Irene Holtzman and Maya Martin Cadogan: DC board should respect military and local parents’ preferences for a Ward 8 charter school

Two years ago, a group of parents began laying the groundwork for a proposed new public charter school. On the edge of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Ward 8, it holds great promise for children from the surrounding neighborhoods as well as those who live on the base–and will be open to any DC student. The DC Public Charter School Board will decide next week whether to approve the new school.

As the leaders of two education-focused organizations here in DC, we strongly support the application by LEARN Charter School Network to open a pre-K-through-eighth-grade school on a piece of land that will be provided by the U.S. Navy. As proponents of high-quality school options for all students, regardless of where they live, we see the plan as a great asset to Ward 8, where high-quality schools are too rare.

There are many reasons to cheer this proposal. The LEARN Charter School Network is enthusiastic about serving students in transient families — military and local — and has experience doing so. Its schools have been willing to take in students mid-year, even when that may hurt the way they look on paper by bringing down proficiency rates. The Defense Department is making land and a building available at a time when charter schools have an unnecessarily hard time finding and affording space. Finally, when we analyzed academic and other available data from a similar LEARN school serving military and local students in Illinois, we found that it would qualify as a Tier 1 school, the highest quality category, if it were subject to DC’s charter-rating system.

Far more important than what we think, however, is the recommendation of the group of parents that invested hundreds of hours over many months to identify what they want in a new school for the neighborhood and their children. They solicited proposals, visited schools and selected LEARN as the operator they want in their community.

The two of us helped launch the Ward 8 Parent Operator Selection Team (POST) project in fall 2016 with a simple concept: If you are going to bring a new school to a neighborhood, you should put parents in charge — actually, really in charge — of identifying what they want for their kids and deciding who gets to run that school.

The unprecedented process of parent leadership — not just parent voice — led to a well-informed and deeply community-based recommendation that should hold considerable weight with the DC Public Charter School Board, which is scheduled to vote on LEARN’s application Nov. 19. At a time when some neighborhoods are skeptical of well-meaning educational organizations that tell them what is good for them, here was a group of parents who reached out and told prospective school operators what they wanted. This time the school operators were answering to the parents. If we truly believe that school choice is a way for parents to make the best choices for their students, then how can we not acknowledge and honor the process in which these parents took part?

Four parents from the military base and four from the adjacent Ward 8 neighborhoods led the effort, organizing 11 meetings where the two of us joined with invited experts to help educate POST members about school finance, academic achievement scores, special education, facilities, and the process of writing and evaluating a Request for Proposals (RFP). When we were not presenting to the group, we and other advisers sat at the edges of the room. We tried hard not to express any opinions.

Members started by identifying their values. They discovered that they were all looking for the same things — regardless of any racial, economic and cultural differences, or whether or not their families lived on base. They all wanted strong academics, of course. But they also wanted a school that would support the emotional and social needs of their children. For military students, that means understanding the issues of transiency and the stresses of having a parent who might be deployed away from home. For many local students, there are the stresses of gun violence, poverty and housing instability, as well as low achievement levels that don’t match the kids’ brilliance. Over the course of the POST project, the parents came to see these different stressors as needing similar solutions, and they took collective responsibility for meeting the needs of all the children in both communities.

Five school operators submitted proposals — itself an extraordinary testament to the work that went into the RFP and to the recognized demand for high-quality educational options for students at the base and in the adjacent neighborhoods.

When POST members visited LEARN 6 in North Chicago, they quickly saw they had been right to score the written proposal highly on the kinds of factors that “technocrats” like us want to see in a publicly funded and accountable school. And it felt right: The choice of LEARN reflected the added wisdom brought by parents and community members who know what works best for their children and families — something that no administrator, policy analyst or elected official could bring.

Whether it’s here in DC or in any community, we believe that parents should determine what they need and that prospective school operators should answer to them — not the other way around. And we believe that when we put parents in charge, we should honor the choices they make.

Irene Holtzman is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), which is DC’s principal advocate for public charter schools. Maya Martin Cadogan is founder and executive director of Parents Amplifying Voices for Education (PAVE), a nonprofit focused on creating a DC public education system made with families. A case study chronicling the Ward 8 POST process is available at Ward8POST.org.