Last night, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser gave her third annual State of the District address and there was plenty in there for advocates of school choice to cheer.  In a strong direct refutation of a letter sent to Congress by 13 D.C. Council members, including David Grosso, the chairman of its education committee, that called for a phasing out of the Opportunity Scholarship Program that allows children living in poverty to attend private schools, the Mayor had this to say early in her remarks:

“We call on the President and Congress to uphold our 3-sector school funding approach that enhances PUBLIC EDUCATION funding in DC.” [Capitalization is in the original text.]

Of course, the 3-sector funds include equal dollars annually for the OSP, charters, and traditional schools.

Later on in her speech she returned to the subject of the District’s schools and commented on the charter sector:

“This year, I am also proud to further increase the public charter school facility allotment by 2.2 percent this year, and lock that increase in for the next four years. Adding millions more to the school facilities all across the District. As well as make available more public buildings for public charter school use.”

The raise in the per peril facility allotment does not reach the $3,250 floor that charter leaders had wanted, but at $3,193 it comes close.  Now Ms. Bowser just needs to add an automatic increase for inflation.  We are also going to hold her accountable for her promise to make additional surplus DCPS buildings available to those institutions that now educate 46 percent of all public school pupils in the nation’s capital.

While the D.C. Mayor hit the nail on the head regarding school choice, last Wednesday U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos missed it.  She was speaking at the Brookings Institution on the release of its 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index compiled by Senior Fellow Russ Whitehurst.  Denver, Colorado is the city at the top of the study’s rankings for having the greatest amount of school choice.  However, as the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports, Ms. DeVos did not agree.  From the Education Secretary’s prepared statement as provided by the Post:

“I am hopeful this report helps light a fire under [low-scoring cities] to better serve students. And while we may be tempted to emulate cities with a higher grade, I would urge a careful look.

The two-highest scoring districts, Denver and New Orleans, both receive A’s, but they arrive there in very different ways.

New Orleans provides a large number of choices to parents: All of its public schools are charters, and there is a good supply of affordable private schools. The state also provides vouchers to low-income students to attend private schools if they choose. Combined with its easy-to-use common application, New Orleans’ sophisticated matching system maximizes parental preference and school assignment.

Meanwhile, Denver scored well because of the single application process for both charter and traditional public schools, as well as a website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools. But the simple process masks the limited choices.”

As I’ve written about many times before, I had the great opportunity to spend some time in Denver last summer as part of the Amplify School Choice conference sponsored by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.  There I learned first hand about the strong growth of charters in this city, and the way that the traditional public schools are held to the same accountability standards that charters face.  Here is what I wrote last August:

“Since 2005, according to Mr. Dan Schaller, director of advocacy for the Colorado League of Charter Schools, ‘DPS has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.’  Low performing charters have also been shuttered.  For example, during the 2010 to 2011 school year 25 percent of schools up for renewal were closed.  Today there are 55 charter schools in Denver out of a total of 223, teaching 18.3 percent of all public school students.

The results of these initiatives have been nothing short of amazing.  The Denver Public School system is now the fastest growing urban district in America.  The high school graduation rate has jumped to 65 percent in four years.  From 2004 to 2014, the proportion of students at or above grade level in reading, math, and writing has climbed from 33 percent to 48 percent.”

Also, as I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, there is a District-Charter Collaboration Compact in this city that has many features that should be emulated here in D.C. and other places across the country.  I strongly recommend that Secretary DeVos make a visit to Denver and see the miracles taking place there such as the outstanding education being provided to low income children by schools such as DSST PCS.

Over the weekend the editors of the Washington Post came out once again in favor of re-authorization of the SOAR Act that provides private school vouchers for low-income children in the nation’s capital.  The editorial board has supported school choice plans across the country for decades.  Here’s the background.

In 1999, I decided that I was going to get a school voucher plan approved for Washington, D.C.  The reason for my decision back then originated with my and my wife’s love for this city.  We met here as college students, settled in D.C. when we were first married, and then moved to Reston, Virginia to raise our family.  We knew that Washington would not be a great town unless it had great schools.

But the education system was a complete mess.  Little teaching was actually going on in the classrooms.  The facilities were literally crumbling.  Drugs, weapons, and gang activity was prevalent in the hallways.  As a political libertarian, I understood that only the competition for students would solve the seemingly intractable problems in the schools.  But I also recognized that no one would listen to me.  I needed someone with local credibility to get behind this policy solution.  I settled on the Washington Post’s Colbert King as the person to advance my proposal.  The reason that I selected Mr. King was that I observed from his weekly column that he too was passionate about the success of his hometown, and he  wrote from the perspective that people living in Washington, D.C. should solve their own problems.

It took me months of persuasion but there I was one morning sitting in the editorial boardroom of the Washington Post with Mr. King.  I had brought along with me Darcy Olson, now the CEO of the Goldwater Institute, but at the time the director of family and education policy at the CATO Institute.  We talked about school vouchers for an hour.

At the end of our discussion, during which I found Mr. King to be extremely kind and attentive, the Washington Post columnist explained that he could not get behind the concept.  He stated that he was worried about what would happen to the quality of the education for those who were left behind when others received private school scholarships.  Extremely disappointed, but invigorated by the chance to sit with Mr. King, I left the meeting.

But then something magical happened.  Unsigned editorial after editorial began appearing in the Post arguing in favor of proposals for school choice in various localities.  This was a drastic reversal of the newspaper’s previous viewpoint.  The change was recognized by Clint Bolick in his book Voucher Wars (CATO Institute, 2003).  In writing about the introduction of the nation’s first private school voucher plan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mr. Bolick  states:

“Ultimately, the Post concluded that because it wouldn’t help many children and was of doubtful constitutional validity, ‘choice is not the answer to the gross inequities that prevail among America’s schools.’  But the editorial conferred a strong and unexpected establishment imprimatur on our effort.  And only a few years later, the Post abandoned its reticence and become one of the nation’s most consistent and influential backers of school choice experiments” (p. 58).

To my amazement I would learn later that Mr. King was writing these pieces.

The Post columnist does not pen these opinions anymore; this job has now been passed on to someone else.  But the tradition strongly continues.  From Saturday’s piece:

“The organization that administers the federal school voucher program in the District has received 1,825 applications this year. The largest share, 25.6 percent or 468 applications, comes from Ward 8, east of the Anacostia River. The smallest, 0.8 percent or 15 families, is from Ward 3 in Northwest. It makes sense that demand is greatest where public schools are worst and families can’t afford private school or are unable to move to where the public schools are better. What doesn’t make sense is the desire — particularly among some D.C. elected officials — to try to kill off this program, thus denying low-income parents a choice that is taken for granted by those who are more affluent.”

In the old days newspaper reporters used to at least try and be objective in their coverage.  Even if the editorial pages favored one ideological side or the other such as The Wall Street Journal,  The Washington Times, The New York Times, and the The Washington Post, the stories attempted to be impartial.  But today the political leanings of the press has spread seemingly by osmosis into articles which are purported to be stating facts.

Since I am a strong advocate of school choice allow me to bring up one example around this issue.  As the Washington Post has been covering efforts in Congress to reauthorize the SOAR Act, almost every story has contained a paragraph identical to the one in this piece by Jenna Portnoy:

“A Washington Post review found that most students enrolled in the voucher program attend Catholic schools but hundreds use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are in unconventional settings, such as a family-run K-12 school operating out of a storefront and a Nation of Islam school based in a converted Deanwood residence.”

At least in this instance a quote was included by Michael Musante, the government relations director for FOCUS, indicating that this school has exited the program.  But impossible to locate would be a mention of the high caliber institutions that accept students receiving Opportunity Scholarship Program scholarships such as Archbishop Carroll High School, Georgetown Day School, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, Gonzaga College High School, Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital, National Cathedral School, National Presbyterian School, Sidwell Friends School, and St. Albans School.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of visiting a small Catholic school located on Capitol Hill.  St. Peters enrolls Pre-Kindergarten through eighth grade students and was awarded the National Blue Ribbon in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Education.  To qualify as a Blue Ribbon School, standardized test scores in reading and in math must be among the top 15 percent nationally.  St. Peters accepts about 10 OSP scholars a year.

Moreover, it appears that the Post’s Emma Brown has been on a mission to discredit any move by President Trump or U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos when it comes to education.  Here’s a portion of one of her news stories today that talks about the President’s budgetary proposal to end funding of the 21st Century Community Centers:

“The proposal is one cut among many in a budget that would slash federal education spending by $9 billion, or 13.5 percent, in 2018. Trump aims to eliminate billions for teacher training and scale back or end several programs that help low-income students prepare and pay for college.”

But not once, at anytime, will readers be told that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that permits Congress to allocate one dime toward public education.

Here’s more from the same article:

“Trump’s push for choice is also likely to face political headwinds: Democrats almost uniformly oppose vouchers. So do some Republicans. And the president’s proposal to allow $1 billion in federal funds to follow poor children to the public schools of their choice — while thin on details — sounds a lot like a proposal that failed to pass the GOP-led Senate in 2015.”

In the District of Columbia, over 41,000 children, 46 percent of all kids attending public schools, are exercising their privilege to utilize school choice by attending a charter school.  There are an estimated 22,000 more on wait lists to get in.  Ms. Brown may be philosophically opposed to a marketplace in education, or she may want to return to a simpler time when everyone just went to their neighborhood school.  However, school choice is here to stay.  Fortunately for America’s children, especially those that live in poverty, the rest of the country may finally get to experience what D.C. has enjoyed for over two decades.

Yesterday, the D.C. Public Charter School Board announced that it has accepted applications for eight new schools to open in the 2018-to-2019 term.  It has been many years since the board has received this many requests at one time.  For example,  during the last cycle one request was received.  As stated by the board’s press release, the applications include “two elementary schools, two middle schools, a high school, two adult schools and a hybrid high school and adult school.”  One interesting note is that the paperwork proposing the creation of the Adult Career Technical Education PCS lists former D.C. School Board Chairman Robert Bobb as a board member.

The PCSB is holding a public hearing for these applications on April 24th and will vote on them May 22^nd.  The board’s Parent and Alumni Leadership Council is hosting a Town Hall to review them on April 11^th at 6 p.m.

If the board follows the same pattern it has exhibited for the last two decades, approximately 40 percent of the new applicants will be granted charters.  This equates to three schools.  There are currently 90,454 individuals attending public school in the District of Columbia.  41,502 of these students, or 46 percent, are enrolled in charters, and 48,952, or 54 percent, go to DCPS.  The difference in enrollment between the two sectors is only 7,450 pupils.  The average size of a charter school is 400 kids.  Therefore, the approval of three new facilities will narrow this gap by 1,200 students.

But there are many other seats in the pipeline as the PCSB has been busy approving requests by existing schools to raise enrollment ceilings.  The day is fast approaching when an equal number of children sit in classrooms belonging to a charter compared to those that are in the DCPS system.  In addition, there is another significant change occurring regarding the education landscape in the nation’s capital.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program is about to grow significantly.  Serving Our Children, the new group administering this plan, has its sights set on racing to 3,000 participants, up from the approximately 1,100 scholars that currently receive vouchers.  Just last Friday, the U.S. House of Representative Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved re-authorization of the OSP for another five years, something the Senate and President will also certainly approve.  Eventually, the goal is to make this law permanent.

Charter schools in this city are erasing the achievement gap between rich and poor students; something many thought was an impossible feat.  Now that the OSP will be free from political interference and uncertainty we are on the road to bringing the same benefit to those receiving private school scholarships. 

Then we will finally be able to fulfill the final civil right of the most vulnerable members of our community:  providing a quality education to each and every child that needs one.  I hope that as a society we will have the foresight to record the names of all of the heroes that fought with every bit of their beings to help these young people, children that they may never even have had the chance to meet.