Update, 4:20 p.m.: D.C. Public Schools is pursuing the authority to create charter schools and turn existing schools under its purview into charters, the schools chancellor said Thursday.
"The reason I would pursue my chartering authority is two-fold," Chancellor Kaya Henderson said. "One is I think that for a number of our schools that are doing very well, what we know is autonomy allows for innovation, and allows for people to be successful."
Henderson added that charter-school planning has not been "planful." Many charter schools operate in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods where the DCPS school is underperforming.
"First [charters] starve the DCPS school, and then they ultimately starve each other, and that's not a good use of all our resources," Henderson told D.C. Council members at the annual DCPS performance oversight hearing. "I think we’d be able to encourage charter providers to go where we need them most and fill in gaps we can't accomplish."
Council Chairman Kwame Brown said he has met with Henderson and members of the charter school board, and have "some rough-draft things written up."
Currently, chartering is the exclusive authority of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. A recent study commissioned by the deputy mayor for education's office recommended that three dozen DCPS schools be closed or transformed into charter schools, causing a stir among officials and families.
Unlike DCPS schools, students aren't guaranteed a slot in a charter school in their own neighborhood. Admission to charters is given through a districtwide lottery, with preference given only to charter founders' children.
Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells suggested that if DCPS is granted chartering authority, they could require charter schools to give preference to children who live near the school -- particularly if their DCPS neighborhood school is closed.
However, Pearson cautioned that such a move must be done carefully. "The first risk is that because it's an afterthought, it's not the main thing [the traditional school system does], they don't provide as good oversight, and I think we saw that in the past in D.C. with the board of education," Pearson said.
Before the charter school board, the D.C. Board of Education was the chief authorizer of charters. The board relinquished its power in 2006 as general consensus became that it had lax standards and was not properly regulating the schools.
The second risk of granting charter authority to a school system is that traditional school systems tend to place many more constraints on charter schools than an independent authorizer would, said Pearson, who formerly oversaw charter programs at the U.S. Department of Education.
"Sometimes at the federal department we referred to them as 'faux-charters,'" Pearson said.
Charter schools enroll 41 percent of the District's public school students, and have outpaced DCPS in both test scores and enrollment growth.
A number of D.C. Public Schools, such as Stanton Elementary and Anacostia Senior High, are run by charter operators even as they remain a part of DCPS.
Washington Teachers' Union President Nathan Saunders said he is encouraged by the success of such programs, but said he did not have enough information to know whether teachers would support DCPS having chartering authority. He said he believed teachers in these hypothetical DCPS charters would remain union members.
"Today's oversight hearing requires a meeting immediately," Saunders said. "These aren't things we should be guessing about."
Original post:
D.C. Public Schools is pursuing the authority to create charter schools, the schools chancellor said Thursday.
"The reason I would pursue my chartering authority is two-fold," Chancellor Kaya Henderson said. "One is I think that for a number of our schools that are doing very well, what we know is autonomy allows for innovation, and allows for people to be successful."
Henderson added that charter-school planning has not been "planful." Most charter schools operate in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods where the DCPS school is underperforming.
"First [charters] starve the DCPS school, and then they ultimately starve each other, and that's not a good use of all our resources," Henderson told D.C. Council members. "I think we’d be able to encourage charter providers to go where we need them most and fill in gaps we can't accomplish."
Council Chairman Kwame Brown said he has met with Henderson and members of the charter school board, and have "some rough-draft things written up."
Currently, chartering is the exclusive authority of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which has been nationally acclaimed for its aggressive moves to open new schools and close failing charters.
Charter schools enroll 41 percent of the District's public school students, and have outpacted DCPS in both test scores and enrollment growth.
Some D.C. Public Schools, like Stanton Elementary and Anacostia Senior High, are run by charters even as they remain a part of DCPS.
It is not clear how chartering authority within DCPS would work — notably, whether Henderson would share the authority with the charter school board, and whether schools chartered by DCPS would remain within DCPS.
