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The fight for fair funding is picking up. Accordingly, many of February’s DC education headlines show that DC public charter schools, given their achievements and innovations, are excelling. Unfortunately, others highlight obstacles toward our vision of funding parity between traditional public schools and public charters. Here’s our review of last month’s news.
Hebrew, Arabic among 11 proposed new charter schools (The Washington Examiner, 2/11/12)
This article details the charter applications DCPCSB received by their February deadline. With the charter school proposals that DCPCSB recently received, it’s clear that charter leaders are not only getting more ambitious in their school plans, but are also responding to the needs of the District. For instance, two proposals address both adult literacy and the green movement to prepare students for work in the modern economy. Likewise, DCPCSB will consider two more immersion schools, one for Hebrew and the other for Arabic. Check out the article for more intriguing charter school proposals!
D.C. charter schools continue to boom (The Examiner, 2/14/12)
As Lisa Gartner elucidates, D.C. public charter school enrollment increased by 8% this school year. In the article, DC School Reform Now Executive Director David Pickens correlates this increase with the growing view that public charters are innovating through a diverse range of new schools and an impressive record of accountability while traditional public schools are not. Public charters, according to the article, account for 41% of DC’s students with 31,562 enrolled students.
D.C. charter schools tout success, ask for more money (The Examiner, 2/9/12)
At last month’s D.C. Council education hearing, we continued our push for fair funding alongside other charter leaders. In this selection, Liz Farmer recounts, “charter school representatives showed up in droves to remind council members about their higher average test scores and graduation rates.” Farmer also mentioned January’s report from the Deputy Mayor for Education arguing for “three dozen DC Public Schools campuses [to] be closed or turned around, likely reinvented as charter schools.”
DCPS enrollment: Missing the mark by $18 million (The Washington Post, 2/16/12)
Bill Turque reports that DCPS, with 2,056 fewer students than originally projected, received $18.4 million dollars for students that were not in their classrooms. He also points out that this isn’t new:
"DCPS routinely--some critics say systematically-- overestimates enrollment projections built into its annual operating budgets. In FY 2010 and 2011 the system also received more money than it would have if payments had been based on actual enrollment: a total of $29 million."
Meanwhile, public charter funding is based on actual enrollment rather than projections. As such, this oversight adds to the current lack of parity in DC education.
D.C.’s charter schools deserve fairer funding (The Washington Post, 2/24/12)
The Post’s Editorial Board finds that the Public Education Finance Reform Commission (PEFRC) “essentially punted on all the core issues of school funding” in its final recommendations. Namely, it rebukes PEFRC for not responding to the current lack of financial parity. The editorial cites “Public Education Finance Reform in the District of Columbia: Uniformity, Equity, and Facilities,” a study we jointly commissioned with the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, in explicating that DCPS “has received $72 million to $127 million annually” in funds coming from outside of uniform funding. Public charters do not have access to this supplemental funding, and as a result, the DC government does not invest in public charter students fairly.
Be sure to keep up with the news on fair funding via our Twitter (@FOCUSdc) and Facebook pages! Visit our blog regularly for opportunities to advocate on behalf of public charter students.