The Washington Post’s Michael Allison Chandler wrote an article recently blaming school choice in the nation’s capital as a reason that the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood Program is not working the way it was designed.  She writes about the $25 million plan in Northeast D.C.:

“But the children of Kenilworth-Parkside aren’t all benefiting from the ‘Promise Neighborhood’ program. Less than a third of the 1,600 students who live there attend neighborhood schools; the rest are enrolled in 184 others, scattered across a city that has embraced school choice more than almost any other.”

Promise Neighborhoods were the brainchild of Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder Geoffrey Canada who created the first one in New York City.  What is so interesting about this fact is that after he came up with the notion to provide family support to low income individuals he realized, as he explained to CityBridge co-founder Katherine Bradley, that he would not be able to make true progress in turning around the lives of kids until he opened a school.  He then created the Promise Academy Charter.

The impact of school choice has had a major positive impact on the very students that Promise Neighborhoods are trying to help.   As FOCUS discovered regarding the 2014 DC CAS results:

“The most interesting public charter school news is the widening gap between how well public charters and DCPS students who qualify for free or reduced price school lunch are doing. The gap is now over 15 percentage points in math and almost 13 percentage points in reading. To put this into perspective, if DCPS were able to match DC charters’ performance with economically disadvantaged students, about 2,000 additional poor children within the District would be able to read and do math on grade level.

Among African American students, charters now outperform DCPS by almost 17 percentage points in math and 12 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 2,000 additional African American students able to read and do math on grade level. For special education students the gap widened to almost 10 percentage points in math and over 5 percentage points in reading. Again, if DCPS were able to match charter performance, there would be about 250 additional special education students able to read and do math on grade level.”

If we would have to give up these gains because school choice complicates Promise Neighborhoods then guess which program should go?

The Washington Post’s Emma Brown has a follow-up story today about the recent Washington State Supreme Court decision finding that charter schools are not public schools because their governing boards are not elected by local citizens.  Her piece characterizes the competing arguments over whether these alternative educational institutions truly fit the definition of a public school.  I believe the whole controversy misses the point.

Everyone wishes that traditional neighborhood schools provided the high quality education that children deserve.  But just look at what happened here in Washington, D.C.  Over time the school bureaucracy became completely detached from the children it was serving.  The result was that very little teaching actually occurred in classrooms.  Much more common was the presence of violence, gangs, and illegal drugs.  It became safer for parents to keep their kids home than to send them to school.  The buildings themselves were rotting from years of neglect.  When students did show up their textbooks were missing, as in many cases was the instructor.

In the 1950’s Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman wrote that if we provided every child with a voucher to attend the private or public school of their choice parents would once again become the customer of school systems.  This is exactly what charters have accomplished in this town.  What is so exciting about the turn of events is that this sector is being responsive to those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum.  Many charters in the nation’s capital are taking low income kids who enter schools years behind grade level and bringing them up to academic proficiency and beyond.  These individuals in the past might have landed in jail or perhaps been killed as a result of violent activity.  As Dr. Darrin Woodruff, the chairman of the Public Charter School Board remarked when I interviewed him, “charter schools are changing peoples’ lives.”

I say forget the phony controversy over whether charters perfectly fit the public school paradigm.  Instead let’s be eternally grateful for the competition they have provided that has resulted in all schools, traditional and charter, rising to levels of performance never seen before in this country.  I think this should be more than enough.

Twenty five years ago I leveraged practically every cent our young family had and missed my younger child’s fourth birthday to attend a conference on libertarian political theory held at Dartmouth College organized by the CATO Institute.  There, I asked executive director David Boaz whether private school vouchers should initially be introduced to assist those living in poverty or whether their adoption should be offered to each public school student.  He advised that they should first be provided to low income students so that more of the general public would rally around their use.

Much has changed, in a positive way, for public education reform since that time.  The Friedman Center for Education Choice estimates that there are now 25 school voucher programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia that enroll over 148,000 kids.  In addition, the same organization reveals that currently 3,000 students take advantage of educational savings accounts in five states, with another 202,000 pupils benefiting from 20 tax-credit scholarship arrangements found in 16 localities.  Finally, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools details that during the 2013 to 2014 school term over 2.5 million students attended charter schools.

Recently, Nevada passed an educational savings account plan available to almost all families, independent of income.  The editors of the Washington Post claim this is too much. “By subsidizing families who do not need aid, the state wastes public money that would be better directed to low-income students in academically struggling schools.”

The problem for the Post is that wealthy parents can afford to send their children to private schools so, according to the newspaper’s editors, it is not right to reimburse them up to $5,000 a child for the cost.  But this is actually an antiquated view of how public education is funded in America today.

For example, in the nation’s capital we provide all public school students essentially a scholarship to attend the traditional public or charter school of their choice equal to the amount dictated by the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula.  Could you imagine the outrage if we told taxpaying citizens that they had to cough up the money to send their children to some of our high performing facilities just because of how much they make?

This issue becomes even more relevant considering what took place just a few days ago in Washington State.  Their Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional, because, according to the Associated Press “charter schools don’t qualify as ‘common’ schools under Washington’s Constitution and can’t receive public funding intended for those traditional public schools.”  The decision creates chaos for the 1,200 kids already enrolled in the nine charters that have been established.  Our local charter school support organization, Charter Board Partners, opened a Seattle office in 2014.

The ruling by the Seattle Supreme Court came after a year of deliberation and was based upon the fact that charters are run by a non-publicly elected board of directors.  Instead of seizing on a particular governance structure or whether affluent families can take advantage of educational savings accounts we should re-focus our attention on the benefit of our children.  We should allow families to send their kids to the school of their choice.