Yesterday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released the names of those who would serve on the ReOpen DC Advisory Group that is being chaired by former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. There are six co-chairpersons under them that will lead eleven Advisory Group Subcommittees. The one for Education and Childcare is getting a lot of notice.

The government co-chairman of this group is Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn. He will share his duties with community co-chairman Charlene Drew Jarvis and associate committee director Rich Harrington, the associate director Mayor’s Office of Policy at DC Government. The mission of the body is as follows:

“The Committee will work across sectors to recommend strategies to close the digital divide, improve distance learning strategies, re-imagine physical learning environments, evaluate phased entry for summer learning and next school year, as well as new tools or resources needed for reopening all aspects of education in Washington, DC.”

In other words it has a say over every aspect of public education in the nation’s capital.

Most exciting is who is a part of this group and who has been left off. There are eighteen members. Of those, seven are either leaders in our local charter movement or have been tremendous supporters. These include Katherine Bradley, co-founder of CityBridge; Patricia Brantley, CEO Friendship PCS; Ricarda Ganjam, member of the DCPCSB; Sonia Gutierrez, founder of the Carlos Rosario International PCS; LaTonya Henderson, executive director of Cedar Tree Academy PCS; and Victor Reinoso, Deputy Mayor of Education under Mayor Fenty. I could also count Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, as she has worked closely with many of our charter schools.

Not named with these individuals is Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. Today, the Washington City Paper’s Amanda Michelle Gomez has an article detailing Ms. Davis’ displeasure of being dissed from the list, as apparently she directly asked Ms. Bowser to be a participant.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Ms. Gomez quotes Ms. Davis as remarking about the omission.

I called recently for all D.C. schools to become charters once they are permitted to reopen in the image of what happened in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. In the piece I wrote, “In order for these facilities to be as flexible as possible, union membership by all teachers would be suspended indefinitely.” Not having the head of the local teachers’ union as part of the ReOpen DC Advisory Group is a fantastic first step in this direction.

The City Paper reporter also notes that there are no teachers and principals as part of the new organization.

It is possible for some very good things to come out of tragedy. We have the opportunity to do something great here. I have pointed out the terrible societal cost of our stubborn 60-point academic achievement gap. Now for the health and safety of all of those living in the District, let’s take this moment to hammer it closed once and for all.

On Friday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser revealed that DCPS would continue instructing students utilizing distance learning until May 29th and would then close for the school year three weeks ahead of schedule. In her remarks she stated that charter schools would shutter on or around the same date.

Recall that on Friday, March 13th, Ms. Bowser closed DCPS beginning the following Monday, stating that it would reopen on April 1st. The Mayor said that she expected charters to follow suit, which they did. All schools then quickly adopted distance learning plans for their students. On March 20th she delayed the opening until April 27th. April 6th she held a teleconference with education leaders in which she stated that the April 27th date would not be met and that schools are closed indefinitely. Finally, at the end of last week, she proclaimed that the 2019-to-2020 term would end on May 29th instead of June 19.

Ms. Bowser did raise the possibility that schools could reopen early in the fall in order to make up for lost instructional time.

My immediate reaction was that the Mayor does not have the power to dictate to charters their last day of school. Apparently, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board Scott Pearson agreed. In a tweet immediately following Ms. Bowser’s remarks he wrote, “This is inaccurate. Public charter schools each have their own closure schedules. Many are choosing to serve students well into June.” The message was sent directly to @MayorBowser.

So ended coordination between the traditional schools and charters during the most significant public health crisis we have seen in our lifetimes.

Of course, the Mayor has authority over charter schools when it comes to the health and safety of its students. That is why when she required schools to stop having students learn in classrooms on March 16, charters fell in line. However, now that pupils are being taught remotely, there is no safety consideration governing a closing date. Two charters that serve some of our city’s most at-risk students, Kingsman Academy PCS and KIPP DC PCS, reacted to the Mayor’s news by announcing that they would stay upon until June 12th. Community College Preparatory Academy PCS will end its year on June 30th as planned. Other schools have not yet committed to their final day of instruction. You can see the list here.

To the schools that have decided to stay open beyond May 29th and for the immediate rebuttal by Mr. Pearson, I can say that I have never been so proud of our local movement. This clear demonstration of student-centered autonomy is why charters were established in the first place.

I sincerely hope that other schools follow the needs of parents and scholars by independently determining when school is over for the year, whether that is May 29th, June 19th, or another date of their choosing.

The Performance Management Tier 1 charter schools with the greatest backlog of over 1,000 students include Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS, Washington Latin Middle PCS, Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS Brookland Campus, DC Bilingual PCS, District of Columbia International PCS, Munde Verde PCS J.F. Cook Campus, Two Rivers PCS 4th Street Campus, Washington Yu Ying PCS, and Basis PCS.

This week the DC Public Charter School Board released its wait list data for the next school year based upon the My DC Lottery results and for the first time in the history of the local movement the number has decreased from the previous term. The number on the list is 10,771 individual names attempting to get into one or more schools. This compares to 11,317 students waitlisted last year for a decrease of 5.1 percent.

The number is still exceedingly high but it it exceptionally interesting that we have seen a drop. The reason for the decline is easy to understand.

Parents have given up trying to get their children into many of these schools.

We don’t know at this point what will happen with school next term. In an article in today’s Washington Post by Perry Stein and Donna St. George the reporters say the KIPP DC PCS is looking at various possibilities:

“Adam Rupe, spokesman for KIPP DC, the city’s largest charter network, with seven campuses, said the network is exploring multiple options, including having prolonged summer school or a longer academic year in 2020-2021.

If officials allow schools to bring limited numbers of students into buildings, Rupe said, Kipp has discussed giving students with special education needs or students in transition grades, including sixth and ninth grade, extra instruction time. The network has explored what it would look like if some students reported to school on certain days, to ensure schools do not create a health hazard by having too many people in buildings.”

I feel terrible for what parents are going through right now. Adding to their stress is where their children will go to school. And when.

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.

As the Washington Post’s Perry Stein reported yesterday, student enrollment in D.C.’s charter schools decreased for the first time since the movement started 23 years ago. Simultaneously, DCPS has grown by four percent compared to last term. 51,060 pupils now attend traditional schools compared to 43,556 in charters. The charter sector went down by 404 scholars compared to October 2018. They now educate 46 percent of all individuals attending public schools. These are unaudited statistics.

What should we say about the decline? The only conclusion that can be reached is to be proud of our local charter movement. As Mayor Muriel Boswer explained to the Post, “One of the big ideas behind the charter movement is that schools that are successful stay open, and schools that are not close, so we shouldn’t be so surprised by this trend.”

It’s been so depressing to watch the Democratic candidates for President talk about education. They uniformly attack charters like they are some kind of monster. At least two of those running, Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker, used to be strong proponents of school choice. But now they are after the endorsements of the teachers’ unions so they are not allowed to say anything positive about these institutions that are opening up in the toughest part of cities in order to teach those kids that have been tossed to the curb. The entire situation breaks my heart.

One thing I have never been good at is politics. I believe that people are basically good and that if I treat them with dignity and respect everything will turn out the right way. However, reality is unfortunately much different from my naive view. People do things and say things that are not based upon the best interest of others. They are looking out to serve themselves.

Which is why what we have accomplished in the nation’s capital is so spectacular. Our city is sticking with the standardized PARCC assessment, testing kids on their comprehension of Common Core standards, which have been viciously attacked as evil around the country. The new DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee has stated he will review the IMPACT teacher evaluation tool that ties ratings to student academic performance but he does not envision much change. I’ve lost track of how many charter schools the DC Public Charter School Board closed this year, but it is doing the extremely tough job of shuttering low performing facilities. Some localities have scrapped the PARCC and Common Core because the relatively low scores made educators look bad. Others have turned away from holding instructors responsible for the results posted by their students. In addition, there are places where charter schools operate in which the authorizer is not as strong as the PCSB. Therefore, poor schools have been allowed to continue operating.

I cannot explain the reasons behind the fortunate alignment of forces that has allowed the nation’s capital to stay above the fray and focus on the singular goal of closing the academic achievement gap. Perhaps it is a natural reaction to the dysfunction of the federal government. But the cause does not really matter. What is crucially important is that we continue on the mission to prepare our youth to compete and thrive in a global economy. Through this bold effort, we will have saved several thousand lives.