Posts about Education

Rob Pitingolo has done a lot of research on which places have more or fewer people with college degrees. DC has the fourth most college degrees per square mile of any city in the nation, but that doesn't apply everywhere in the region or everywhere in DC.

Rob created these maps that show the locations of people with and without college degrees aged 25 and over.

There seems to be a fair amount of mixing in Virginia, but in DC and Maryland, the divide is starker. East of the Anacostia, blue dots are very few; west of Rock Creek and in the central city, they overwhelm the pink dots.

A lot of news stories talk about the DC region in terms of the division between black and white. The city's history of racial segregation has left a legacy of educational and socioeconomic inequality. As a result, many commentators use race as a simplistic shorthand for conflicts that are really about college educated versus not, or wealthy versus poor, or young versus old.

Race is immutable, but other characteristics are not. If our divisions are really about black versus white, they're not going to change unless some people move out of the city, and that's not what we want to happen. But education levels can change, and it's good for everyone if we can help all people in our region access better education.

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.

Switching from standalone middle schools to PS-8, and back to standalone

Ward 5 parents are right to be outraged about their middle schools. The class entering the District's two top public high schools, Banneker and School Without Walls, in the 2011-12 school year included only 5 students from Ward 5.

Much of the parental dissatisfaction with the 7 PS-8 schools in Ward 5 stems from their lack of programs and facilities for middle schoolers, which parents argue affect educational outcomes. Many PS-8 schools lack multiple levels of math including algebra, foreign languages, robust before and afterschool programs, age-appropriate desks and toilets for older children, and so on.

DCPS says that their funding model prevents them from offering the full range of programs at a school when enrollment falls below a certain level.

By dividing Ward 5 middle school students across 7 PS-8 schools, DCPS argues, enrollment at the middle school grades was too low to justify these programs at every PS-8 school.

Former Chancellor Michelle Rhee created many of the PS-8 schools in 2008-2009 in response to parental opposition to school closings. By adding middle school grades to existing elementary schools, the new PS-8 schools were intended to reduce the impact of school closings on Ward 5 parents.

DCPS officials engaged concerned parents last fall and collaborated to arrive at a solution, a project known as the Ward 5 Great Schools Initiative. The result was a plan, announced in more detail this month, to close all but 1 of the 7 PS-8 schools in Ward 5 (some will remain open as elementary schools) and create two new middle schools in their place:

• A standalone middle school focused on arts and languages will be placed on the old Brookland school campus.
  
• A science and technology magnet middle school will be located in a vacant wing of McKinley Technology High School.
  
• The remaining PS-8 school, Browne, will launch an International Baccalaureate program.

If a standalone middle school is a better model, why did it fail before?

A member of the DC Council expressed frustration about building another middle school "when the last middle school we built, Kelly Miller... parents don't want to send their kids there."

Kelly Miller Middle School in Ward 7 was rebuilt from the ground up over 7 years and opened in 2004 to great fanfare. DCPS spent $35 million to build a technology and arts-focused school that was to be the "flagship" middle school in the District. In 2006, the school received a multi-million dollar grant for after-school programs.

Today Kelly Miller, with a capacity of 600 students, has seen its enrollment fall from 586 in 2006 to 328 in the current school year. That's just 28 students away from the DCPS threshold below which programming is cut.

What lessons should be learned from Kelly Miller, or from the failing Ward 5 middle schools that were closed or merged by Chancellor Rhee? How can those lessons be applied when building new middle schools in Ward 5? Unfortunately, DCPS would provide no answer to these questions.

Parents need a larger voice in new school design

The disconnect that one feels when talking to a principal about what they think matters most, and then reading DC Council testimonies, newspaper columns and policy reports on what matters most, is striking.

For all the commentaries on how to fix schools, there is relatively little advice for principals on the specific steps that will improve their school's educational outcomes.

One advocate for parents whose eye is firmly on the ball of what matters is Raenelle Zapata, chair of the Ward 5 Education Council and candidate for the Ward 5 council seat. Zapata argues that a new middle school "is just the beginning of the solution," and she is right.

Zapata points to the importance of marketing the school to Ward 5 parents and the importance of staffing the school with strong leadership. She strongly supports appointing successful middle school principal Patrick Pope as head of the new school.

Zapata says she is in "wait and see mode." But DCPS shouldn't sideline Ward 5 parents into "wait and see mode," particularly when the most important decisions are being made.

Parents are right to demand more details on the newly planned schools, as switching between models has been shown to have no effect on educational outcomes.

Ward 5 parents should demand to know how DCPS will make both the new middle schools and the remaining PS-8 school effective. Furthermore, they should look at successful and failing middle schools themselves, find out what works and doesn't work, and demand to see these lessons applied in Ward 5 schools.

DCPS can leverage parental engagement by creating Local School Advisory Teams (LSAT) for the two new middle schools now, not after they are built. LSATs, made up of parents who consult with a principal on the operational details of their school, have been pivotal to the success schools across the city including Hardy and Deal Middle Schools.

Engaged parents are the key to a school's success, according to Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund. She supports the replacement of PS-8 schools with middle schools in Ward 5, but supports creating LSATs for these schools before they are built.

Filardo explains that research indicates no difference in educational outcomes between middle schools and PS-8 schools. Ward 5 parents' support for the move, says Filardo, is what will make the difference. Filardo points to the pivotal role of parental engagement in the success of the Capitol Hill cluster of schools, as well as many schools in Ward 3.

A Kelly Miller veteran gives the keys to success for Ward 5

Ward 5 parents should talk to teachers and administrators like Waahida Mbatha. Mbatha was a teacher at Kelly Miller Middle School in 2005-2006, and then a teacher and administrator at E.L. Haynes Charter School, a successful PS-8 school.

Mbatha has specific ideas about the keys to success that Kelly Miller lost its focus on, and that must be central to a new Ward 5 middle school.

Mbatha entered Kelly Miller a year after its rebuilding "with extremely high expectations of the school leadership and none of those expectations were met."

"One of the stand out differences between Haynes and KM [Kelly Miller]," according to Mbatha, "is that Haynes spends a great deal of time investing in teachers."

Investing in teachers, according to Mbatha, is far more central to the success of middle schools than is their enrollment or structure. What kinds of demands could Ward 5 parents make on DCPS to improve investment in teachers?

Mbatha identified the following specific practices that accounted for the success of E.L. Haynes and the failures of Kelly Miller Middle School:

• New teacher interviews and orientation: Haynes has "an extensive interview process" with "demo lessons" that administrators observe. Teachers began the year with a "3 week orientation" in which they reviewed prior year test results with coaches and prepared lesson plans.
  
• Coaches: At Haynes, "each teacher was assigned a coach" who regularly observes teaching and whom the teacher can call to help plan for hard-to-teach topics.
  
• Weekly professional development: "Every Friday at Haynes, school is dismissed at 1:00 and from 1:30-4:00 teachers engage in professional development." This time is "spent analyzing data and working on unit plans."

These are the demands that parents should make on the school system, as they are the lynchpins to success.

Parents should not be satisfied with simply building new schools, and they should extend their advocacy to the policies that result in successful schools regardless of their grade configuration.

If you are a Ward 5 parent who feels that the current Ward 5 middle school plan doesn't go far enough, email Mark Jones, Ward 5 Representative to the State Board of Education, Chancellor Henderson and Chairman Kwame Brown to let them know.

Ward 5 is home to massive big box development with large surface parking lots, fast-moving commuter roads like Rhode Island and New York Avenues, busy intersections, and has perhaps the least amount of bicycle infrastructure and Capital Bikeshare coverage in the city.

Yet it also has three Red Line Metro stops and the Met Branch trail, and room for new transit-oriented development. McDuffie also mentioned a priority of "solving traffic problems" associated with development. I hope that he, and other candidates in Ward 5, understand the benefits of changes which slow down cars but benefit travel by transit, on foot and by bicycle.

Ward 1 and Capitol Hill provide good examples of residential and retail density with bike infrastucture that create desirable destinations and connections between adjacent communities. The tree-lined streets of residential Ward 5 can have the best of both worlds—good urbanism while preserving a sense of suburban tranquility.

McDuffie has made education a key point of his candidacy, creating an education priorities page on his website. He says he will "tackle truancy," "prepare students for higher education," and "increase vocational programs."

At a recent meet-and-greet, someone asked about the disposition of vacant or underutilized DCPS school buildings. McDuffie gave what I consider the "correct" answer without hesitating: make sure that operators who have shown themselves to be effective at educating kids have a fair crack at the buildings, and if that avenue is exhausted, seek a deal that is good for the city in terms of generating the most revenue.

As with most campaign platforms, the lofty pronouncements may be on the right track but don't delve into as much detail. It's easy to promise to address big problems, but harder to specify exactly how, (or how to pay for any changes). The challenge for voters is to read between the lines and guess what the candidates will do if and when they sit on the council.

The education priorities page does not address school modernization, school funding, or the equity and adequacy issues raised in the recent DC Public Education Finance Reform Commission report (and covered in the Washington Post). It also does not address any of the various education proposals that Kwame Brown has floated in the past few weeks. Will McDuffie side with Brown or take a different approach? What about the other Ward 5 hopefuls?

I look forward to hearing more about the specifics of McDuffie's views, and what the other Ward 5 candidates and at-large candidates running in the April primary have to say. I hope they will write position papers on their website, post on this blog, and even engage with voters in comments.

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.

For a neighborhood that has been the recipient of two of the Obama Administration's most celebrated community development efforts, there's been little fanfare in the city outside this small patch of Ward 7. Fortunately, that's not holding the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) back.

DCPNI is a new 501(c)3 organization led by Irasema Salcido, founder and CEO of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which has a Parkside campus. DCPNI organized a permanent Board of Directors in October 2011 and has been working since to pursue its goals for 2012. A January 2012 report by the Urban Institute outlines in great detail how DCPNI plans to transform the neighborhood.

Kenilworth-Parkside sits squeezed between the Anacostia River and DC-295 to the east and west, and a sprawling decommissioned Pepco plant and the District border to its north and south. The disadvantageous geography and years of disinvestment left Kenilworth-Parkside sinking further and further into disrepair.

Despite having Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and its acres of green space in the neighborhood, Kenilworth-Parkside still shows all of the typical indicators of urban blight.

Statistics on the residents in the DCPNI footprint are dire. Median household incomes are barely half of the city's median. Rates of teenage births are some of the highest in the nation. Single females head 90% of families.

Yet, at least until now, it's lacked any kind of investment which many of DC's now "up-and-coming" neighborhoods have received.

Enter DCPNI. In 2008, Salcido launched the Initiative based on the principles of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. DCPNI launched their efforts after winning funding from the US Department of Education.

The 2012 plan is ambitious. DCPNI is proposing home visits to pregnant women and mothers of young children. They want to build a community library of children's books. For the neighborhood's school children, they will launching an experiential learning program to visits to local museums and monuments with directed classroom instruction.

DCPNI, which holds tours of the neighborhood on the fourth Thursday of every month, is perhaps the city's foremost example of a place-making initiative. They are taking all of the most current research on comprehensive, services-based community development and applying it to one unique geographic area.

DC should keep its eye on Kenilworth-Parkside. Stakeholders of the Choice planning grant will inevitably apply for implementation funding when it becomes available in an effort to revitalize more than 300 units of dilapidated public housing. In June, Educare, a brand-new early childhood education center serving 175 Headstart-eligible children, will open its doors.

Victory Square, a new senior affordable apartment building built by Victory Housing, began accepting applications this week and will open in the spring. And all the while, DCPNI continues to establish partnerships with local businesses and organizations and organize programs that aim to strike at the core of Kenilworth-Parkside's ills in just the way that Canada tackled a swath of Harlem.

Over the next few years, as the 21 Promise Neighborhoods get to work across the country, community development advocates will learn whether or not federal money can be applied to local community development initiatives successfully and efficiently to improve public health, housing and education outcomes.

Lucky for the DC region, there's a site right in our backyard to follow, support, and learn more about. You just have to know where to look.

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.