Is this the endgame for the DC Public Schools? (Probably not.)

Woodward & Lothrops, Ames, Zayre, Kresge, Woolworths, Bob Peck Chevrolet, Jacobs-Gardner, Ginns Office Products, Michael Jordan's Steakhouse, Hechinger, Oldsmobile, Rolling Rock... the DC Public School System?

Today's Post has a front page story, "The Future of D.C. Public Schools: Traditional or Charter Education?," about the future of the DC Public School System. From the article:

Ten years after Congress imposed charter schools on a reluctant city, the District has emerged as one of the nation's most important laboratories for school choice and one of the first to confront a central tenet of free-market theory: Will traditional public schools improve with competition? Or will charters take over?

Both sides agree that the District is approaching a critical juncture. With public confidence in the schools at an all-time low, more than 17,000 public school students -- nearly one in four -- have rejected the traditional system in favor of 51 independently run, publicly funded charter schools. That share is one of the largest in the nation and is expected to rise when six more charter schools open their doors this fall. ...

Powerful forces in the national debate are watching closely to see whether D.C. schools can win those students back.

"The hope has always been that the traditional school system would respond by getting better, by doing things that are politically painful, but we've never had a good test of it until now," said Michael Petrilli, a former Bush administration education official who is a vice president of the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

"We're going to see whether D.C. can compete," Petrilli said. "If that doesn't happen, you'll see charters continue to open. And you could wind up with the first system entirely composed of charter schools."
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Schools aren't a free market. So improvement doesn't necessarily occur through competition.

Personally, I think various interest groups within the city, and government and elected officials lack the political, social and cultural will to effect substantive change--not just within the schools, but within the government more generally.

Substantive government improvement started under Mayor Williams, but I think it hit a plateau some time ago, even though some agencies continue to improve and move forward (such as the DC Department of Transportation, the e-government initiative across the entire set of agencies, the Office of Planning, the Police Department--which has improved despite the overhang of more than 1,000 officers hired with inadequate background checks during the Barry Administration, Housing Authority, etc.).

We aren't really being direct and debating what the appropriate role of government is in the city. This question touches a raw nerve in many places. Much of the debate within communities during this election cycle, especially within the various wards with the most school-aged children--Wards 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8--strike me as being more about government as a jobs program and as a tool for other than civic ends.

This is what I call the "Uncivil War," and in large part it is about the kinds of social capital arguments discussed in such books as Marion Orr's Black Social Capital.

This tension about the role of government and power relations within the city, what many quarters call "The Plan" for whitey to take back what became "Chocolate City" in the late 1950s after post-integration white flight is wrapped up in the schools debate as well as the broader election for Mayor, Council Chair, and some of the Council seats.

The Chocolate part of the city is shrinking for a number of reasons--African-Americans continue to migrate from the city at both ends of income spectrum, in addition more whites are moving back into the city attracted by urbanity, and other people of color and immigrants are moving into the city--and many people don't like this.

One such illustration of this tension is the opposition on the part of longer-term residents of Shaw against the renaming of a couple blocks of 9th Street NW as Little Ethiopia. This is about economics, ethnicity, resentment, class, and origin.

Getting back to schools, I don't think that the DC Public School system will wither away, even though I don't think there is the political will, even as of yet, to really grapple with the issues that the system, along with most every other urban school system faces--a goodly number of the students are from extremely impoverished families, and the schools--even the greatest schools--can only do so much in the time they are allotted.

This has to do with inertia and infrastructure, as well as the fact that because the charter schools have the same "inputs" issue that DCPS faces, that it will be difficult for the average charter school to demonstrate long-term effectiveness, unless the schools initiate the kinds of total student-family engagement programs necessary to effect success given the social, cultural, and economic conditions faced by the average student.

In short, there isn't enough organizational capital to create enough charter schools to educate all the students in DC, and there will be enough inertia (and occasional excellence) to keep a fair number of students in DCPS. After all, there are great teachers and great programs sprinkled across the system, the after and before school-day programs are great, and neighborhood schools are much more convenient for the average parent, especially in neighborhoods that are stabilizing and improving.

As the article points out, some charter schools are excellent and others are incompetent. I still blanch, thinking about young teachers I've met, barely out of college, telling me how they are writing the curriculum for X or Y in various charter schools. I wonder why they are doing this when there are tried and true curricula out there. What is the sense of creating new curricula for each and every charter school?

I participate on the concerned4dcps e-list, and I am an "outlier," communicating a perspective that for the most part is ignored because it challenges the prevailing paradigm, which focuses on the anti-government agenda of the charter movement, while failing to recognize, accept, and address the fact that the underperforming school system provides the "inch" that the charter movement needs to seize the day and the advantages within this debate--a situation that wouldn't have arisen in any case had Congress not imposed the charter movement on the City, which is but another source of resentment on the part of many in the anti-charter camp.

Granted, many public officials, resigned to the seeming fact that the School System won't change, are accepting of charter schools because they believe that some quality public schooling option must be offered to middle- and upper-class parents that have choices, that are able to leave the city for suburban locales with better public schooling options.

Myself, I write about this more and more, not because I have children, but because I find the level of the debate, the recognition of the issues, to be pretty barren.

Some things that bother me about charter schools:

1. They are publicly funded but not open to the public in terms of governance.
2. The DC Public Charter School Board is not elected.
3. These public schools are technically nonprofit organizations but the school facilities are not owned in trust by citizens of the District of Columbia, the funders of the schools.
4. Charter schools are not neighborhood schools, and therefore disconnect local schools from neighborhoods, where they are normally strong stabilizing influences.
5. City-wide charter schools generate lots of daily vehicle trips and add to congestion (did you see the article in today's Post about Rosa Parks Elementary School in Hyattsville, where all the students walk to school?).

Things that bother me about DC Public Schools:

1. Don't appear to be committed to innovation.
2. Conceptualize their mission strictly within the boundaries of their campuses.
3. Can't get it together managerially wrt special education.
4. Need to look beyond the traditional towards "year-round schooling," "family learning contracts," "cooperative education" at the high school level.
5. Need to create more systems like the Capitol Hill Cluster School.

Index Keywords: education