FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

October 30, 2006

--Charter School Enrollment Takes Another Big Jump
--Revised Master Facilities Plan Means Even Less for Charters
--Fannie Mae/Urban Institute Report: Charter Students Travel Farther for Higher Quality
--D.C. Kids Don’t Finish College, SEO Report Says

Charter School Enrollment Takes Another Big Jump

Enrollment in the District’s charter public schools has spiked again, according to reports filed by the schools on October 6, the official count date. As of October 6, charter enrollment stood at 19,924, an increase of 2,505, or more than 14%. FOCUS has been unable to get DCPS enrollment numbers either from DCPS or the D.C. government, but it is expected that the system will have lost between 2,000 and 3,000 students from last year to this and that charter enrollment as a percentage of total public school enrollment will climb to around 27%.

The reported numbers will be audited by the State Education Office; the audit report is expected in January.

This year’s enrollment increase represents the tenth straight for the District’s charter schools, the first two of which opened in 1996 with a total of 160 students. Since 2000, annual enrollment increases have averaged just under 15%.

Revised Master Facilities Plan Means Even Less for Charters

As expected, the superintendent has revised his proposed Master Facilities Plan in response to negative comments from neighborhood activists and parents at a series of community meetings sponsored by the school system. Also as expected, the revision will reduce the already limited number of opportunities for charter schools to gain access to school buildings (See “For Charters, Superintendent’s Master Facilities Plan, Touted as New Beginning, Continues Old Shell Game," Bulletin 10/4/06 at www.focusdc.org).

Under the revised plan, the system, which has lost around 20,000 students since it last declared a building surplus and controls approximately 6,000,000 square feet it doesn’t need, will make four buildings available for non-system use by the 2008-2009 school year. No other buildings will be made available until 2016, when two are planned to be vacated. Another two will be made available in 2018. Four partial spaces (e.g., a floor or wing) also will be made available at some point and two other spaces will be available on a short-term basis. Together, the spaces to be made available on a permanent or long-term basis will reduce the system’s current excess inventory by approximately a fifth. The excess will continue to grow, however, as DCPS loses more students to the charter schools. This year alone, DCPS’s expected enrollment decline will create around 250,000 square feet of excess space.

It is unclear how much of the space identified for non-DCPS use by the plan will end up being occupied by charter schools. DCPS has never publicly acknowledged the charter schools’ statutorily-mandated “right of first offer” on these buildings; what’s more, the system is known to be seeking public-private development partnerships for much of the excess space identified in the plan.

FOCUS continues to advocate for the creation of a neutral entity to control all of the District’s public school buildings, the most important function of which would be to fairly distribute school buildings to the school system and the charters based on demonstrable need.

Fannie Mae/Urban Institute Report: Charter Students Travel Farther for Higher Quality

Data in a new report sponsored by Fannie Mae and the Urban Institute (Housing in the Nation’s Capital 2006) shows that charter school students travel much farther to their schools than do DCPS students. The median travel distance for charter elementary school students is four times greater than that of their DCPS peers, and in fact greater than that of DCPS high school students. Charter middle school students travel more than three times as far as their DCPS counterparts and charter highschoolers travel nearly twice as far. This effect is most pronounced among students who live east of the Anacostia River and in Northeast, where there are many troubled schools, suggesting that “families are choosing charters in hopes of having their children attend higher-performing schools.” The full report is available at http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/publications/reports/hnc/2006/hnc2006.shtml.

D.C. Kids Don’t Finish College, SEO Report Says

According to another recent study, this one sponsored by the D.C. State Education Office and others, only nine of every 100 students who enter 9th grade in the public schools of the District of Columbia (DCPS and charter) get a college degree within five years of college matriculation. Even this woeful figure is misleadingly high, skewed upward by DCPS’s selective magnet schools, 28% of whose 9th graders end up with a college degree. For the large number of DCPS non-selective schools the figure is 7%; for DCPS schools in Wards 7 and 8, where the District’s very poor are concentrated, it’s 5%.

FOCUS has asked the SEO to break out the charter school data from the overall figures and is awaiting its response.

According to the report (Double the Numbers for College Success; A Call to Action for the District of Columbia, October 2006), the problem begins in 9th grade, from which only 58% of students are promoted (promotion rates from 10th, 11th, and 12th grades are much higher). This results in only 43% of D.C. 9th graders graduating from high school within five years and only 29% enrolling in college.

The sponsors of the report — the D.C. College Access Program, the D.C. Education Compact, DCPS, and the SEO — vow to work together to double the number of D.C. 9th graders who graduate from college within five years of college matriculation from 9% to 18% of those who entered 9th grade this year. As things stand now, however, even this modest goal is daunting, largely dependent on the ability of one of the partners — DCPS — to overcome its historical inability to ensure that its students are reading well by the time they reach 9th grade. Right now, on average, incoming 9th graders are years behind in reading, often at the 4th- or 5th-grade level.

The report is available on line at http://www.seo.dc.gov.

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #104
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 387-0405 phone
(202) 667-3798 fax
www.focusdc.org