D.C. Charter Schools

Demand for the District's publicly funded, independently operated charter schools is at a high -- enrollment has risen an average of 13 percent annually since 2001. The charter school numbers are expected to rise further as frustration with the traditional school system grows.

Post staff writers Theola Labbe and Dion Haynes were online Thursday, April 26 at 2 p.m. to take your questions about the current and future status of D.C. charter schools.

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V. Dion Haynes: Hello everyone. Thanks for participating. I look forward to communicating with you.

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Former charter school teacher: I've worked in multiple D.C. charter schools and I find the turnover rate mind-boggling. It seems these schools pay very little and make no effort to retain teachers.

Most of these administrators have never been teachers, never been in education, and I have seen too many stories about fraud and corruption in the media -- and they only touch the tip of the iceberg! The last school I worked at, the school had insufficient money for textbooks, etc., yet the principal and others were making over $200k per year!

Yes, the D.C. public schools are a mess, but charters are no better. Your thoughts on this are appreciated.

V. Dion Haynes: Yes, we've written about a few charter schools that are the focus of federal investigations and charters that have been involved in questionable practices. The charter advocates will argue that the schools are under much more scrutiny than the traditional public schools -- the chartering authorities conduct thorough financial and academic audits -- and that the charters are subject to a shutdown unlike the traditional schools. But, apparently, those reviews haven't picked up on the type of problems that you're talking about.

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Fort Washington, Md.: Why are charter schools only in the inner city? And how long until they rear their head into PG County??

V. Dion Haynes: Some of the D.C.-based charter schools are looking to expand to Prince George's as well as elsewhere in the region and around the country.

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The District: Can anyone run a charter school in the District of Columbia? Can parents or teachers design their own school?

Theola Labbe: Good question. Any individual or group can apply to start a charter school in D.C. In addition, individuals can apply to convert an existing public school, or an existing private school, into a charter school. (For the conversions, there's a little more involved in terms of getting some number --not sure of the exact number -- of the existing staff to agree to the change.)

A few years ago Wilson SHS in the District was considering going charter, and Paul charter school in Ward 4 used to be a DCPS school.

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Washington, D.C.: Hi. It looks like the chartering board considers many new schools for chartering every year.

What are the newest charter schools under consideration by the D.C. chartering board like? Anything interesting or innovative among this year's applicants we can hold out hope for as a good option for our kids in a couple years?

Theola Labbe: Yes. It's application season and the D.C. Public Charter School Board is looking at 13 proposals right now. By law, the seven-member board appointed by the mayor can grant up to 10 new charters a year.

I'm starting to read some of the applications and they're fascinating. There's Washington Yu-Ying, a Chinese-English immersion school for prek-eighth grade; Citygate MultiCultural Academy, a K-8 school that would be managed by Mosaica Inc. and says it will give students a rigorous experience with a curriculum that is (like it's name) truly multicultural; and there's Achievement Preparatory Academy, which plans to gives students in grades 4-8 the ability to "excel as high-achieving scholars and leaders in high school, and beyond.")

And that's just a sample. Check out the charter board's Web site (www.dcpubliccharter.com) for more details on the school proposals, and the schedule of upcoming public hearings on these schools that are open to you, the members of the public!

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Washington, D.C.: Compared to their public school equivalents, are fewer D.C. charter schools meeting academic targets? If so, then why is that, given that charter schools typically have smaller sizes and more involved parents? Are there any D.C. charter schools that are doing better than their public school equivalents?

V. Dion Haynes: The charter advocates attribute the schools' failure to the introduction of a new, more rigorous student assessment in the spring of 2006. DCPS, in its role as a state education agency, designed the new assessment that its students and those from charters are required to take. DCPS also cites the new test as one reason why more of its schools failed to make academic targets. This is not an illogical argument: The same type of drop happened nationwide when the new SAT was introduced.

Still, given the fact that several charters were closed for academic problems and possibly two closed schools are under federal investigation, the low test scores are fueling a debate on whether the schools are any better than their traditional counterparts.

KIPP and Friendship Public Charter School Woodridge campus are two of the charters that made academic targets in 2006.

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Washington, D.C.: I have my kids in a DC public school and they are doing great. They are reading at a first-grade level in pre-K. I did research to find a great school in the system, though I did need to go out-of-boundary. I think the rush to charter schools is a poor choice. There are some stand outs, but based on the testing data, these schools on average are doing worse than our existing system. They seem to be much better at public relations than at teaching our kids.

The one thing I haven't gotten a straight answer on is if these schools are required to take kids with learning disabilities. The large percentage of challenged youth continues to be the biggest problem in the system and I've heard from some quarters that the charter schools don't have to take them. If that is true, the charter schools are not only doing worse, they are doing worse with an easier population. I know my school has picked up a couple students expelled from charter schools as behavior problems. How can they be allowed to reject students that our regular public schools have to take and then be compared to them fairly?

V. Dion Haynes: You raise some interesting issues. I hear from lots of anti-charter activists who allege that some charters sometimes reject students with disabilities and kick out students with behavior problems. So far, I haven't seen much data to support this. I know city officials are interested in seeing if this is the case. If you have any evidence or good examples of this, please let us know.

Theola Labbe: D.C. Parent, this is a question that I hear a lot, from everyone to parents like yourself to people who are working to found these schools.

Charter schools, by law, are supposed to accept every child who applies, as long as there's space. Now the applications vary from school to school -- I've seen some that ask for student essays and parental responses, others seem to be more like straight forms that just want your name and address.

The rub comes when the charter schools go through their application lists to make sure they can serve every child who signs up. For example, if a potential student needs intense daily speech therapy, and the school doesn't have a speech therapist, and has no money or plans to hire one, then perhaps both parties might decide that that charter school is not for them. So in your case, or in the case of any parent in a similar situation, it would depend on the kind of disability your child has, and whether they would be best served by that charter school.

Like Dion mentioned, we've heard anecdotal cases of students being steered away from schools, or kicked out because of behavior or other issues. But they're just that, anecdotal information, and we need facts to accurately pursue a story.

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SE, D.C.: Your article noted that five charters schools met annual yearly progress. Out of 55 schools or more, that is less than 10 percent! Is the DCPS percentage that low or better? I will admit that I am not a fan of the takeover, but this shows that the D.C. public education situation is not merely issues of schools but a social dynamic that is not being addressed.

V. Dion Haynes: Seven percent of charter campuses made adequate yearly progress in 2006 compared with 19 percent of the traditional public schools.

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Federal Center, D.C.: If city funds are provided to non-profits as a facility fund to run a government function and the non-profit uses that amount to purchase or lease land or a building, at the end, who owns the land? The city or the non-profit? Does the city retain the right of ownership for all the charters, which I assume are non-profits? I am just curious, the dedicated funding for building funds seems odd in that they are using it to buy property. Is it legal if the city does not own the land at the end? Apparently some of these schools are leveraging the facility funds to broader funding instruments.

V. Dion Haynes: Good question. That issue came up last year. The city invested millions of dollars to help operators of a residential special education facility called Jos-Arz renovate a building in Northeast. But when the school closed, the owners of the building put it up for sale. Members of the D.C. Council and Board of Education argued that the city should recover some of its investment, rather than allowing the owners to pocket a profit that resulted from the infusion of city money.

The council last year passed a law allowing the city to recover such funds when a charter is closed and sold. It will be interesting to see what type of legal challenges that law will face when the city steps in to block the sale of a building when the next charter school closes.

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Anonymous: I think I read recently that Mayor Fenty's school takeover plan had originally called for giving the Mayor or another part of the D.C. government further authority over charter schools, but that part of the plan was dropped. Do you think the Mayor will be supportive of the charter school movement, or is he a threat? I thought that charter schools were supposed to be independently operated, with oversight only for their results.

Theola Labbe: Thanks for this question. It's an interesting one to me because one thing I've noticed from covering charter schools here is that often the issues are portrayed as "us" vs. "them"; or "support" vs. "threat." I'm not really sure why that's the case.

One aspect of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's school takeover proposal would give the State Education Office (SEO), a city agency, authority to revoke a school's charter for financial or academic reasons. This would be a new power that this city agency would have.

Charter advocates like FOCUS- Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (www.focus-dccharter.org) deeply opposed this aspect of the bill, saying that since the SEO wouldn't be overseeing the schools all the time (that's the job of the charter board), they wouldn't know enough about them to judge if they should close or not. Also, as outlined in the federal law that created charters in D.C., charter schools are not part of the D.C. government, but are independently operated.

Everyone, let's not forget one important thing -- Fenty's bill is not a done deal. It's at Congress now, awaiting approval. Since Congress had such a large role in getting charters started in D.C., it wouldn't be surprising if senators and representatives tinkered with the charter part of the legislation. I know that advocates for the traditional school system have been making the rounds in the Capitol, pressing for changes to Fenty's bill, because they've e-mailed and called me about their actions. Perhaps charter advocates are also making the rounds too.

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D.C. parent: In response to SE, D.C.'s question and your response, yes, there may have been a lower percentage of charters that made the grade last year, but most charter schools, which are open to all students, regardless of DCPS boundary, target the most disadvantaged student populations.

There are not charter schools that have, like many of the DCPS in upper NW DC, largely wealthy and advantaged student populations. And most of the highly-performing DCPS are those that have the "advantaged" student populations.

So is it fair to charter schools to compare them on this basis?

V. Dion Haynes: What you say is true. But I'll reiterate the fact that a KIPP D.C. campus and Friendship's Woodridge campus made AYP. Low-income students represent more than 90 percent of both campuses. What that says to me is that poverty doesn't necessarily equate with low achievement.

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Happy parent of E.L. Haynes Public Charter School students: I just want to counter that our charter school, E.L. Haynes, DOES retain teachers year after year, DOES pay them well, and is an absolutely outstanding educational experience for my three children. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Never in my life have I met such dedicated and outstanding teachers and administrators as Haynes can boast.

If we hadn't gotten into E.L. Haynes, my family would likely have left the District for Maryland public schools. Many parents in the District do not have that option, and that is the sad part. Haynes will be able to serve 600-some students by the time we are at full capacity (preK through 12), by 2016, but EVERY SINGLE student in the District deserves the quality education that we offer. About 65 percent of our kids currently qualify for free or reduced lunch, by the way, and we aim to stay a very diverse school working to ensure that the playing field is level for all of our kids, not just the rich ones.

I encourage The Post to research us further; perhaps they could help us disseminate lessons about best practices, or at the very least dispel the myth that all charter schools in D.C. are bad.

At Haynes we are also determined to serve as a training resource for other teachers and schools so they too can achieve high levels of success. And we are managing all of this despite the effort that has to go into a several-million-dollar real estate deal to build our own facilities. We have tried and tried to find regular public school co-locations, but to no avail. Imagine what we could do without the real estate challenges.

So in closing I too would recommend that bad charter schools be closed (and this is already much more likely to happen with bad public charter schools than with bad traditional public schools, by the way), but by all means, let the good ones like E.L. Haynes do their job.

Theola Labbe: Thanks E.L. Haynes parent. I was at the school's groundbreaking last month and everyone there was indeed excited. one interesting thing about E.L. Haynes is that principal Jennie Niles doesn't want to multiply to several campuses, a growing trend we pointed out in the story, but wants to focus on her one school.

I've met Niles as well as other school leaders there and will certainly be watching how the school does, academically and with the space issue. I was at a meeting last night and saw your principal and rest assured, she's working on it!

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Washington, D.C.: I'm a parent of three children in D.C. Public Schools (high school, middle school and elementary so I have it all covered and, no, they are not all attending schools in NW). The combination of charter school authorizations (breeding like bunnies year after year with no accountability) and school vouchers are slowly amputating and "balkanizing" public school education in the District. I am aware that DCPS has not performed like it should but lost in all the talk about charter vs. non-charter vs. private is what public education has meant in this country and what it could and should mean to all D.C. citizens whether you have children in the school system or not. I think The Washington Post needs to report on the huge ramifications of this rather than the pros of one movement or another or a simplistic focus on testing. This deserves a series in The Post.

Theola Labbe: Thanks very much for bringing it back to academics. Because whether children are learning or not is the core question, no matter what environment they are in (charter/private/voucher/DCPS).

Rest assured that the paper is actually hard at work on some longer-term stories that you suggest and those will be published in the near future. Stay tuned.

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Washington, D.C.: Why does D.C.'s charter school authorizing board (the Public Charter School Board) include people from out of state? Tom Nida (Virginia resident) and Tony Colon (Maryland resident) seem intelligent, competent and dedicated to their roles, but is there a reason we can't find people like this who actually live here?

Theola Labbe: There's five members of the charter board right now -- its operating with two vacancies. Nida is the board chair and its other members include Colon, Dora Marcus, Will Marshall and Lawrence Patrick.

I don't have the home addresses of these board members so I can't verify that they live out of state or in-state. As public servants appointed by the mayor, they would go through a screening process by the mayor's boards and commissions agencies that would include whether they were a D.C. resident or not.

Just as parents and the public know about the school board, its important for them to also know about the individuals charged with making decisions about charter schools. The board meets monthly and its meetings are public. For more information on that, and the board member's bios, check out www.dcpubliccharter.com

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Washington, D.C.: Hi. I realize that charter schools are very different from one another, but is there any good data available on how D.C. charter-school grads fare as a group compared to DCPS students when it comes to getting into college (or into good high schools, for that matter)?

Thanks!

Theola Labbe: Sigh. Thanks for this question. The sigh is because I wish I could answer it. I haven't seen any comprehensive data that you mention. Each charter school keeps individual statistics on college-going rates, and DCPS keeps overall information as well as school-by-school. The charter board puts out an annual report on its schools, which includes graduation rates.

Perhaps the charter board or the city's education agencies are already working on developing this, but your question shows that there's a demand for more data.

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Washington, D.C.: What role does the DC Public Charter School Board play in all of this, and if they are so influential, why have I heard so little about them?

Theola Labbe: I think I got to this one earlier.....

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V. Dion Haynes: That was a very lively discussion. Thanks, everyone, for participating.

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Alexandria, Va.: Charter schools were presumably created so that children can receive a better education than one they would receive in a regular public school. Yet, most independent studies show that students' test scores are no better in charters than in regular schools. At what point do the authorities say "Hold on, why are we taking resources out of regular schools to put in charter schools that are not providing the as advertised superior education"?

Theola Labbe: It's been 10 years since charters first came to D.C. and things have changed dramatically during that time. The D.C. Board of Education, which was given power by Congress to open up charter schools, decided several times that it wanted to pump the brakes so to speak, and not authorize any more schools until they study further issues like test scores and locations of schools. Then the school board voted up to give up its chartering power altogether last year, and Fenty's bill strips them of the ability to open charter schools.

It's an interesting pivotal time for charter schools and the city's entire education system. The Charter board will have authority for ALL of the city's 55 charter schools, plus new ones opening next year, plus how many more new schools they decide to approve. How much is enough? That decision is partly in their hands, and I imagine that that discussion will be happening in the months and years to come.

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Theola Labbe: Thanks to all for the great questions. Keep those story ideas coming to labbet@washpost.com.

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