Strength in Unity - The D.C. Charter School Coalition

The independence from school district bureaucracy that charter schools enjoy has a potential dark side: feelings of isolation, political powerlessness, and strain on limited resources. In the District, however, the charter schools early on recognized the need to band together and, only three years into their existence, have achieved a level of mutual support and collaboration that has paid great educational, political, financial, and psychological dividends. The engine driving this cooperative effort is the FOCUS-led D.C. Public Charter School Coalition.

The Coalition, an informal network comprising all 27 of the District's public charter schools and various support groups, has been meeting weekly since 1997. Aside from FOCUS, the Coalition's first members were other non-profit organizations supporting public school choice, a few individual activists, and one of the only two charter schools that existed at that time. In the summer of 1997, this group successfully advocated for a series of amendments that considerably strengthened D.C.'s charter law. The most important of these was a provision for extra per-pupil funding to offset facilities costs, which only a handful of jurisdictions provide (for FY 2000, this facilities allowance will be $1,058 per pupil).

In the fall of 1998 the activists who formed the Coalition were suddenly joined by a dynamic group of 18 new charter leaders scrambling to build schools out of nothing. The Coalition, chaired by FOCUS president Mike Peabody, continued to advocate for fair treatment of the charter schools, pressing city officials to give charter schools access to abandoned public school buildings and to provide enough funding for all the new schools. But the Coalition also became an important forum for resource sharing and mutual support. FOCUS staff recruited District officials, social service providers, and vendors to make presentations at Coalition meetings and organized fax and email lists to spread information among the schools. Coalition meetings also gave charter leaders a chance to commiserate about the many problems of startup and to share ideas for solving them.

In 1999, the Coalition has continued to grow and adapt. Coalition witnesses have become a fixture at hearings of the City Council, Board of Education, and the D.C. Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. In addition, three Coalition committees were formed to do vitally important work that cannot be undertaken successfully by individual schools: legislative action, public relations, and student support. The Legislative Action Committee helped avert another potential budget shortfall and worked with Congress to eliminate the fast-approaching sunset provision of the charter law, to permit a sibling preference in charter school admissions, and to establish a process to improve the dysfunctional way DCPS goes about disposing of abandoned school buildings, which are badly needed by the charter schools. The Coalition Public Relations Committee has worked to overcome public misunderstanding about charter schools and to highlight the successes of the charter schools. And the Student Support Committee put together two successful federal grant proposals, one of which is the largest grant ever awarded to a collection of charter schools (see below).

Nationally, charter schools in several states have created formal associations, some with considerable staff and member dues. But few have been as effective politically or built as strong a sense of cooperation and community as the Coalition.