D.C. Officials Should Include Charters in Efforts to Improve Schools

Washington's still-burgeoning charter schools movement is both an embarrassment to and a role model for the city's regular public schools. As Chancellor Michelle Rhee moves from the first, flashy chapter in her whirlwind reform drive -- fixing decrepit buildings and shutting down excess schools -- to the even tougher assault on chronic low achievement and low expectations, the charter system stands as a constant reminder that parents are voting with their feet.

There are 22,000 kids in D.C. charter schools and 50,000 in the regular public schools. At the rate of growth the charters have experienced in recent years, the majority of D.C. students will be in charters by 2014. Perhaps the exodus from the public system won't continue at quite the same pace, but the message is clear: Parents put a huge value on schools perceived as safe and locally run, even if the performance measures of those schools aren't necessarily any better than those of their neighborhood school.

But the city's political establishment continues to fight the charters or relegate them to secondary status. Throughout the debate over Rhee's drive to shut 23 schools because they are hugely underenrolled, there has been little discussion about who will gain control of those buildings. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, whose administration controls their fate, says they will be used to house social services and other D.C. agencies that are hungry for space or eager to move out of expensive office rentals. But the law requires that school facilities no longer used by the public system be made available to charter schools.

The D.C. Council, which oversees the school system now that the school board has been put out of business, has issued a report arguing that it's time to slam the brakes on the growth of the charter schools. The report calls on the council to "work with the U.S. Congress to address the chartering of new schools" and suggests that the Public Charter Schools Board, an independent body that governs many charters, become "a District of Columbia entity." The report questions the very existence of the charters: "School choice may be worthy of review and may require revision."

But there is no stuffing this genie back in the bottle. The quality of charter schools varies to a frightening degree, ranging from excellent and adventuresome to downright criminal, with a whole lot of mediocrity in the middle. But with rare exceptions, parents see charters as a place where their kids will be safe, where committed teachers work and where children will not drift through as anonymous bothers to staffers counting the days to retirement.

Advocates for the charter system, while often far too suspicious of efforts to ensure some base level of competence at charters, have the advantage of having the public on their side. As Robert Cane, head of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a pro-charter group, noted in a recent memo, charter enrollment keeps growing at an average of 15 percent a year, and he cited a survey that found D.C. residents in favor of charters by a wide margin.

Charters remain relatively underfunded: The charter budget is about 30 percent of the regular system's, but the tally of students in the charter system is 44 percent of the regular public school enrollment.

If District politicians are concerned about abuses of public money, they should seek a way out of the congressionally imposed school vouchers program, which is much smaller than the charter system, contains no mechanism for oversight, subsidizes religious institutions with taxpayer dollars and provides no meaningful competition that might spur the regular system to improve itself.

Charter schools are public institutions, even if they don't operate nearly as transparently as regular public schools. The same politicians who back Rhee and Fenty in their reform efforts should focus on improving charters and giving them the facilities they need, not on trying to limit the one piece of Washington's school system that parents are embracing.