FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin
September 30, 2002
In this issue:
Charter School Facilities Crisis Front Page News
Keene School To House PCS; Administration Continues to Resist On Other Buildings
FOCUS Web Site Project To Promote Charter School Transparency
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Charter School Facilities Crisis Front Page News
There is growing media interest in the struggles of D.C.'s public charter schools to find adequate space - and in official Washington's lack of attention to their plight. Last spring the Washington Post published a lengthy article on the subject and an op-ed piece written by FOCUS. This month FOCUS's effort to identify affordable commercial space for the charter schools was the subject of a front-page article in the Washington Business Journal http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2002/09/16/story1.html. The Washington Times Editorial page, meanwhile, published a hard hitting critique of the District's failure to live up to the letter and spirit of the School Reform Act by largely ignoring charter schools' preference to acquire former DCPS buildings http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020918-68427790.htm. It's been a long struggle - far from over - but the public is starting to pay attention.
Keene School To House PCS; Administration Continues to Resist On Other Buildings
The Administration has decided to permit a charter school to occupy the Keene school, the only school building reserved for the charter schools in the Mayor's last order on the subject. At the same time, staff have recommended to the mayor that other surplus buildings very much needed by the charter schools - including the Bruce School, in which council member Graham has taken an interest -- be returned to DCPS or occupied by D.C. government agencies. Council member Graham has scheduled an important hearing on the disposition of surplus buildings for October 18 at 10:00 a.m. FOCUS is organizing testimony for the
hearing and we urge charter school leaders, parents, and students to testify. Please call Tasha Tillman at 387-0405 if you're interested.
FOCUS Web Site Project To Promote Charter School Transparency
A dozen D.C. charter schools soon will be providing the public with good information about the value they are adding to their students' education. As part of the FOCUS free web site program, these schools have agreed to post on their sites uniform school
performance data. The data, to be presented in a format agreed upon last spring by the D.C. Public Charter School Coalition, will enable parents and others to see how much each schools' students improved academically after being at the school one, two,
three, and four or more years.
This sort of data is the lynchpin of charter school accountability. Unlike traditional public schools, for which accountability means filing endless numbers of reports and enduring pointless monitoring visits by "downtown" bureaucrats, public charter schools are accountable primarily to parents, who freely choose these schools for their children and can freely
withdraw them if their chosen schools are not performing. In order to exercise this choice in an intelligent fashion, parents must have good information about how these schools are doing. It is just this sort of information that will be provided by
our schools.
The data will begin appearing on the web sites in October. These sites, and those of all the other D.C. charter schools, can be accessed at www.focus-dccharter.org.
Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #001
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 387-0405 phone
(202) 667-3798 fax