- D.C. kicks off school boundary overhaul
- Deputy Mayor revising school feeder relationships which may involve charters [FOCUS mentioned]
D.C. kicks off school boundary overhaul
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 29, 2013
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s administration kicked off an effort Monday to overhaul school boundaries and feeder patterns for the first time in decades, a politically charged and long-delayed process that could limit access to some of the city’s most sought-after schools.
The revisions will rewrite rules that determine which schools students have a right to attend based on their city addresses — changes that can ripple across neighborhoods and real estate markets, and that carry undercurrents of race and class. Many of the District’s best-performing schools are in wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods in Upper Northwest. Those schools have long attracted diverse students from across the city, but now are attracting more local families and are bursting with more students than they’re designed to hold.
First planned to be done by June and to take effect in fall 2014, the boundary process has been delayed. An advisory committee was scheduled to meet for the first time Monday night and to recommend changes by May.
Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith is leading the initiative, co-chairing — with John Hill, chairman of the D.C. Board of Library Trustees — the advisory committee of parents, advocates and government officials.
Community members will have a chance to weigh in on those recommendations before they are finalized by September, Smith said. The changes will take effect in fall 2015, with unspecified grandfather provisions meant to reduce their immediate impact.
“It’s going to be a challenging effort, but it’s a necessary one,” Smith wrote in an e-mail. “We are committed to engaging the community throughout the process, and while we know not everyone will be happy with the outcome, we believe the end result will benefit from the participation of a broad range of stakeholders.”
Parents have been anxiously anticipating boundary news for nearly a year, after Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced an overhaul last fall. That announcement triggered panic and pushback, especially among residents who feared being cut out of two overcrowded Northwest schools with strong academic records, Alice Deal Middle and Woodrow Wilson High.
“Bottom line, it’s a heavy lift to do this. It certainly takes a lot of actual work, but it also takes a willingness to take on a very political and emotional process,” Smith said. “We’re now in a place where we feel like we have the capacity to do it.”
Smith’s office will not release recommended revisions until a month after city Democrats nominate a mayoral candidate next spring. That limits the potential political fallout for Gray (D), who hasn’t yet said whether he plans to run for reelection. Smith said that the timeline was developed for reasons outside of politics.
Another potential mayoral candidate, D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania (I-At Large), had previously called a Nov. 15 hearing on the boundary change process. He did not return a request for comment Monday.
The committee that will recommend boundary changes has 20 members, including parents of charter- and traditional-school students and people with expertise in urban planning, policy and civil rights.
They will examine traditional schools’ feeder patterns and boundaries, many of which have been made obsolete by school closures and sweeping demographic changes. But they also will consider recommending changes that would affect charter schools, which by law are open to all students across the city, with admissions decided by lottery when interest exceeds available space.
Smith said the committee is likely to discuss whether and how to create a neighborhood preference for charter school admissions. They’ll also consider creating hybrid feeder patterns, in which charter and traditional schools could feed each other.
Also under consideration is an idea that Henderson has previously floated: scrapping boundaries at the high school level and creating citywide, theme-based academies from which students could choose.
Chris Sondreal, the father of a pre-kindergartner, said the boundaries are convoluted and in need of streamlining. Some of his child’s classmates at School Without Walls at Francis Stevens, in Northwest, have the right to attend Wilson High, Sondreal said, while others are guaranteed access to Cardozo High, where test scores and graduation rates are far lower. Some Francis Stevens students have rights to still other high schools.
“It’s a super complicated series of overlapping maps in terms of where your kid can go to school,” Sondreal said. “Rationalizing that process, I welcome that in theory — but there's a lot of trepidation that comes along with it.”
Deputy Mayor revising school feeder relationships which may involve charters [FOCUS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 29, 2013
Deputy Mayor of Education Abigail Smith announced yesterday that her office is about to tackle the highly controversial topics of school boundaries and feeder relationships. When my kids were young growing up in Reston, Virginia meetings on these topics were some of the nastiest sessions I have ever witnessed. For parents there may be nothing more important and sensitive than where your children go to school and with whom. So here we go.
Ms. Smith and John Hill, Jr., a long-time community activist, will act as co-chairs of the advisory committee that will make the final recommendations. The group includes Josephine Bias-Robinson of DCPS and Emily Bloomfield of the DC Public Charter School Board. Although FOCUS is not represented on this body it does include Ariana Quinones from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services who is a long-time friend of the local charter school movement. Finally, there are 14 parents of traditional and charter schools included on the advisory committee. The public is being offered other avenues for making their opinion on these subjects known.
One goal of the committee is to "make recommendations on how to bridge student-assignment and choice policies across DCPS and charter schools." I hope that Ms. Smith's group is extremely careful in this regard.
First, they need to remember that charters, unlike most DCPS facilities, are dynamic organizations. They often grow in size throughout their existence, relocate and/or replicate, and can be shuttered by their regulatory agency. All of these factors complicate establishing firm feeder relationships from charters to regular classrooms.
Mayor Gray has proposed having DCPS elementary schools feed into charter middle schools. However, charters are mission specific institutions that parents choose. We would not want to set up a situation where a feeder relationship forces parents to send their kids to educational institutions whose mission they do not prefer.
In addition, as I've pointed out before, guaranteed students for charters limits the competition. It is competition for students that has caused the academic quality to rise in both charter and traditional schools. Limiting choice could reverse the hard-earned progress that has been achieved over the last 15 years.
The Deputy Mayor of Education explained that the committee is expected to make their recommendations by May of next year, with those suggestions finalized by September 2014. Implementation would take place in the fall 2015.