Say what you will about the press conferences of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, it is evident that there are heroic efforts by many people to provide supplies, testing, and medications in order to save American lives around this pandemic. In addition, observing the response of healthcare workers at all levels to caring for patients is enough to bring tears to your eyes. These individuals who risk their own health on a daily basis will never make the history books or win a Presidential Medal of Freedom, but they should. These are professionals in the true sense of the word. There is a job to do and so they are doing it.

Even in these extremely difficult times the world goes on and so here in the nation’s capital last Friday parents received their children’s public school lottery results. I enjoyed reading Perry Stein’s Washington Post article following examples of lottery decisions for families in each of the city’s eight wards. What I did not like were the results. Only 38 percent of those entering the lottery received their first choice. Many participants do not even try to gain admittance to the top charter schools in the city because they already know that the wait list is in the thousands of students with no or very few empty spaces available. I’m sure any day the data for those whose names have been placed on this list will be released, and it is certain that is has grown from the depressingly large 12,000 we saw for this school year.

What I’m trying to understand is why we do not put the effort into solving the problem of a lack of quality seats as we do when we have a severe healthcare problem? Where is the teamwork and drive that is exhibited when the future of our society is at stake? I know perfectly well that we are not talking about life and death when it comes to the school a child attends. But in a serious manner the stakes are just as high.

This is the perfect opportunity to figure out how to increase the capacity of our strongest academic performing schools. There are many smart men and women out there with a lot of time on their hands. Zoom has proved to be an especially effective technology for communicating when we cannot be in the same room. Here’s the challenge: By the end of April a list is generated of ten concrete steps that can be taken to make sure that our town is providing the best education to each child that needs one. Who wants to take the lead?

We have solved serious problems regarding public education before and we can certainly do it now. We should use our response to the coronavirus as a motivating force.

When it became apparent that distance learning was the method for teaching in the near future, over a million dollars was raised in a matter of days to make sure pupils could access the internet. After it was discovered that Monument Academy PCS was falling apart, Washington D.C. nonprofits came to the rescue with promises of grants and managerial support. In the face of students being forced to find other places to learn when the D.C. charter board was about to close facilities, institutions such as Friendship PCS and KIPP DC PCS incorporated these sites into their networks.

Now you should not leave the house. Now what are you going to do?

Note: As a public service, I plan to continue to write about school reform in the nation’s capital to give people a few minutes of reprieve from all of the depressing coronavirus news coverage.

Even though Monday evening’s monthly board meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board was not held in person with proceedings broadcast on the internet, you could clearly read the disappointment on the faces of the group’s members regarding the discussion around Achievement Prep PCS.

In February, Friendship PCS had been granted a charter amendment to takeover Achievement Prep’s Wahler Place Middle School after the school founded by Shantelle Wright admitted that it was not serving the educational needs of its fourth through eighth grade students. The plan was for Friendship to teach the current students at the Wahler campus the next school year and then transfer these pupils to an enlarged Southeast Academy Middle School 1.2 miles away which is currently under construction.

The discussion the other evening was around giving approval to Achievement Prep to reconfigure its grades, which would eventually include restarting its middle school program. But as reported here, on March 2nd the charter received a letter from Deputy Mayor of Education Paul Kihn explaining that the plan was actually illegal because the new Friendship campus was not open to others in a fair and equal manner consistent with the My DC Lottery process. Achievement Prep did not want to be accused of doing anything to appear blocking access to its schools for low-income minority students and so the deal with Friendship was called off.

The whole affair left my mind reeling. Weren’t these two schools simply following the same arrangements that had led, for example, Friendship to takeover IDEAL Academy PCS and KIPP DC PCS to run Somerset PCS? Well it turns out that I was incorrect.

People in the movement more knowledgeable than I pointed out that the instances I illustrated above involved the transfer of assets. In other words, one charter was closing and another was assuming its operation. This was not the case with Achievement Prep. In this instance, Achievement Prep was continuing to run its school. It was simply attempting to move one campus under Friendship’s control.

Apparently, the D.C. School Reform Act permits one school to replace another when a charter is closing but there is no written power for the same procedure to be followed when it comes to a campus. This is wrong.

Now approximately 355 children need to find a school for next term after the lottery has closed. The fact that the Deputy Mayor sent his letter to Achievement Prep on the last day that families could enter their preferences in the lottery is just sad.

There is a simple solution to all of this turmoil. The School Reform Act needs to be amended to allow for the arrangements such as the one that Achievement Prep and Friendship had reached. If our focus is truly on the children and meeting their educational needs with the least amount of disruption for families, then we know the right thing to do.

I read with extreme interest the editorial in the Washington Post by Peter Anderson, the head of Washington Latin PCS. It drew my attention because I was the board treasurer and chair during a six year period in this high performing school’s history when its continued viability was strengthened. Moreover, I have been to education conferences for years in which the illustration that Mr. Anderson describes has been shown on projection screens big and small. But despite universal audience opinion that equity is a value that everyone who is involved in teaching children should try and reach above all others, the line of reasoning has left me uncertain.

We have seen multiple articles celebrating the success of public school reform in the nation’s capital. This improvement is due to the competition that charter schools offered to the traditional school system beginning a quarter of a century ago. Since money followed the child there was strong incentive for schools to improve. For the first time parents became the customers in an education bureaucracy that rewarded adherence to the chain of command. Before public school reform reached the District we left our kids’ classrooms without books, instructors without incentives to instruct, and buildings characterized by falling plaster, gang activity, and the presence of drugs and guns.

Families are returning to D.C. schools and enrollment is at its highest level since right before Mayor Fenty was elected in 2007 on an education agenda. A major contribution to this growth has been the equal chance of parents to have their children admitted to one of the city’s charter schools.

Charter schools were established to provide an alternative to the one-size-fits-all model of the regular schools. Their concentration has been rightly on those that have not been successful in traditional classrooms, especially those who come from low-income homes. This is why so many charters have located in Wards 6, 7, and 8.

My worry is that the ability of a charter to voluntarily provide admissions preference to at-risk students will elevate equity over equality. It may send an unintentional signal that this sector is not for every child with the impact being a dissatisfaction by a significant portion of our community.

I remember when Senator Patrick Moynihan was alive and he argued famously that life was a race in which black families were often left behind at the starting line. It was a view of society that led to welfare policies that ending up hurting the very people he wanted to help. Senator Moynihan’s analogy is not much different from the drawing Mr. Anderson references.

I contend that equality is a superior value to equity and that this should be reflected in the same admission probability for all those who want to attend our schools. This does not mean that we should not provide additional support to those pupils who need them.

Washington Latin PCS has about a 2,000 student wait list and has been approved by the DC Public Charter School Board to replicate. If it really wants to focus on improving the lives of at-risk children, it should locate its next campus near where they live.