Reprint: Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward (2017)

These days I have been thinking a lot about organizational failure (I have a partially written entry about WMATA and its wheels issue) and what I am calling a "bias for inaction." The Post has an editorial ("D.C. schools improved under mayoral control. Why do some council members want to undermine that success?") about how the DC City Council shouldn't get over-involved in DC Public Schools matters, since mayoral control has resulted in great gains.

That's a crock.  

Two wrongs -- the wrong kind of City Council involvement and the sub-optimal involvement of mayoral control -- don't equal a better system.

The school system continues to lag for students of color and the Post has been the primary enabler of the sub-optimal "reform" efforts in DC Public Schools, ever since the onset of Mayor Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.  Rather than address the issue of resources and quality programs, mostly they've focused on high-stakes testing and demonizing bad teaching.

The article led me to re-read this piece from 2017, which is still completely relevant, and well written to boot.

==============

Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward

DC's Schools Chancellor, Kaya Henderson, left her position at the end of September.  The Post, in articles and an editorial hailed her great accomplishments, although they are arguable, and never came close to fulfilling the measurable promises first made by Michelle Rhee to her foundation overlords -- Guy Brandenburg's series of articles evaluating Rhee's promises found a pass rate of 1.5 on 62 items ("Did Michelle Rhee Actually Close Those Achievement Gaps").

The Washington City Paper has a particularly blistering article, "Left Behind: How Kaya Henderson Failed At-Risk DCPS Students," assessing the Henderson era, as Kaya Henderson missed most of her goals on improving educational outcomes for children from low-income households.

... A 40/40 school is among the 40 lowest performing schools in the District. When she announced her plan, Henderson said her second-highest priority—“invest in struggling schools”—was to increase proficiency rates in those schools by 40 percentage points by the end of the current school year. Initially, DCPS defined “proficiency” according to the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS), designed to test mastery of English, math, and science according to local “content standards,” but it abandoned that metric after the 2013-2014 school year.

Schools designated as 40/40 schools have certain traits in common: They mostly reside in parts of the city plagued by high crime, high unemployment, high rates of disease and mortality, and high numbers of single-mother households. More than half are elementary schools, which experts agree is the educational stage that is most critical to any future prospects for success in academics—or life. ...

As Kaya Henderson departs DCPS, the schools are nowhere close to the goal she set, with marginal or inconsistent gains in some schools, stagnation in some, and losses in others, according to a City Paper review of DCPS performance data. DCPS, after four years, still lists 10 of the 40/40 elementary schools as “priority” schools, meaning they still need “intense support to address low performance of all students” and require “special quality monitoring and professional development.” Six are labeled “focus” schools, meaning they need “targeted support to address large achievement gaps,” according to the DCPS website. Just five are considered to be either “rising” or “developing.”

Which is not surprising, given that investment in 40/40 schools has ranged from non-existent to inequitable to compromised, according to DCPS funding data, proficiency scores, budget experts, and education watchdogs.

Meanwhile, the charter schools continue to grow their enrollment, and probably only the existence of Pre-K education for 3 to 5 year olds helps to keep DCPS enrollment figures up ("Report: Charter Enrollment Outpacing Traditional Public School System," Washington City Paper; "DC Public Schools See Seventh Consecutive Year of Increased Enrollment," Georgetown Hoya).

The resignation of Kaya Henderson offered the city and its media an opportunity to take stock, to compare DC's "reform" efforts to other cities, to gauge the impact of the charter schools on the traditional school system, to look in-depth at specific initiatives, and even to compare DC to other best practice K-12 efforts in the area (Arlington County, Montgomery County).

Outside of the City Paper article and some e-list discussion, such a review did not occur, even to how the Mayor inadequately followed the law on selecting a chancellor that was passed as part of shifting authority of the school system over to the Mayor from an elected school board ("Antwan Wilson confirmed as chancellor of DC Public Schools," Post).

Review: Lots of Pain, Minimal Gain. Perhaps the biggest problem in "reforming" K-12 education has to do with asking and answering the wrong questions ("Missing the most fundamental point about urban educational reform).

And ideology in terms of an anti-government or neoliberalism agenda that promotes charter schools, private schools and vouchers, or home schooling ("Mitt Romney: Trump has made a smart choice for education secretary," Washington Post) over what anti-government types are now calling, pejoratively,"government schools"

Although we must concede that school systems become bureaucratic and lose focus on what matters. Teacher's unions often end up focusing on maximizing pay. And too often personnel decisions can be particularly arbitrary--I know plenty of good teachers who got screwed by vindictive principals or other school administrators.

A failure to focus on the need for different types of resources.  But comparably to how I argue that the problem with a disinvested property is lack of investment and the solution to disinvestment is not demolition but investment, the problems around teaching low income children aren't solved by forcing students to spend lots of time studying for and taking tests or to fire the teachers, but are solved by providing additional, focused and the "right" resources necessary to address economic and other gaps that make it much harder for children from such households to succeed.

I used to get furious in how Michelle Rhee was allowed to shift the argument from resources to teacher blaming, when just about any successful charter school is successful because they have more resources in terms of special programs, more instruction time, etc. For example, the Harlem Children's Zone model ("The Harlem Project," New York Times).

But rather than argue for more targeted resources and innovative programs for children and schools in need along the lines discussed in various past blog entries ("Powerful story of how Bristol Virginia elementary school deals with extremely impoverished students," "Creating cultures of excellence in schooling," "International Baccalaureate program at an impoverished high school in Seattle as a way to improve academic outcomes," "Back to school as a reason to consider schools issues comprehensively"), the focus in DC was on tests and demonizing "bad teaching" (and failing to acknowledge that "bad teachers" were produced by the system, and that therefore, the system has some responsibility for dealing with that, rather than tossing people out.

Community Schools model as an alternative. A model for delivering an actual program for the "40/40" schools is the Community Schools concept, which is not new and pre-dates programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. It's about bringing to impoverished schools a wide variety of additional types of resources. 

Austin, Texas is one place where the Community Schools model has been shown to be particularly successful ("Years Into Austin’s Community Schools Experiment, National Policy Catches Up," Texas Observer).

The initiative came at the instigation of the advocacy group, Austin Voices for Education and Youth.

According to the report, Community Schools: Transforming Struggling Schools into Thriving Schools, two previously failing schools, Webb Middle School and Reagan High School are succeeding.

From 2010 to 2015, Webb went from the lowest-performing middle school in Austin ISD, based on its test scores, to one of its best. Its enrollment has grown 55 percent, and fewer students are leaving the school mid-year. Reagan’s enrollment has more than doubled and its graduation rate has improved from 48 percent to 85 percent.

The Observer says the report:

lauds Webb and Reagan’s discipline policies built on restorative justice, early college partnerships, daycare programs and mobile clinics for student mothers, new mental health and trauma support programs, on-campus English classes for parents, and new band, orchestra and dance troupes.

It's not that DCPS hasn't implemented bits and pieces of these kinds of programs here and there across the system.  But they haven't developed and implemented a comprehensive program.

And the Webb and Reagan schools are demographically comparable to the many school buildings that DCPS closed in Wards 7 and 8 ("Rethinking community planning around maintaining neighborhood civic assets and anchors").

What has prevented development of comparable stories of success in DC is a complete failure to develop, fund, and implement a real plan for improvement--asking and answering the right questions instead of the wrong ones.

And it's not apparent that anything will change with the new regime.

School reform "should be" "easy" but it isn't because we ignore the obvious

I can't help but think of the Winston Churchill quote:

You can always trust America to do the right thing, after she has exhausted all other possible alternatives

wrt "school reform."

I probably have a couple hundred pieces, most written back in the Michelle Rhee-Fenty years, about the issue.

Basically, students who are poor need access to more, better, and diverse school-based resources, complemented by family assistance programs, and other supports:

-- "Powerful story of how Bristol Virginia elementary school deals with extremely impoverished students," 2015
-- "Missing the most fundamental point about urban educational reform (in DC)," 2009
-- "Positive Deviance and the DC Public Schools," 2007
-- "Positive deviance in NYC school system remains unrecognized," 2006

The lesson from charter schools isn't that they are somehow better than traditional school settings, but for the most part, the charter schools that are touted tend to be examples of those that get more resources and supports than traditional schools.

-- "No wonder DC school systems are underperforming," 2016

DC efforts to do this -- provide more resources to students and schools with exceptional needs -- pretty much have never gotten off the ground ("Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward," which discusses the September 2016 Washington City Paper article by Jeffrey Anderson, "Left Behind: How Kaya Henderson Failed At-Risk DCPS Students") at least to the level that is required, although many high quality support programs have been created and implemented.

But systematic school-wide improvement programs haven't been funded or instituted along the lines of efforts such as in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Cheating and lies at Ballou High School.  So it should be no wonder with all the pressures to improve student outcomes, without providing the right kinds of supports and tools necessary to do so, that school administrators lie, cheat and obfuscate, and pass students who shouldn't be passed, which has come out with Ballou High School in DC ("DC plans probe of Ballou High School following report questioning standards," Washington Post). From the article:

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser launched an investigation Wednesday into allegations that some students who were chronically absent and others who could scarcely read and write were allowed to graduate from Ballou Senior High School in Southeast Washington.

The D.C. Council also announced that following the accusations, it plans to hold a hearing to investigate graduation rates in the city.

At a midday news conference, Bowser and D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson said they are taking the allegations seriously but stood by Ballou — a historically low-performing high school that has been touted for its seemingly rapid improvements in recent years — and its principal.

They never learn. After all, it took USA Today, not the Washington Post, to investigate the test score cheating that occurred in many DC schools during the Rhee years.

-- "How test cheating is a damning indicator of the problems with the prevailing approach to school "reform"," 2012

Note that I wrote about Ballou in 2005, "Street vs. Middle-class Culture in the DC School System."

IB as an program not susceptible to local cheating.  In a column yesterday, Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews made the point that in order to improve failing schools, they need an overt and independent reset ("The only way to fix bad high schools is to start over").  From the article:

Ballou has been one of the worst high schools in the country for decades. It would be best to send its poorly served students elsewhere — they can’t do worse at other schools — and start over.

The District has already tried that with encouraging results. Eastern High School shut down for renovation, and during the second year of its reopening, it had just a ninth-grade class. The school added a class each year as it took a remarkably steady, long-term approach to its students’ lack of preparation.

Future Eastern students were offered challenging classes designed by International Baccalaureate in three elementary and two middle schools. The Accelerated Cohort at Eastern (ACE) program was created for ninth- and 10th-graders who had shown “motivation and habits of mind to meet above grade-level academic standards,” as the program’s leaders put it.

This produced startling results. In 2016, Eastern gave 62 IB exams, which were three to five hours long. Forty-two percent of those exams received passing scores from independent graders. In the past on similar tests, the school’s passing rate was usually zero.

I agree.  He discusses the use of IB--International Baccaulaureate--at Eastern High School, with earlier development of IB at feeder elementary and junior high schools as the way to do it.

But he misses a huge point. Programs like IB have a system of accreditation and grading that is independent of the local schools that participate.

The advantage of IB is that it is a national/international program and system of accreditation that can't be gamed by local school administrators, because the testing protocols and grading are independent of the local schools.

That's the kind of reboot that schools like Ballou need.  Otherwise it's merely more of the "The soft bigotry of low expectations" (Washington Post column by Michael Gerson), because school administrators are incentivized to cheat, especially when they aren't provided with the right resources necessary for success.

Note that a few years ago I wrote ("International Baccalaureate program at an impoverished high school in Seattle as a way to improve academic outcomes") about how Rainier Beach High School in Seattle, one of that city's worst performing schools, rebooted through the introduction of IB, with some support--but not enough--from the central administration. 

But at the time I last wrote about it, the school system wasn't willing to provide the small amount of additional resources the school needed to maintain its IB accreditation ("Deal saves Rainier Beach High School's acclaimed IB program," Seattle Times).

This is merely one more example of how the additional resources required for schools serving the impoverished typically aren't forthcoming.

====
WRT the tenor of the Mathews column, for a number of years I've been writing that rebuilding failing schools, especially when so many of DC's high schools have paltry enrollments, is a waste of money, that instead we should be focusing on strengthening the existing schools.

-- "DC wastes $122 million on new high school: evidence of failures in capital improvements planning and budgeting," 2013
-- "DC high schools: capacity vs. enrollment," 2014
-- "DC high school that wasn't needed and built at a cost of $122 million wins sustainability award," 2015

In a neighborhood discussion of the coming renovation of nearby Coolidge High School, data shared stated that the school has had an enrollment of about 400 students !!!!!!! for many years.

DC high school enrollments, 2012-2013 school year

School	Enrollment
Anacostia	697
Ballou	791
Banneker	394
Cardozo	537
Coolidge	490
Dunbar	504
Eastern	504
Ellington	551
McKinley	697
Phelps	340
Roosevelt	473
School Without Walls	548
Wilson	1713
Woodson	710

It makes no sense!

This is why I argued that to reduce capacity pressures on Wilson School, Western High School (Ellington School of the Arts) should be converted to a regular high school, and Ellington shifted to one of the Ward 4 high schools -- either Roosevelt or Coolidge -- to allow the local school to focus and to add Metrorail proximity to the city-wide serving Ellington School.

Instead the city spent $175 million on rebuilding Ellington, and will spend close to that amount renovating Coolidge (and adding a middle school as part of the renovation).

Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward

DC's Schools Chancellor, Kaya Henderson, left her position at the end of September.  The Post, in articles and an editorial hailed her great accomplishments, although they are arguable, and never came close to fulfilling the measurable promises first made by Michelle Rhee to her foundation overlords -- Guy Brandenburg's series of articles evaluating Rhee's promises found a pass rate of 1.5 on 62 items ("Did Michelle Rhee Actually Close Those Achievement Gaps").

The Washington City Paper has a particularly blistering article, "Left Behind: How Kaya Henderson Failed At-Risk DCPS Students," assessing the Henderson era, as Kaya Henderson missed most of her goals on improving educational outcomes for children from low-income households.

... A 40/40 school is among the 40 lowest performing schools in the District. When she announced her plan, Henderson said her second-highest priority—“invest in struggling schools”—was to increase proficiency rates in those schools by 40 percentage points by the end of the current school year. Initially, DCPS defined “proficiency” according to the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS), designed to test mastery of English, math, and science according to local “content standards,” but it abandoned that metric after the 2013-2014 school year.

Schools designated as 40/40 schools have certain traits in common: They mostly reside in parts of the city plagued by high crime, high unemployment, high rates of disease and mortality, and high numbers of single-mother households. More than half are elementary schools, which experts agree is the educational stage that is most critical to any future prospects for success in academics—or life. ...

As Kaya Henderson departs DCPS, the schools are nowhere close to the goal she set, with marginal or inconsistent gains in some schools, stagnation in some, and losses in others, according to a City Paper review of DCPS performance data. DCPS, after four years, still lists 10 of the 40/40 elementary schools as “priority” schools, meaning they still need “intense support to address low performance of all students” and require “special quality monitoring and professional development.” Six are labeled “focus” schools, meaning they need “targeted support to address large achievement gaps,” according to the DCPS website. Just five are considered to be either “rising” or “developing.”

Which is not surprising, given that investment in 40/40 schools has ranged from non-existent to inequitable to compromised, according to DCPS funding data, proficiency scores, budget experts, and education watchdogs.

Meanwhile, the charter schools continue to grow their enrollment, and probably only the existence of Pre-K education for 3 to 5 year olds helps to keep DCPS enrollment figures up ("Report: Charter Enrollment Outpacing Traditional Public School System," Washington City Paper; "DC Public Schools See Seventh Consecutive Year of Increased Enrollment," Georgetown Hoya).

The resignation of Kaya Henderson offered the city and its media an opportunity to take stock, to compare DC's "reform" efforts to other cities, to gauge the impact of the charter schools on the traditional school system, to look in-depth at specific initiatives, and even to compare DC to other best practice K-12 efforts in the area (Arlington County, Montgomery County).

Outside of the City Paper article and some e-list discussion, such a review did not occur, even to how the Mayor inadequately followed the law on selecting a chancellor that was passed as part of shifting authority of the school system over to the Mayor from an elected school board ("Antwan Wilson confirmed as chancellor of DC Public Schools," Post).

Review: Lots of Pain, Minimal Gain. Perhaps the biggest problem in "reforming" K-12 education has to do with asking and answering the wrong questions ("Missing the most fundamental point about urban educational reform).

And ideology in terms of an anti-government or neoliberalism agenda that promotes charter schools, private schools and vouchers, or home schooling ("Mitt Romney: Trump has made a smart choice for education secretary," Washington Post) over what anti-government types are now calling, pejoratively,"government schools"

Although we must concede that school systems become bureaucratic and lose focus on what matters. Teacher's unions often end up focusing on maximizing pay. And too often personnel decisions can be particularly arbitrary--I know plenty of good teachers who got screwed by vindictive principals or other school administrators.

A failure to focus on the need for different types of resources.  But comparably to how I argue that the problem with a disinvested property is lack of investment and the solution to disinvestment is not demolition but investment, the problems around teaching low income children aren't solved by forcing students to spend lots of time studying for and taking tests or to fire the teachers, but are solved by providing additional, focused and the "right" resources necessary to address economic and other gaps that make it much harder for children from such households to succeed.

I used to get furious in how Michelle Rhee was allowed to shift the argument from resources to teacher blaming, when just about any successful charter school is successful because they have more resources in terms of special programs, more instruction time, etc. For example, the Harlem Children's Zone model ("The Harlem Project," New York Times).

But rather than argue for more targeted resources and innovative programs for children and schools in need along the lines discussed in various past blog entries ("Powerful story of how Bristol Virginia elementary school deals with extremely impoverished students," "Creating cultures of excellence in schooling," "International Baccalaureate program at an impoverished high school in Seattle as a way to improve academic outcomes," "Back to school as a reason to consider schools issues comprehensively"), the focus in DC was on tests and demonizing "bad teaching" (and failing to acknowledge that "bad teachers" were produced by the system, and that therefore, the system has some responsibility for dealing with that, rather than tossing people out.

Community Schools model as an alternative. A model for delivering an actual program for the "40/40" schools is the Community Schools concept, which is not new and pre-dates programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. It's about bringing to impoverished schools a wide variety of additional types of resources. 

Austin, Texas is one place where the Community Schools model has been shown to be particularly successful ("Years Into Austin’s Community Schools Experiment, National Policy Catches Up," Texas Observer).

The initiative came at the instigation of the advocacy group, Austin Voices for Education and Youth.

According to the report, Community Schools: Transforming Struggling Schools into Thriving Schools, two previously failing schools, Webb Middle School and Reagan High School are succeeding.

From 2010 to 2015, Webb went from the lowest-performing middle school in Austin ISD, based on its test scores, to one of its best. Its enrollment has grown 55 percent, and fewer students are leaving the school mid-year. Reagan’s enrollment has more than doubled and its graduation rate has improved from 48 percent to 85 percent.

The Observer says the report:

lauds Webb and Reagan’s discipline policies built on restorative justice, early college partnerships, daycare programs and mobile clinics for student mothers, new mental health and trauma support programs, on-campus English classes for parents, and new band, orchestra and dance troupes.

It's not that DCPS hasn't implemented bits and pieces of these kinds of programs here and there across the system.  But they haven't developed and implemented a comprehensive program.

And the Webb and Reagan schools are demographically comparable to the many school buildings that DCPS closed in Wards 7 and 8 ("Rethinking community planning around maintaining neighborhood civic assets and anchors").

What has prevented development of comparable stories of success in DC is a complete failure to develop, fund, and implement a real plan for improvement--asking and answering the right questions instead of the wrong ones.

And it's not apparent that anything will change with the new regime.

==============
Public Education Reform Amendment Act of 2007 (the mayoral takeover legislation).

Sec. 105. Chancellor; appointment; duties.

(a) The DCPS shall be administered by a Chancellor, who shall be appointed pursuant

to section 2(a) of the Confirmation Act of 1978, effective March 3, 1979 (D.C. Law 2-142; D.C. Official Code § 1-523.01(a)), and in accordance with subsection (b) of this section. The Chancellor shall:

(1) Be the chief executive officer of DCPS;
(2) Be qualified by experience and training for the position; and
(3) Serve at the pleasure of the Mayor.

(b)(1) Prior to the selection of a nominee for Chancellor, the Mayor shall:

(A) Establish a review panel of teachers, including representatives of the Washington Teachers Union, parents, and students ("panel") to aid the Mayor in his or her selection of Chancellor;

(B) Provide the resumes and other pertinent information pertaining to the individuals under consideration, if any, to the panel; and

(C) Convene a meeting of the panel to hear the opinions and recommendations of the panel.

(2) The Mayor shall consider the opinions and recommendations of the panel in making his or her nomination and shall give great weight to any recommendation of the Washington Teachers Union.

How many DC charter schools are defrauding the citizens by enrolling non-residents?

Whenever I ride by charter schools when students are being dropped off or picked up from school, I am struck by a disproportionate number of out-of-state license plates on the cars.  Sure, some of the children are probably in divorced households, with split custodianship, but not that many.

Earlier in the month, the Washington Post reported ("Excel Academy Public Charter School under scrutiny for alleged residency fraud") that two-thirds of the students at Excel Academy haven't been certified as being DC residents. That's the equivalent of almost $7 million in instructional funds being paid to support non-residents.

From the article:

Because students at the city’s public charters and traditional public schools must live in the District to attend — and receive an education funded with thousands of dollars in taxpayer money — enrolling from outside the city’s borders could be considered residency fraud. ... 

A copy of the audit, obtained by The Post, showed that just 196 of the 618 students enrolled at the school were in compliance with OSSE guidelines for residency verification. No documentation to verify residency was provided for 356 students, and 65 student files had residency documents that were out of compliance with OSSE guidelines, such as pay stubs that showed tax withholding in Maryland or utility bills or lease agreements that were provided without a corresponding receipt or canceled check. 

On Monday night, the charter board asked Deborah Lockhart, chair of Excel’s board of trustees, to speak at the board’s meeting “to provide us with assurance that the school was going to be running a clean enrollment operation,” Pearson said.

Separately, apparently two schools have been declared ineligible for playing in the annual high school football Thanksgiving Day game because of having nonresidents on the team.

I presume this is a big problem across many of the schools in the charter "system."

And no one is doing much about it, not the Public Charter School Board. Assurances are not enough. The school should be have a temporary receivership appointed, and a full audit of student residency should be conducted.

2.  This kind of fraud could be a great item for the new elected DC Attorney General to start off investigating. Separately, the current AG (non-elected) has initiated lawsuits alleging fraud against Options Charter School and the Community Academy PCS system for officials creating separate for profit businesses to provide high priced services to their schools, to the pecuniary benefit of the self-interested officials.

The complicated questions involved in the support or opposition to charter schools

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has a column, "Do some charter schools have too many white students," quoting former DCPS teacher Erich Martel and his contention that DC charter schools provide misleading reporting about educational outcomes, implying that theiir programs have extranormal benefits for low income children, when higher outcomes are most frequently obtained not from low income children, but by students from higher income households.

There's a complicated discussion in the piece about equity etc. From the article:

He told me he thinks some urban charters with high achievement rates “claim to be meeting the needs of children in poverty, but they are really just skimming off those who have the socialization for success in school and throwing the rest back to” the rest of the D.C. public schools.

This contradicts those who think having significant numbers of middle-class children is a plus for urban schools and should be encouraged. The nation’s leading advocate of giving urban schools a good mix of poor and affluent students is Century Foundation scholar Richard D. Kahlenberg. He has written several books on research showing such balanced enrollment raises achievement for all students. Racial integration is also good, he said, because that reduces racism and teaches students “what they have in common as Americans.”

I have spent much time in charters with almost no middle-class children but impressive achievement rates. The reasons of their success, in my view, are mostly better teaching and more time for instruction. But many educators, including Martel, think their test scores are higher because they attract more children raised with middle-class values, even if their parents don’t have much money.

Partly, the complications ensue because there are at least four reasons for creating charter schools and these reasons can conflict.

1.  Better educational outcomes for impoverished children;

2.  Competition for traditional public school systems with the intent of fostering improvement within traditional schools through organizational improvement initiatives spearheaded by "market-based competition;"

3.  Retention of families that otherwise might move out of center cities in search of better schooling choices;

4.  Demonization of government organizations of all types as failures in the promotion of a  neoliberal agenda promoting privatization.  ("Privatizing Public Education: The Neoliberal Model");

Too frequently anti-government and/or pro-privatization agendas are hidden within stated goals of improving opportunities for either poor or higher income children.

Plus some people object to the concept of "choice schools" being offered as a way to retain higher income families as center city residents, seeing this as ultimately an inequitable practice.

As I keep repeating, the irony of the purported "school reform" initiative of Michelle Rhee, former "chancellor" of the DC Public School system, is that as Mathews says, mostly better outcomes in charter schools comes from more instruction time and a greater variety of resources and programs.

Whenever people would say to Rhee that impoverished children need more resources, her response was "you're saying children can't learn."

And the school system didn't provide, for the most part, the kinds of additional resources provided by the best performing charter schools.

Three reasons why "equal funding" on a per student basis would favor DC charter schools over DC Public Schools

The Washington Post editorializes in favor of the DC Charter Schools campaign for "equal funding" ("D.C. charters deserve the same funding as traditional public schoolsD.C. charter schools sue city, alleging unequal funding").

1.  Special education.  Using average data on the "equality of per student funding" between charter schools and traditional schools is misleading, because the reported figures are averages.

The reality is that roughly one-third of the funding for traditional urban school districts is spent on special education, and special education students tend to comprise about one-sixth of the student body.

Charter schools do not have the same levels of special education enrollment.

2.  Student funding is set on enrollment data from the fall term.  Students frequently leave charter schools after this point for placements in traditional public schools, but the funding doesn't follow the student, it is retained by the charter school.  There is limited reciprocal movement of students from the DCPS system to charter schools to counter the financial disparities.

3.  Because charter schools are newer, the average legacy cost per staff member for health care, pensions, and other personnel related costs are significantly lower than for the traditional public schools.  These costs should be "backed out" of numbers used to calculate costs.