Yesterday, at a ceremony at D.C. Bilingual PCS as part of a celebration of D.C. Education Week, Mayor Bowser took the first step in her long-held desire to have charter schools offer a neighborhood admissions preference.  Calling her concept a “walkability preference” the announced change in policy would allow the city’s charters to provide partiality to elementary school children who live within a half mile of a charter when their normally assigned neighborhood traditional school is more than this distance from their homes.

This is a terrible idea.  For 20 years charters in this town have driven the rise of quality for all schools through the competition for students and the per pupil revenue that is associated with their education.  The arrangement instantaneously transformed parents into customers because their decision as to where to send their kids has powerful consequences for school budgets.  Before the forces of school choice were unleashed in the nation’s capital the traditional schools were wastelands of educational malpractice in facilities that were literally falling apart all around them.

Anything that interferes with an educational marketplace takes away from the clout of parents.  Under Ms. Bowser’s proposal, and it is really only a proposal because its implementation would take amending the School Reform Act through approval of the D.C. Council,  parents could be provided access to charters not because they like the curriculum, or the principal, or the standardized test scores, but simply due to its location.  We would be turning our backs on the incentives that turned around a deplorable situation.

Do you think I’m exaggerating the impact of all this?  Under a walkability preference an operator can open a charter in Ward 3, the most affluent part of town, strategically locate it more than a half a mile from a regular school, and then fill it with children living steps from its door, thereby blocking access by low-income kids from Wards 6, 7, and 8 that this charter movement was created to serve.  Mayor Bowser would effectively be providing a private school education on the taxpayers’ dime.

The fear of diminishing the availability of charters to at risk kids was a primary reason that a Neighborhood Preference Task Force rejected the notion of a admissions preference back in 2012.  The Mayor could have been reminded of this finding if she had consulted with FOCUS or any other public leaders of the charter movement before making this decision, but the information I have is that she failed to take this step.  As the Washington Post’s Alejandra Matos reveals today, Ms. Bowser did not even float the suggestion in front of her own Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force, the group Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles assembled to determine how charters and DCPS could cooperate in order to improve the delivery of public education, although apparently the group rejected a similar scheme in the past.

The preference came sandwiched between a flurry of other dictums.  The Mayor stated that she would include in this year’s budget request a two percent increase in the charter school per pupil facility allotment which would raise it to $3,193; closer but not quite up to the $3,250 that charter leaders had begged for in 2016.  She also announced that D.C. Bilingual will be allowed to stay at the Keene School and that the P.R. Harris School will be provided to Building Hope’s Charter School Incubator Initiative for the eventual home to two Ward 8 charters.

The Washington Post quotes D.C. Council education committee chairman David Grosso as stating that he has “already heard some ‘vocal uproar'” regarding the walkability preference concept.  Let’s hope that he along with others can stop this revision to the SRA before one child is harmed.

In today’s Washington Post there are two articles about public education in the District of Columbia.  The first, by Michael Allison Chandler, celebrates the five year anniversary of Kaya Henderson as DCPS Chancellor.  She includes this observation:

“Despite the accolades, many educators and advocates are concerned that progress in the school system is still not being felt by many of city’s most disadvantaged students. In many schools in the poorest parts of the city, less than a third of students perform on grade level, standardized tests show.”

The second piece, by Emma Brown, talks about the fact that the growth of charter schools in the nation’s capital has slowed.  She explains that while it was true for years that only New Orleans had a higher concentration of students in charters, now D.C. is eclipsed by Detroit and Flint, Michigan as well.  For the last three terms the percentage of kids in charters has remained stuck at 44 percent.  Ms. Brown writes:

“That flat-lining comes after a period of rapid growth: Nine years ago, just 25 percent of D.C. schoolchildren were in charters, which are funded with taxpayer dollars but run by independent nonprofits.”

These two trends are not good.  We desperately need to figure out how to increase substantially the number of high performing seats for every child that needs one.  Many have recognized that providing a quality education to all, no matter the race or socioeconomic status of the student, is the final great civil rights struggle of our time.

How do we do it?  Well we need some help.  The DC Public Charter School Board needs to provide incentives for good schools to replicate such as giving a year off of Performance Management Framework grading when a new campus is added.  Next, the city must turn over to charters the 20 or so vacant shuttered school buildings that are currently sitting empty.  In addition, the Mayor should bring to a conclusion the FOCUS engineered funding inequity lawsuit so that charters operate on a level playing field with DCPS.  Ms. Bowser,  the D.C. Council, and Scott Pearson, the PCSB executive director, also have a duty to bring successful charter management organizations here with the promise of a facility.

I guess we could go on talking about the quality of our public schools for another 100 years.  For me, I just don’t have the patience.

The Washington Post’s Michael Allison Chandler reported recently that unaudited enrollment data from D.C.’s charter schools and DCPS reveal that each sector increased by two percent in the 2015 to 2016 term.  Charters now educate slightly over 39,000 children, while the traditional schools have 48,693 kids in their classrooms. Ms. Chandler points out that this is the seventh annual increase for DCPS, which for years was losing its student body to charters.

The statistics means the ratio of charter to regular school students remains constant, with 44 percent to 56 percent in each group, that has been the case for the last several years. This comes as as the nation’s capital has just passed the point in time in which a decade-old study produced by Fight for Children predicted that by last year charters would teach the majority of pupils in Washington, D.C.  What happened?

Well, two things.  First, and probably most importantly, when the report by Gregg Vanourek was written the local charter school movement was focused mostly on growth.  Charters had 17,473 students in the 2005 to 2006 school year, representing 24 percent of all public school students.  There were 51 charter schools with 62 campuses.  DCPS enrolled 55,298 children, for a total of 72,771 individuals attending public schools.

Now there are 62 charters comprised of 115 campuses.  This is not a tremendous increase in the total number.  Therefore, what the study most likely did not anticipate was the strong focus on quality adopted by the DC Public Charter School Board.  Between 2006 and 2011 the Center for Education Reform states that 30 schools have been shuttered.  As chairman of the DC PCSB Dr. Darren Woodruff explained during my interview with him 13 charters have been closed in the last three years alone.

The second factor that has led to enrollment in charters remaining at 44 percent has been the dramatic improvements in DCPS.  When the Fight for Children report was issued Mayor Fenty had just been elected.  Michelle Rhee was about to be named Chancellor.  Her replacement, Kaya Henderson, has proved an exceptionally strong competitor for public school students.

The end result of all of this is that the educational landscape has greatly improved for our children.  It will be fascinating to see what the next 10 years brings.

DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson enthusiastically announced on Facebook yesterday that in 2015 the four year high school graduation rate for her system increased to 64 percent.  Her goal is to get to 75 percent by the year 2017.  The rate represents a six percent jump from last year’s 58 percent.  I was at a Fight for Children event last night that Ms. Henderson also attended and I can attest that she was thrilled about the news.

The number is definitely moving in the right direction but is still seven points below the overall rate of 71 percent for the city’s charter high schools, which is a sector that serves primarily low income minority children.  In addition, the statistic is far below the 90 percent graduation rate of Opportunity Scholarship Program scholars comprised of kids living in poverty.

But DCPS has seen a consistent rise in this number since it was at an astonishing low 53 percent in 2011.  It appears that public education reform is continuing its steady climb in the nation’s capital.

A year ago Alexandra Pardo, the former executive director of Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, wrote a guest editorial talking about the importance of measuring student Median Growth Percentile (MGP) as the best indicator of academic progress.  The D.C. Public Charter School Board also takes this number seriously as it comprises 40 percent of the grade charters receive on the Performance Management Framework tool for elementary and middle schools.  This number drops to 15 percent of the total score for high schools.

In fact, educators know that the longer a student spends in many of our charters the better they do academically.  This only makes sense.  A kid that arrives in a school years behind grade level will have a much more difficult time adjusting to the environment the first year in a new facility compared to the third term.

Charters that fail to back fill available slots after a particular year could gain an advantage regarding their PMF score over those charters that accept all comers.  In her article on this issue, Ms. Natalie Wexler points to the difference in student overall proficiency rates of Achievement Prep and DC Prep Edgewood, which do not take students after the sixth grade and E.L. Haynes, which does not have this restriction.  Moreover, Achievement Prep Wahler Place Middle PCS and DC Prep Edgewood Middle PCS are ranked at Tier 1 schools on the 2014 PMF while all three E.L. Haynes PCS’s campuses are at Tier 2.

For four years now the PCSB has ranked charters based upon PMF scores.  If this ranking is to be equitable for all schools then each should adopt a policy of back filling vacated seats.  In this way the PMF will have the legitimacy that the public has come to expect from this assessment.

Last week Natalie Wexler had a piece in Greater Greater Washington in which she revealed that a couple of high performing charter schools such as Achievement Prep and DC Prep Edgewood do not accept students after the sixth grade.  This is not what we as a movement should be doing.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I understand that at the high school level some charters, due to their specific curriculum, may not be able to accept kids at later grades because it would then be impossible for them to obtain the necessary classes to graduate.  But at the elementary and middle schools there is really no excuse not to enroll pupils that want access to the quality programs our portfolio of institutions offer.

Those of us involved in this alternative sector often claim that charter schools are public schools just like the traditional ones.  We offer this moral statement as a strong justification for funding and space on an equal basis to that of DCPS.  But if we are not going to take in students the way that the regular schools do than this ethical argument goes right up in smoke.

I know well the problem that charters have in enrolling additional kids mid-year.  Currently, there is no additional funding for teaching these students.  As I have argued before, this is a problem that desperately needs to be fixed.  But failing to add pupils at the start of the school term, before the October count, because they may have not benefited from starting a program from the beginning, is not what this school reform endeavor is about.

As a reminder, we fight like we do to create quality schools so that every young person in the District that can benefit from attending one of these facilities has exactly that opportunity.