I think we have no idea about just how difficult is the challenge of urban schooling

Last year, the Richmond School District merged two low-enrollment high schools into one. The Richmond Times-Dispatch monitored this change over the course of the past year and today ran a special 8-page section, "Put to the test: A year at the new Armstrong High."

It's worth reading and it certainly provides food for thought in terms of thinking about DC Schools, where according to the Post in the article "Reinventing The Route to D.C. Diploma: Fast-Track Course Load, 5th-Year Option Planned," "One D.C. school system report showed that though 4,207 students enrolled as ninth-graders in 2000, only 2,740 graduated four years later. But the study did not account for students transferring into or out of the D.C. system."

Something I read in the Post more than 10 years ago clued me into the fact that the average center city urban school district spends upwards of 33% of total funding on special education, representing a student population of about 10%.

The stories in the Richmond paper remind me of a phone call I received a couple years ago from the social worker at Gibbs Elementary School in northeast DC. She was looking for a list of businesses that might be willing to make donations of alarm clocks, because the children "have no one to make sure that they get up in the morning to come to school."

Now, by default, charter schools are setting the education agenda in the City of Washington, as seen by the quantum leap in the granting of charters for new schools. Today's Post reports in "As D.C. Charter Schools Grow, Competition for Space Tightens," that "The number of D.C. public charter schools will grow from 42 to as many as 61 over the next year, making a shortage of affordable buildings even more acute, according to charter school advocates."

At first, I was supportive of the charter school movement, because I think it's wrong to hold students hostage to broad educational philosophies about the importance of the overall school district. If the school system isn't doing the job, does that mean that we should force students to remain with that system, in order to keep that system intact? After all, Everett Rogers in research recounted in the book Diffusion of Innovations, found that K-12 school systems were the most resistant to change of all major institutions in American life.

Now, I have serious reservations. By default, charter schools are becoming the primary "neighborhood planning organizations" because of the way Congress intervenes and by law provides charter schools with first dibs and first right of refusal on all DC Government properties deemed surplus.

Maybe a charter school disconnected from the immediate neighborhood isn't always the best use for such properties given other needs and interests on the part of a community for service. In the article "Senator Targets Underused Schools: D.C. Buildings Should Be Closed and Resources Redistributed, Brownback Says," the issue of under-utilized school properties is discussed, but by giving charter schools first rights, consideration of neighborhood and/or other city priorities and needs are removed from the discussion.

Plus, charter schools are not neighborhood schools, they have city-wide enrollments, and they end up disconnecting the school from the neighborhood, when normally, neighborhood schools are the foundation of stabile neighborhoods.

Plus, they add greatly to the number of car trips around the city every morning and afternoon, as students travel to schools far from their neighborhoods, and the trips are usually inefficient from a public transit standpoint, leading to greater automobile usage.