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This year marks the 15th anniversary of the passage of the District of Columbia’s School Reform Act, which enabled the creation of publicly funded but independently run charter schools for District-resident children. In a decade and a half, these new-style public schools have transformed the educational landscape in the nation’s capital, raising student performance and prompting the long-overdue reform of D.C.’s traditional public school system.
In 1996, about half the city’s high school students dropped out. Enrollment in the school system had halved in a generation — from about 150,000 in 1967 to approximately 75,000. In student achievement, D.C. routinely scored lowest among all American cities on the widely respected National Assessment of Educational Progress. Many city-run schools struggled even to guarantee student safety.
The city’s public charter school reform has helped reverse D.C.’s decades-long spiral of educational decline. Charters’ enrollment has increased dramatically — from 160 the year the law was passed, to nearly 40 percent of all D.C. students enrolled in public schools today, on nearly 100 campuses. Thanks to the determination of the social entrepreneurs who founded the city’s charters and located them in the most underserved neighborhoods, these campuses are available to students in communities where the need for quality public education is greatest.
D.C.’s public charter schools have brought successful high-performing public schools to neighborhoods that formerly had only failing schools, and to children whose parents can’t afford the luxury of moving to a well-to-do suburb or paying tuition.
As a result, the achievement gap — the difference between the academic performance of economically disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers — has been cut. In 1996, for example, disadvantaged fourth-graders scored 35 points less in reading than their advantaged peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — approximately 3.5 grade levels of difference. Disadvantaged eighth-graders were 24 points behind. D.C.’s public charter schools have reduced that gap to 20 points for fourth-graders and seven points for eighth-graders.
From a starting point of a 50 percent graduation rate for D.C.’s traditional school system in 1996, charters have achieved a high school graduation rate of 84 percent — 12 percentage points higher than the school system after Michelle Rhee’s spell as D.C. Public Schools chancellor. Some 83 percent of charter high school graduates are accepted to college; after four years of reform, the school system still does not release that statistic. D.C.’s most successful public charter high schools have graduation rates in the high 90s, with 100 percent of the graduates accepted to college.
D.C.’s public charter schools also have been ahead of the curve in student performance on D.C.’s standardized tests in reading and math. In five years, D.C. charters have raised the share of high school students reading at grade level from 39 percent to 50 percent, and raised the share at grade level in math from 32 percent to 54 percent. The city’s traditional public school system also has posted increases in the number of students performing at grade level, but has yet to match charters’ success. The percentage of D.C. cityrun school system high school students who are at grade level in reading and math rose from 35 percent to 43 percent in reading, and from 26 percent to 43 percent in math over the same time period.
Despite these achievements, the role of the city’s charters in improving overall student performance and encouraging reform of the school system remains underappreciated. But Rhee understood the role played by charter schools: “Spurred by the competition [from charters], the D.C. Council voted to make the mayor accountable for results instead of diluting accountability across a school board, which had been the case for decades,” she once acknowledged.
The charter reform offers its schools control over instructional methods, administration and expenditures, while holding them accountable for improved student performance. Underperforming schools have lost their right to operate — 34 percent of all charters that opened since 1996 have closed, a far higher percentage than in the controversial school-closure program pioneered by Rhee.
The collapse of public education in the District failed a whole generation of the city’s most vulnerable children. The entire city still lives with those consequences today. By contrast, the District’s public charter school reform — and the D.C. Public Schools reform it helped inspire — has created a new era of hope for neighborhoods where children were shamefully written off as hopeless causes, empowering thousands of the city’s most disadvantaged children to earn college degrees and find rewarding careers.
Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a D.C.- based nonprofit
The Current Robert Cane August 24, 2011