Submitted by rcane on
By Robert Cane
Mayor Vincent Gray on Thursday of last week began what was billed as a major policy address by acknowledging that, 15 years ago, D.C. public education was “frankly, moribund.” But then, he said, we opened our first public charter schools, and everything changed.
Damn right it did. The public charter school reform led to better schooling practically overnight, especially in the District’s poorest neighborhoods. Competition from the burgeoning charter school movement led to giving the mayor control over DCPS, with the goal of speeding system reform. It led to the hiring of Michelle Rhee, who cleaned up DCPS’s act and put it, however tentatively, in the school reform business. It led the teachers’ union to make concessions to Rhee, the then head of the union acknowledging that if DCPS didn’t reform he would continue to lose members and influence.
In short, said Gray, the District “embraced innovation and operated with urgency….[p]ublic school enrollment is up…[a]nd proficiency rates in both sectors have improved.”
But then, after extolling the progress that has been made over the last 15 years because of competition from the public charter schools, Gray urged that we abandon that approach: “…lasting, sustainable success…will happen. And for it to happen, it is imperative that charters and DCPS collaborate.”
Gray provided no evidence for this claim, probably because there isn’t any. In fact, the centerpiece of his new policy is to give the chancellor the authority to create her own charter schools. This move has nothing to do with collaboration and everything to do with making it more likely that she can effectively compete with the charter schools.
Save one—loosening DCPS’s hammerlock on school facilities it no longer needs—the other major ideas the mayor laid out in his address have little to do with collaboration as that term generally is used. Collaboration, as far as I can tell from his speech, mostly means abandoning what got us here. He wants charters—by definition schools of choice open to all regardless of where they live—to become neighborhood schools in neighborhoods where DCPS has failed to provide good ones. He wants a central planning process that will drive school location and programming. And he wants charters to give up some of the instructional and administrative autonomy that has enabled them to be successful.
We’re all for giving the chancellor the authority to create charter-like schools so she can rapidly increase the quality of her offerings. We welcome the mayor’s focus on providing a high quality seat for every D.C. public school student and his willingness to involve the Public Charter School Board and the public charter schools in a dialogue about the nature of good schooling. And we have no objection to charters and DCPS schools collaborating as they see fit. But we reject absolutely the notion that we’re in a “new era” in which what got us here—competition, parental choice, and charter school autonomy—needs to be abandoned in favor of the kind of government-directed education planning that has for so long failed to provide good schooling in D.C. and other cities.