It appears that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s push for a charter school walkability admissions preference has caused quite a stir.  Over the weekend the editors of the Washington Post urged severe caution regarding the proposal.  They wrote:

“But there are ramifications to a neighborhood preference that need to be thought through. Most significant is whether a move to a neighborhood preference would lock-in neighborhood patterns of segregation that would keep students most in need out of high-quality charter schools.  A task force that looked at the issue in 2012 concluded that if neighborhood preferences were mandated for charter schools, children in Ward 7 and Ward 8 would be most hard hit by losing access to high-performing charters elsewhere in the city.”

Also last Thursday, the subject was discussed on WAMU’s The Kojo Nmamdi Show featuring Emily Lawson, the CEO of DC Prep PCS and Eboni-Rose Thompson,  Ward 7 Education Council chair.  Ms. Lawson indicated that her staff had done a preliminary analysis of the impact of the admissions preference regarding her student population and had concluded that a relatively small number of families would be impacted.  But Ms. Lawson’s schools are not the ones that are most central to the arguments over the preference since they already serve low-income students, although she did point out that gentrification has resulted in changes in some of the neighborhoods around her facilities.   The other guest, Ms. Thompson, did an outstanding job detailing the fears around restricting access to high performing charters for kids living in poverty that this amendment to the School Reform Act would bring, identical to those that I have highlighted along with the Washington Post editors and the 2012 Neighborhood Preference Task Force.

The most disappointing part of the program was the participation of the Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles.  She stated that she had just happened to hear about the radio show during a school visit and decided to call in.  When she was asked by the host why the subject of the day’s discussion had not first come before her own Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force, upon which Ms. Lawson sits, she responded that every issue that reaches her desk has cross-sector implications and therefore not all of them can be brought to this body.  This comment came even though one of the stated goals of the Task Force is to “explore cross-sector feeder patterns.”

It is not only this group that was caught off guard by the suggestion.  FOCUS was kept out of the loop as was the DC Public Charter School Board.  There really has to be much more inclusive stakeholder involvement when it comes to this question as well as others such as the per pupil charter school facility allotment and the turning over of vacant DCPS buildings to the sector that now educates 47 percent of all public school students in this city.  I expect much more from education leaders who have been intimately familiar with our local charters since their founding over 20 years ago.

As I wrote about yesterday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Monday introduced a policy proposal for a change in the School Reform Act that would give students an admissions preference to charters within a half mile of where they live if their regularly assigned DCPS school is more than that distance from their home.  The seismic change in admission policy which Ms. Bowser referred to as a “walkability prefernce” was advanced by the Mayor without consulting any of the major players in the charter school movement including the town’s most prominent charter advocacy group FOCUS.  Even her own Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force did not see this coming.

WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle quotes me in an article about this subject as opining that the idea is terrible and he raises a point by David Grosso, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee, that I had not previously considered.  According to Mr. Grosso:

“Who does it really impact? In the really high quality, Tier 1 charters, are parents who have the money therefore able to buy a home strategically in that neighborhood? And if they do that, does it raise questions about segregation in our city?”

I see this working both ways.  Affluent parents can decide to locate near a charter to get their kids in or a school operator can decide on a site in which academically high performing kids can be skimmed from a DCPS facility.

To her credit, Ms. Bowser is trying to address an issue that frustrates many parents.  They may live physically close to a great charter, but because these are schools of choice they may be not able to gain access to them for their children.  I experienced this first hand with Washington Latin PCS both when we were in negotiations with the Cafritz’s for a permanent facility and with the neighbors around 2nd Street, N.W., where we eventually took over the old Rudolph Elementary.  Both groups expressed dismay that Latin could not pull pupils directly from the local community.

In his piece Mr. Austermuhle quotes my friend Susan Schaeffler,  the CEO of KIPP DC, as commenting:

“KIPP D.C. is trying to work with the public chartering authority to say, ‘Hey, is there a chance we can give preference to kids that can walk to school, and make it so that it’s not the entire school, but maybe 15 percent of the seats are held for students that can walk to school?’ That just makes sense citywide as a strategy.”

But I strongly contend that the solution to this problem is not to mess with admission preferences.  The answer is to greatly accelerate the replication of excellent charters and to bring some of the best ones from around the United States to the nation’s capital.  Once we have added a sufficient capacity of good quality seats these schools will naturally draw from the blocks around where they are situated.

Parents would much prefer to have neighborhood schools that work.