By Donald Hense, Chairman, Friendship Public Charter Schools
May 7, 2009
The D.C. City Council votes on Mayor Fenty's budget just three days before the 55th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark civil rights decision, Brown v. Board of Education. How are these two events related? Both have implications for closing what educators call the "student achievement gap"— the difference in academic performance between Black and White students in public schools.
This historic civil rights anniversary and the looming Council vote both matter to me. I was the chief usher at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King and was a student representative on the board of Morehouse College when King served there. I am Chairman of Friendship Public Charter School, which educates nearly 4,000 students in Northeast and Southeast D.C.
Public charter schools are unique public schools, which— like the neighborhood schools run by the Mayor—cannot charge tuition and are open to all D.C. children without interviews or entrance exams. Unlike the schools run by the Mayor, however, charters have the freedom to design education programs to suit the needs of their students and to set other school policies, from discipline to attendance, independently of the D.C. government bureaucracy.
The freedoms charters enjoy are balanced by responsibilities to parents—charters are funded based on how many students they enroll—and to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which holds school leaders to a high standard, replacing school leaders if necessary.
This unique mix of freedom and responsibility has allowed these special public schools to flourish. Increasingly popular with parents, D.C. public charter schools have higher shares of African-American children than the city-run public schools. And they are ahead of the curve in closing the achievement gap. Black middle and high school students are almost twice as likely to be proficient in reading and math as their peers in city-run neighborhood schools.
Despite this important step toward fulfilling the promise of the civil rights movement, the Mayor proposed to the Council that D.C. public charter schools, which educate about 33 percent of D.C. children, take 100 percent of his education cuts. The Council has now reversed 70 percent of this cut, leaving charters with $7.3 million less to buy, lease and renovate school buildings compared to last year.
Sadly, although a big improvement on the Mayor's unfair education cut, this $309 per student cut will add to the discrimination against charters that already exists. After the budget cut, school building funding for each public charter school child will be $2,800 compared to $5,829 per student in the city-run schools. Worse, as Councilmember Barry pointed out at the Council's budget press conference, the city government has almost always denied charters the right to buy or lease public school buildings that the city-run schools no longer have the students to fill.
Charter school children are being kept out of surplus public school buildings despite the fact that D.C. law and simple humanity say charters should be able to negotiate with the city before luxury condo and commercial developers can. Meanwhile, many charters are housed in warehouses, retail or office space and church annexes and basements. And children in nonresidential D.C. public charter schools have less than half the square footage per student as their peers in the city-run schools.
Despite being underserved for school buildings, high school graduation rates in D.C. public charter schools are 24 percent higher than in D.C.'s regular public schools. And teens in charter schools lose half as many days to student absenteeism as teens in city-run neighborhood schools.
The good news is that at the budget hearing Council Chair Vincent Gray noted that the traditional public schools, which the Mayor controls, are double funded for facilities compared to charters. Gray also said that he is open to charters' request that certified public accountants study and report on how to achieve equal funding for all D.C. public schools.
The bad news is that the Mayor has included yet another attack on D.C. public charter schools in the budget, this time trying to undermine their independence by making them adopt the policies that his appointees make for the schools he runs, messing with charters' success.