- Washington Post Magazine’s 25th Anniversary: 25 Moments That Changed
- Early-Childhood Education Has New Meaning
- Why School Choice Fails
- FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
Washington Post Magazine’s 25th Anniversary: 25 Moments That Changed Washington Most Since 1986
The Washington Post
By Marc Fisher
December 1, 2011
#13. (1996) After a surprisingly easy path through the District’s political thicket, charter schools became a free and popular alternative to the city’s troubled regular public schools. Although the charter movement began as a conservative challenge to public schools that right-wing politicians believe are sentenced to poor quality by rigid and selfish teachers unions, D.C. leaders avidly grabbed on to the idea as a way to keep and lure back a black middle class that had been leaving the city for better public schools in the suburbs.
Although the charters vary enormously in quality and as a whole perform only slightly better than regular public schools, they offer smaller classes and a safer environment — in good part because every family in a charter is there by choice. Today, almost half the city’s schoolchildren are enrolled in about 60 charters, which the teachers unions have long since embraced.
Some of the schools have been criminally lousy, and some are recognized as among the nation’s best charters, but overall, they have established themselves as the schools of choice for D.C. parents who are actively involved in their children’s education.
Early-Childhood Education Has New Meaning
The Washington Times
By Tom Howell Jr.
December 4, 2011
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s administration is preparing to be the county’s role model for early-childhood education through programs for children as young as 6 months.
Education officials are working on a partnership that builds on universal pre-kindergarten in the District and leverages the abilities of community-based organizations that formerly ran pre-K programs.
The city is calling on the community groups to re-focus their expertise to children younger than 3, although the program differences and higher costs than pre-K could pose challenges, officials said. As part of a multiyear effort, the administration is working with D.C. Public Schools and the Office of the State Superintendent for Education to figure out which organizations can serve as effective partners and how much financial assistance the city can give to the programs.
“This is the very, very beginning,” an administration official said on background, noting that no one is authorized to provide official comment at this stage. “This is about laying out a framework and laying out a charge.”
The first several years of a child’s life are considered the most important for brain development and should ensure greater success in later grades, officials said.
When he was D.C. Council chairman, Mr. Gray pushed legislation in 2008 that expanded the city’s educational offerings to 3- and 4-year-olds, coinciding with a national trend to serve students before they reach kindergarten. The pre-K offerings became popular and were cited as part of the reason why some parents from neighboring states sneak their children into D.C. schools without paying tuition.
Mr. Gray focused on early childhood in recent public remarks about education, a priority of his administration alongside jobs and economic development, fiscal stability and public safety.
“I don’t have any reservation in saying at this stage that the District of Columbia is an absolute leader in early-childhood education,” Mr. Gray said at a Nov. 16 briefing in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Ward 7. “We are the only city in America, to my knowledge, that has a universal pre-kindergarten program.”
He also signaled that the city would be shifting its focus toward infants and toddlers with a rollout of announcements in coming weeks.
The mayor punctuated the trend at his State of the District address in March, when he noted the EduCare Learning Center had broken ground in Northeast “and what we learn will inform other early-childhood services across the city.”
“I think we will be a role model for the nation in how we work with very young children,” he said in his Nov. 16 remarks. “And ultimately, to me, that is the answer in how we ensure that increasingly large numbers and percentages of our children actually are successful in our public education system.”
Dennis van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said he supports efforts across the country to stimulate the minds of children before they enter school.
“I think it’s absolutely critical,” he said.
Mr. Van Roekel said some school districts offer instruction to parents on activities they can do with their young children, especially in underprivileged areas where children have less-enriching summer or preschool experiences.
“Think of all these kids who come to school and have experienced nothing,” Mr. van Roekel said. “How do they know what their passion is or what they enjoy?”
Why School Choice Fails
The New York Times
By Natalie Hopkinson
December 4, 2011
IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.
Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.
Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.
My neighborhood’s last free-standing middle school was closed in 2008, part of a round of closures by then Mayor Adrian Fenty and his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The pride and gusto with which they dismantled those institutions was shameful, but I don’t blame them. The closures were the inevitable outcome of policies hatched years before.
In 1995 the Republican-led Congress, ignoring the objections of local leadership, put in motion one of the country’s strongest reform policies for Washington: if a school was deemed failing, students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school or receive a voucher to attend a private school.
The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.
Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power.
Competition produces winners and losers; I get that. Indeed, the rhetoric of school choice can be seductive to angst-filled middle-class parents like myself. We crunch the data and believe that, with enough elbow grease, we can make the system work for us. Naturally, I’ve only considered high-performing schools for my children, some of them public, some charter, some parochial, all outside our neighborhood.
But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.
For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.
In the meantime, the neighborhood schools are dying. After Ms. Rhee closed our first neighborhood school, the students were assigned to an elementary school connected to a homeless shelter. Then that closed, and I watched the children get shuffled again.
Earlier this year, when we were searching for a middle school for my son — 11 is a vulnerable age for anyone — our public options were even grimmer. I could have sent him to one of the newly consolidated kindergarten-to-eighth-grade campuses in my neighborhood, with low test scores and no algebra or foreign languages. We could enter a lottery for a spot in another charter or out-of-boundary middle school, competing against families all over the city.
The system recently floated a plan for yet another round of closings, with a proposal for new magnet middle school programs in my neighborhood, none of which would open in time for my son. These proposals, like much of reform in Washington, are aimed at some speculative future demographic, while doing nothing for the children already here. In the meantime, enrollment, and the best teachers, continue to go to the whitest, wealthiest communities.
The situation for Washington’s working- and middle-class families may be bleak, but we are hardly alone. Despite the lack of proof that school-choice policies work, they are gaining popularity in communities nationwide. Like us, those places will face a stark decision: Do they want equitable investment in community education, or do they want to hand it over to private schools and charters? Let’s stop pretending we can fairly do both. As long as we do, some will keep winning, but many of us will lose.
FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
The FOCUS School Quality Dashboard has been updated with the 2011 DC CAS results. Available at www.focusdc.org/data, this easy-to-use, interactive tool allows users to see school performance on the state test and compare progress from 2006 to the present for all public schools in the District, both traditional and charter.
The FOCUS Education Policy Dashboard is a collection of sector level information on performance, enrollment, funding, poll data, facilities, and ward facts. It is available at www.focusdc.org/education-