A Boom for D.C. Charter Schools

Tom Porter, director of real estate and operations at Building Hope, said he'd like the school system to provide charter schools the 2.5 million square feet that school officials say they don't need.

Abdusalam H. Omer, the school system's chief business operations officer, said he will propose to the school board tonight that it make one of the five closed schools, McGogney Elementary in Southeast, available to charter schools for short-term leasing. He also wants to give charter schools access to some of the nearly 20 schools that the Board of Education is proposing to close over the next decade. "These are huge buildings, and you can earn money . . . when a tenant comes in," he said.

Congress passed legislation in 1996 allowing charter schools in the District, and the nation's capital has been fertile ground for the movement. The city's 55 charter schools are operating on 71 campuses, and the District has the highest concentration of charter students in the nation behind New Orleans, according to the Center for Education Reform.

The boom has not been hampered by poor test results. Seven percent of charter schools met No Child Left Behind standards last year, compared with 19 percent of the traditional public schools. The dismal results in part prompted Fenty (D) to propose giving the State Education Office the authority to revoke charters.

Charter schools offer "a pretty picture painted on the outside that doesn't reflect what is going on inside," said Cherita Whiting, a member of Save Our Schools, a group that opposes charter schools. Three years ago, Whiting said, she switched her son back to a traditional school from a charter school, where she was a trustee, because the charter school failed to meet academic targets and lacked what she considered an adequate number of certified teachers.

But in a forthcoming book, "Charter Schools: Hype or Hope?" its authors, Jack Buckley, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City, and Mark Schneider, a political scientist at Stony Brook University in New York, report that most parents of D.C. charter school students say they believe that the schools have more qualified teachers, a safer environment because of strong discipline, better academics and more involved parents.

"I feel that charter schools . . . genuinely care about the students," Angela Allen, whose 13-year-old son Christopher attends SEED, said in an interview.

Capital City, in Columbia Heights, was among the 66, out of 71, charter campuses that did not meet No Child targets. Parents have indicated in surveys that they love its curriculum -- children explore topics in depth through semester-long projects -- and its near-even blend of whites, blacks and Latinos, officials said. The school has 600 students on its waiting list, prompting officials to begin planning a second campus for seventh- to 12th-graders in 2008. "A lot of these kids would be lost in the neighborhood public school," said Anne D. Herr, Capital City's founder and executive director.

Looming on Benning Road SE is the carcass of the Fletcher-Johnson Educational Center, a 300,000-square-foot building that the school board ordered shuttered last summer because of low enrollment. Across the street is the site that KIPP DC purchased to build a $27 million campus for KEY Academy, a school with grades 5-8 now leasing space in a commercial building at the Navy Yard, and LEAP Academy, a new elementary school.

Opened in 2001 as KIPP DC's first campus, KEY Academy, with a 99 percent black student body, has the highest middle school test scores in the city and is among the five charter campuses that met No Child targets. Demand for the program, which has nine-hour days, Saturday classes, mandatory summer school and an emphasis on good behavior, prompted officials to open two more campuses.

Like Friendship, KIPP DC is working to become a self-contained school system, with two elementary schools, three middle schools and a high school by 2009. KIPP officials predict that enrollment will quadruple by 2013, to 2,600.

Susan Schaeffler, KIPP DC's executive director, said the ideal option would be to lease space in a closed or under-enrolled school building. Last summer, the school board nearly killed KIPP DC's proposal to place a new middle school in an elementary school in Shaw, then approved it a few weeks before it was scheduled to open.

That experience, Schaeffler said, was a factor in KIPP DC's decision to purchase land rather than negotiate with the school system.

Too much red tape, too time-consuming, Schaeffler said.

Staff writer Jay Mathews contributed to this report.