
Should school choice work like bank choice? (Dec 13, 2012)

Education bombshells

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 08:51:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Were teachers cheating on students' standardized tests? (Post) ... Some parents say school closings will push them to charter schools. (Examiner) ... Charter schools expel far more students than traditional schools (Post).

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Don't favor local kids in charter admissions, says task force

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:54:00 EDT

by Ken Archer

Charter schools don't give priority to kids who live nearby, instead choosing all students from a citywide lottery. Some other big cities, like New York, allow or require a neighborhood preference in charter admissions. In a report released Friday, a DC task force set up to consider this idea recommended against DC following the lead of these cities.

Photo by Derek Bridges on Flickr.

The task force did recommend a common lottery across charter and traditional public schools. Currently, parents enter separate lotteries for each charter, as well as the out-of-boundary lottery for DCPS neighborhood schools. As a result, they can't indicate neighborhood preference by ranking schools when applying.

But the 12-member task force, which included 7 members from charter organizations, also concluded that other cities' reasons for neighborhood preference don't apply to DC. While there are valid arguments in favor and against neighborhood preference, the report appears to present and engage only the opposing arguments.

Arguments for neighborhood preference in charter admissions

Charter school critics often question whether the education outcomes of top tier charter schools results from selection bias, the idea that generally more dedicated students and families apply to charter schools. Charter advocates often validate this concern by claiming that the "model" of charter schools, even non-specialized ones, is somehow incompatible with educating neighborhood students.

The task force report, for example, asserts that "charter schools are not well suited to be neighborhood schools." In a post earlier this year criticizing neighborhood preference, Steven Glazerman similarly argued, "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, critics argue, their educational outcomes won't be taken as seriously.

Charter schools aren't alone in preferring students from a citywide 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 citywide 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 in DC had to give priority in admissions to students from their neighborhood, they would face many of the same educational challenges that neighborhood schools have faced for years. Charters in New York City, the school district with the most charters (136), have to face these same challenges. Why should DC be different?

Task force report argues against neighborhood preference

The task force report did not mention this central argument in favor of neighborhood preference in charter admissions. Instead, the report focused on the number of "quality seats" (a spot at a high-performing school) and access to existing high-quality charter seats.

The report concluded that "neighborhood preference would not increase the number of quality seats but simply ration them based on the location of a student's home."

Furthermore, the report argues that "wards east of the [Anacostia] River would be most negatively impacted." This is based on the large number of students from Ward 7 & 8 in charter schools outside of their ward compared to low number of charter seats in their ward occupied by students from other wards.

The unstated assumption, of course, is that "quality seats" in charter schools are due to the school and not to selection bias. That's the central issue, and it is not raised anywhere in the report.

During the 2nd task force meeting, members asserted that "this Task Force was commissioned to focus on access to education, not quality of education." The legislation creating the task force, however, asserts no such restriction, asking instead for a report on "the pros and cons of a weighted lottery."

The report didn't hear the pros of a lottery weighted by neighborhood for 2 reasons: 1) the report argues that the models of other cities don't apply to DC, and 2) the task force failed to solicit public comment.

Other cities use neighborhood preference

New York, Chicago, Denver and New Orleans all have varying models of neighborhood preference in charter admissions. Neighborhood preference is optional for Chicago charter schools (12 of 110 prioritize neighborhood kids in admissions) and mandatory for charters in the other 3 cities.

After reviewing the models of these 4 cities, "the task force concluded that the models used in other jurisdictions are not closely applicable to DC." They say that is because of DC's "charter school market share," "distribution of charter schools across seven of eight wards," "the relative small size of the District," and "widespread availability of public transportation."

The report doesn't mention why these differences make the charter admissions policies of other cities inapplicable to DC, concluding simply that "DC's unique public education history and current state" should make us "cautious about implementing neighborhood preference similar to any of the models explained above."

If you didn't know about the public comment period for the task force, you are not alone. Only 4 people provided public comment. 2 of them were charter school leaders. The hearing was scheduled on November 15, at the same time as the DC Council hearing on DCPS school consolidation.

The minutes to the subsequent task force meeting note "the low participation in public testimony" and the suspected "scheduling conflict with the DCPS school closure meeting," but the task force decided against extending the public comment period.

Everyone agrees we need a common lottery

The task force does recommend a common lottery across charter schools and the out-of-boundary lottery for DCPS neighborhood schools.

The benefits of a common lottery are many, but the task force focused in particular on parents' ability to indicate neighborhood preferences by ranking schools accordingly.

Currently, 2 children on opposite ends of town can apply to charters next to their homes and across town, and each win a spot at the charter across town but not at the local school even if they would both prefer to swap places.

In April 2012, Denver and New Orleans both implemented a common lottery across all charter schools. New Orleans parents rank their top 8 schools (families choose 2.5 on average) while Denver parents rank their top 5 schools (2.8 average).

If the Deputy Mayor for Education makes no progress toward a common lottery in time for the Spring 2014 lotteries, the DC Council will likely have to legislate a common lottery.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that, while DC is a leader in charters as a share of the education market, other cities are leading DC in figuring out how to organize charters and non-charters into a single public school system.

A common lottery and neighborhood preference in charter admissions are becoming standard in other cities with charters while in DC there is either lack of leadership to implement these polices or outright opposition from charters.

While the Neighborhood Preference Task Force moves us close to a common lottery, it sets us further behind other school districts when it comes to neighborhood preference in charter admissions.

101 comments

Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
DC charter schools should centralize admissions (Oct 25, 2010)
Level the playing field for charters and neighborhood schools (Feb 24, 2012)
Favoring local residents would undermine charter schools (Feb 21, 2012)
Are DC schools good enough? (Jul 17, 2012)

Little movement in test scores

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:26:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

A report shows that DC 3rd graders' test scores have not significantly improved since reforms began in 2007. Charter schools also didn't show significant improvement over their traditional counterparts. (Examiner)

Comment

Should school choice work like bank choice? (Dec 13, 2012)
Don't favor local kids in charter admissions, says task force (Dec 17, 2012)
Level the playing field for charters and neighborhood schools (Feb 24, 2012)
Mayor Gray should keep promises on education funding (Jan 17, 2012)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)

Should school choice work like bank choice?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:08:00 EDT

by David Alpert and Ken Archer

A majority of public school students east of Rock Creek Park now attend charter or magnet schools, a fact that some consider a victory for school choice. If this trend continues, we'll have a system with no neighborhood schools at all, where everyone chooses a school from a menu, like you choose a bank. Is this an acceptable outcome?

Photo by markhillary on Flickr.

The Brookings Institution ranked urban school systems on various factors around its system for letting parents choose schools. The District scored 3rd in the nation on the overall index, largely because many kids opt out of their default local school.

Grover Whitehurst, the report's author, told the Washington Post, "The thing that of course stands out about the District of Columbia is that 40, 45 percent of kids are in schools of choice—which is very high with respect to the rest of the nation."

Is this really a good thing?

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.

65 comments

Are DC schools good enough? (Jul 17, 2012)
DC drifting towards separate school systems. Are they equal? (Nov 16, 2012)
School rankings don't tell you what you need to know (Jul 18, 2012)
DC needs school choice, not vouchers (Feb 25, 2011)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)

DC one of the choiciest

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:20:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

Brookings ranked DC third in school choice, with 40-45% of DC students in "schools of choice" like magnets and charters. (Post)

Comment

Mayor Gray should keep promises on education funding (Jan 17, 2012)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
Will the real education candidate please stand up? (Apr 20, 2011)
DC needs school choice, not vouchers (Feb 25, 2011)
Online common application may help DC specialized high schools compete for top students (Oct 25, 2011)

DC drifting towards separate school systems. Are they equal?

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:04:00 EDT

by Ken Archer

DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced yesterday that DCPS plans to close 20 schools. All of the closed schools are east of Rock Creek Park, and 9 are east of the Anacostia River.

Ron Brown Middle School in Ward 7, slated for closure

In these areas, charter schools continue to grow and DCPS neighborhood schools shrink, while families are clamoring to attend neighborhood schools in the wealthiest parts of the District.

The danger of this trend is that the District will drift toward two, completely separate public school systems: a neighborhood-based school system primarily in the city's west, and a charter school system in the east.

These two systems are very different and geographically separate. But are they equal? That's the central question that yesterday's announcement raises. And it's a question not for Henderson, who is responsible just for DCPS, but for the Mayor and Council.

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.

59 comments

Are DC schools good enough? (Jul 17, 2012)
Can a diverse and high-quality public school last? (Jul 19, 2012)
DCPS cancels promised arts magnet middle school (Dec 8, 2011)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
Wilson High drawbridge to students east of park is going up (Nov 9, 2012)

DCPS closing 20 schools, including Spingarn

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:00:00 EDT

by David Alpert and Ken Archer

Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced today that DC Public Schools will close 20 of its schools in a long-anticipated move based, she said, primarily on right-sizing DCPS's capacity with its enrollment and educating more kids in modernized campuses.

Spingarn High School, Photo from Wikipedia.

The only high school slated to close is also the high school most in the transportation news: Spingarn High School, on Benning Road. DDOT has been planning a streetcar maintenance facility on the Spingarn grounds, and hoped to provide technical training in streetcar technology for Spingarn students.

Henderson said that this idea isn't gone; DCPS is looking into creating a "transportation career and technical education center" at Spingarn, but this plan is still in the early stages.

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.

Graphic from DCPS.

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.

Images from DCPS.

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.

Graph from DCPS.

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)

26 comments

DCPS cancels promised arts magnet middle school (Dec 8, 2011)
DC drifting towards separate school systems. Are they equal? (Nov 16, 2012)
Wilson High drawbridge to students east of park is going up (Nov 9, 2012)
Are DC schools good enough? (Jul 17, 2012)
Online common application may help DC specialized high schools compete for top students (Oct 25, 2011)

Charters lead to integration

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 08:40:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

Cities with charter schools, like DC, may be retaining more middle class families with school age kids, resulting in more economically and racially diverse communities. (USA Today, Ward 1 Guy)

Comment

Favoring local residents would undermine charter schools (Feb 21, 2012)
Level the playing field for charters and neighborhood schools (Feb 24, 2012)
Are DC schools good enough? (Jul 17, 2012)
DCPS cancels promised arts magnet middle school (Dec 8, 2011)
Can a diverse and high-quality public school last? (Jul 19, 2012)

DC school population grows

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:20:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

Enrollment in DC schools rose by more than 4000 students over the past year, the most growth in 45 years. The increase was led by charter schools, which grew by 11%. (DCist)

Comment

Mayor Gray should keep promises on education funding (Jan 17, 2012)
Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools (Jun 29, 2012)
Will one old school become a new school? (Oct 7, 2010)
Flawed study mis-rates potential DC school closings (Feb 1, 2012)
Could the slowing economy benefit DC schools? (Apr 13, 2009)