David Koenig: How public are DC’s public charter schools?
In DC nearly half of all public school students attend charter schools, rather than schools in the traditional public system known as DC Public Schools (DCPS). Although the charter schools are “public” in a sense — they are open to residents of the District free of charge — they are governed by boards of directors that are anything but public.
The several hundred men and women who make decisions regarding the budgets and operations of DC’s charter schools are not elected by anyone, and they are not accountable to students, families or employees of the school in any meaningful way. Not only are they unelected, but they are free to do their business — making fundamental decisions about the schools they govern — largely in private. This is because DC’s charters are not subject to basic transparency requirements that apply to charters in most states. Two key DC laws that apply to government entities are the Open Meetings Act, which requires meetings “at which official action of any kind is taken” to be open to the public; and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows members of the public to obtain documents related to public business.
What would members of the public want to know about these schools that they’re unable to find out currently? I can think of a few examples, beginning with one from personal experience. In the 2016-17 school year I organized a teachers’ union at Paul Public Charter School. The school fought against our union with a number of sophisticated tactics, assisted by the giant international law firm Jones Day. I would like to know how many public dollars the school paid that firm to help it deny collective bargaining rights to its employees instead of spending that money on resources that could have benefited our students. I could obtain that contract via a simple FOIA request, if the school’s board were subject to that law.
In other instances, job applicants or employees might want to access a school’s salary scale or policy, but most charter schools do not make that information public. Teachers and parents might want to attend a board meeting where the school’s officers discuss increasing class sizes in order to bring in more money in per-pupil funding, but they are only allowed to do so if their school decides to open its board meetings to the public. If our elected officials are serious about engaging the community and empowering parents in our schools, opening all of those schools up to public scrutiny would be a good place to begin.
In order to bring some grass-roots pressure to bear on those officials, I and other teachers on the EmpowerEd Teacher Council wrote a petition — sending it first to charter school teachers but eventually sharing it with a wider circle of public education stakeholders — calling on the DC Council, and Public Charter School Board to subject public charter schools to the same transparency requirements as traditional public schools. After two weeks in circulation, the petition has so far gained about 385 signatures and counting.
Just days after the petition was initially circulated, the board of Cesar Chavez Public Charter School decided to close its one remaining middle school — Chavez Prep, which just happens to be the only unionized charter school in the city. The school’s board made this decision in secret (its meetings are not open to the public, despite repeated requests from the teachers’ union that open meetings be a term of their contract), with no input from, or discussion with, the school’s families or employees.
While this decision is disappointing and even heartbreaking for the entire school community, it also has the potential to serve as a galvanizing event — awakening the public to the need for public schools to be held publicly accountable. At the Jan. 28 meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board, members of the Chavez union, along with other teachers and parents, packed the hearing room; one by one, the attendees called on the board to enact or support true transparency requirements for charter schools.
The principle is simple: Public schools should do their business publicly.
David Koenig is a teacher at Washington Latin Public Charter School.
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