FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

September 7, 2004

District, Federal Officials Sued Over Public Charter School Program; Startup PCS Also Named as Defendant

A group of Capitol Hill parents, upset and angry with the "notoriously dysfunctional" state of the District of Columbia Public
School System and the poor condition of many of its individual schools, lashed out at the District's popular public charter school movement in a lawsuit filed last Wednesday in federal district court. The suit also attacks the new D.C. voucher program and the No Child Left Behind Act.

The complaint alleges that by funding the public charter schools, which the complaint asserts enroll fewer African American and poor students, the District has re-segregated D.C. education by consigning minorities and the poor to bad DCPS schools. The suit, brought against the D.C. Board of Education, the District Council, Mayor Williams, former acting superintendent Robert Rice, the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, Two Rivers Public Charter School, and Secretary of Education Rod Paige, also puts the blame for DCPS's failure to provide good schools and schooling on District leaders' "diversion" of funds to the public charter schools.

The facts do not bear out these allegations. According to the District's State Education Office, public charter school enrollment is 92% African American, versus 85% for DCPS (1% of public charter school enrollment is white, versus 5% for DCPS). Free- and reduced-lunch enrollment is 78% in the public charter schools and 63% in DCPS. And since the first public charter school opened in 1997, DCPS's annual operating funding has increased from $479 million to $568 million, even though its enrollment has declined by approximately 17,000 students during that period. DCPS capital funding also skyrocketed during those years.

In the complaint the plaintiffs, calling themselves Save Our Schools (S.O.S.) Southeast and Northeast, take special aim at Two Rivers Public Charter School, a new school which opened today on Capitol Hill with 165 students. Two Rivers, whose enrollment is 62% African American and 31% white, is accused of using discriminatory admissions practices in order to produce a "largely white" student body.

The frustration of the plaintiffs with DCPS and with D.C. government is evident throughout the complaint. According to the
plaintiffs, DCPS is characterized by "pervasive mismanagement, lack of accountability and poor governance." This dysfunctionality, says the complaint, violates due process and equal protection by victimizing children who go to DCPS schools. D.C. government officials, they allege, do nothing about this because they have their own children in private schools. At the same time, these officials encourage better off and non-minority families to send their children to public charter schools or private schools.

Revealing a total lack of understanding of the mechanism for funding DCPS and the public charter schools, the plaintiffs allege that public charter schools get more funding than DCPS schools. This alleged funding differential, according to the plaintiffs, goes to explain why Two Rivers PCS supposedly can afford a better program than the DCPS school with which it will share space this fall.

In fact, each student who goes to a DCPS school or to a public charter school is funded at the same level under the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula. The difference is that funding for enrolled students goes directly to each public charter school, while the funding for enrolled DCPS students goes to the DCPS administration, which then decides how much money will go to each school site and how much it will keep for central office services. In recent years, as individual DCPS schools have been
required to eliminate teaching positions and programs, the size of the central office's cut has been a subject of much debate within the school system.


The plaintiffs think it unfair that the public charter schools don't have "the millstone of DCPS bureaucracy" hanging around their necks, while individual DCPS schools have to fork over operating funds to support the central office. The most obvious solution to this problem would be to reduce the size and cost of the DCPS bureaucracy, but the plaintiffs prefer eliminating the public charter schools. Those schools, by way of comparison, on average spend $101 per square foot to renovate their school
buildings. So far, the DCPS Long Range Facilities Master Plan is generating expenditures of $292 per square foot.

The plaintiffs also assert that spending money on public charter schools amounts to a "surrender of a sacred public function to provide [public] education." But public charter schools are every bit as "public" as DCPS schools. Like DCPS schools, public charter schools are publicly funded and publicly accountable. Like DCPS schools, they cannot discriminate and must serve special education students. Unlike certain DCPS schools, which (like Duke Ellington) can select the students they wish to enroll,
public charter schools must take all comers without regard to academic or other abilities.

As to Two Rivers, the plaintiffs seem to be of the view that school integration, rather than to be welcomed, is just another
form of invidious discrimination. In fact, the complaint charges that any public charter school in the District of Columbia that has fewer than 84% African American students -- according to the plaintiffs the District-wide average, must be illegally turning away African American students.

By way of remedy, the plaintiffs ask (among other things) that the charter granted to Two Rivers PCS be revoked; that the D.C.
Public Charter School Board be prohibited from granting additional charters until due process, equal protection, and D.C. human rights laws are complied with; and that DCPS be forced to stop "favor[ing]" [public] charter schools over public schools.

FOCUS will provide you with updates as the suit progresses.


Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #001
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 387-0405 phone
(202) 667-3798 fax
www.focus-dccharter.org