Ramona Edelin: School choice works for DC students
Each year, the week commencing with Martin Luther King Jr. Day also marks National School Choice Week, during which a kaleidoscope of educational organizations, school leaders, teachers, parents, guardians, students and elected officials come together to communicate the achievements and potential of choice in education. This year was no different, but there’s an important underlying fact that we in DC need to recognize.
Public charter schools are the most popular, fastest-growing form of choice. Some 3.2 million students attend them nationally, equal to 6 percent of all public school students, according to statistics from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Another 1 million students are on waitlists to attend charters, representing another 2 percent. After the first of these unique public schools opened in Minnesota in the early 1990s, the reach of charters has spread to all but six states, and enrollment shows no signs of slowing down.
Demand for the charter alternative is highest across urban America — where the top-down, centralized school district model most dramatically failed its students. The share of charter students as a proportion of all public school enrollment is 92 percent in New Orleans, 52 percent in Detroit and 48 percent in DC.
As taxpayer-funded and tuition-free entities that are nonetheless operationally independent of traditional public school systems, charters are free to innovate while being held accountable for improved student performance. Charters offer school choice to all, regardless of income or ZIP code.
In the nation’s capital, the benefits of this education reform have stretched far beyond the nearly half of public school students who are educated by charters. Those who attend traditional public schools have also benefited, as charters’ growth inspires reforms to the entire system. The high school graduation rate for DC charters is over 50 percent higher than that which prevailed in the public school system before their introduction in the late 1990s. This has enabled many more students to gain access to college. Moreover, citywide standardized tests scores have improved even as the exams have become more academically rigorous; curricula have become more varied and diverse; and a multiplicity of extracurricular activities have been added.
The expansion of choices has also opened new college and career options for DC children, with charters developing a variety of specialties. Some programs focus on eliminating the pre-K achievement gap; others emphasize expeditionary learning and college prep. Specialized educational themes at DC charters include law, public policy, bilingual immersion, world languages, classics, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. The track record of success has resulted in more than 11,000 waitlisted students seeking spots at charter schools unable to accommodate them.
This college-and-career lifeline is essential for neighborhoods where substandard schools were the norm for decades, particularly in communities where functional adult illiteracy impacts 1 in 2 adults, according to the DC State Education Agency’s report, “The State of Adult Literacy.”
Sadly, charter schools’ many achievements, especially among the least advantaged, are marred by the DC government’s reluctance to support this groundbreaking reform. While the city’s own analysis found that nearly 40,000 additional high-quality public school seats are needed, the government continues to underfund charter school students compared to their traditional public school counterparts. One study by DC public school financing expert Mary Levy put the annual per-pupil discrepancy at $2,150.
Among the many data points — and charters led the way in bringing data into schools to boost academic performance — two stand out in DC. The rate of African-American charter students graduating high school in four years is almost identical to the overall average for DC charter school students. And charter students in wards 7 and 8 — the city’s most underserved areas — are twice as likely to meet college and career readiness benchmarks as their peers in the traditional public school system. This success among the city’s most economically disadvantaged students demonstrates how charters offer quality public education to those whose need is greatest, an achievement that eluded previous approaches.
DC charters have achieved these gains even though their student population has a higher share of disadvantaged and minority students than the city’s traditional system does. Besides being unfair — especially to some of DC’s most vulnerable students — this unequal funding is also against DC law, which requires equal per-student funding for school operating costs for students of the same grade or level of special education.
The same neglect of charter school students’ needs is revealed in school facilities funding, for which the government provides $1 for every charter student compared to $3 spent per student in the city-run school system. To make matters worse, the city continues to flout other provisions in DC law by selling surplus schoolhouses to private developers without offering them to charter schools first; meanwhile, charters struggle with limited dollars to acquire school space.
It’s frustrating to have to highlight these same points year after year, but it’s important that we not just accept these discrepancies. For their significant contributions to public education, charters deserve the enthusiastic and evenhanded support of our elected officials.
Ramona Edelin is executive director of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools.
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