- D.C. has a revenue stream structural problem with charter schools [FOCUS and Rocketship mentioned]
- Free and open competition applies to D.C. schools, too
D.C. has a revenue stream structural problem with charter schools [FOCUS and Rocketship mentioned]
The Examiner
February 14, 2013
By Mark Lerner
Imagine that you are opening a new business whose product the public has decided should be supported with taxpayer money. I work in healthcare so let's say it is a medical facility. However, the big bureaucratic hospital in town doesn't like this idea because it could lose patients to your clinic. The loss of customers would result in less revenue for the already existing medical complex with a major consequence of this decrease translating into a reduction in staff.
Now let's pretend that in order for you to operate this new enterprise the only way to obtain the public funding is by requesting the money from the hospital. Do you think that there may be a problem in acquiring the dollars? Of course there would.
Well this is essentially the setup we have in the District of Columbia regarding charter schools. The revenue stream flows through the Mayor and D.C. Council which for years have viewed these alternative schools as a major threat to the continued presence of DCPS. The possible approval of Rocketship PCS to open in the nation's capital has raised this perceived threat to the level of an emergency. Rocketship plans to open eight schools in five years educating over 5,000 students.
The result is that Chairman David Catania this week suggested that the D.C. Council might turn to cutting off the facility funding for new charters as a way to check their growth. However, this points directly to my example above. The process is broken if the only way to create entities that compete with the established system is by going to those fearful of the traditional way of doing things disappearing.
Charters need and deserve to have their financials divorced from politics. After all these are the schools that in many cases are finally closing the achievement gap between races and income levels. We need FOCUS and other reform minded public officials to work together to develop a better way to support the institutions that are now instructing 43 percent of all public school children. There is not too much time to waste.
The Washington Post
February 13, 2013
By Robert A. Skitol, Potomac
The Feb. 11 front-page article “Charters’ growth raises questions,” on how “the District is on track to become a city where a majority of children are educated not in traditional public schools but in public charters,” provided much for the District’s children and their parents to cheer about. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) struck the right note about this when he said that competition has forced both school sectors to improve.
On the other hand, D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chair of the education committee, is wrongheaded in his complaint that the District has let charters and traditional schools function in isolation for too long; his belief that the council needs to “help manage this [competition] process”; his unhappiness over “schools that pop up everywhere”; and his vow to push for “a momentary pause” in this competition “so we can make sure that we’re all growing in the same direction.”
We as a society have a long-standing and fundamental commitment to free, open, uninhibited and thus unmanaged competition throughout virtually every sector of the economy. There is no apparent reason this commitment should not apply to the provision of education at all levels. This idea has been a core value since enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act more than 120 years ago. And, as the Supreme Court said 38 years ago, “the central message of the Sherman Act is that a business entity must find new customers . . . by competing successfully rather than by arranging treaties with its competitors.”
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