What Could a Neighborhood Admissions Preference Mean for DC’s Neediest Students?
The District of Columbia is known for its commitment to public school choice. If parents do not want to send their child to their neighborhood school, they can apply to an out-of-boundary DC public school or to any DC public charter school. But what happens when the most sought-after schools do not have enough seats available to meet the demand? Or what happens if your neighborhood DC public school (DCPS) closes but you cannot get into a nearby charter school because it accepts students city-wide?
One idea to be studied by a task force this summer is a neighborhood admissions preference for DC public charter schools. As the number of DCPS schools decline, helping families to access public charter schools in their neighborhoods is important to consider. But the District can use the opportunity of this task force to look at broader issues, too, including how to help more low-income students get access to the highest-performing schools.
Currently, if a DC charter school has more applications than available seats, students are selected through a random lottery (after preference is given to siblings of enrolled students and children of the school’s board members/founders). A neighborhood preference for a share of each charter school’s seats could mean a family living near a charter school has a greater chance for admission.
There are mixed reactions to this concept. Supporters believe it is unfair that parents who live near a high-quality charter school are not able to send their children there. This forces many DC children to travel far to go to school, which is inefficient, costly, and may prohibit some families from being able to access a better school. Many residents also feel that if low-performing schools are replaced with charters as recommended in a recent study of DC school quality, then a neighborhood admissions preference could help these families get access to the new schools first.
Others worry that this type of preference would lead to greater levels of segregation. Because many higher-performing charter schools are in middle class neighborhoods, neighborhood preference could, in some cases, make it harder for low-income students to get in, and would essentially displace low-income children by catering to more affluent neighborhood residents instead.
The task force will be led by Brian Jones, board chair of the DC Public Charter School Board. Other members now being selected will include representatives from government agencies, charter schools, researchers, and charter school advocates. The meetings, which should be open to the public, will take place this summer to complete the final report with recommendations by Sept. 1, 2012.
The task force is only charged with exploring a neighborhood preference but, why stop there? With all the right people in the room, why not maximize this opportunity to increase access for our city’s neediest students? DCFPI recommends the task force also consider a “weighted lottery” to give low-income students a preference in charter admissions. Research confirms that these students face the greatest educational barriers and that they benefit significantly from being in academically rigorous environments. A similar recommendation for the funding formula already came out of the DC Public Education Finance Reform Commission. Adding an income preference to the charter lottery system would truly increase access to quality schools for our neediest students. As they work through what works best for DC, DCFPI urges the task force to take the conversation even further to level the playing field for education.
This made laugh. “The District of Columbia is known for its commitment to public school choice.”
[...] But the DC Fiscal Policy Institute says the task force should go a step further and consider preference for low-income students. (DCFPI, [...]
Soumya,
This post seems to be founded on a few assumptions that I would question.
1. Charter schools are not categorically more academically rigorous than neighborhood schools. There is a similar range among charters and DCPS schools — some good, some awful. Both sectors have relatively low student achievement on standardized tests (not that its a very good measure of school quality). So you are perpetuating a myth not born out by data. Average data is marginally better for charter schools, but this does not warrant the sweeping generalizations in your piece.
2. You seem to be advocating the expansion of the charter sector and to be assuming the contraction of the DCPS sector. Such assumptions contribute to a self-fulfilling prophesy and impacts policy. Have you actually taken a position that DC has too many schools? And do you support the continued expansion of charters in the face of that?
3. You are ignoring the factors that underlie school quality and instead make broad generalizations based on sector. The fact is that charter schools have very little in common with each other. They do not use strategies in common. They tend to have very high rates of teacher turnover — higher than the high rates in DCPS. They seem to have no common system of quality control. When the charter board closes a school it is usually for fiscal reasons, not because the academic program is “insufficiently rigorous.”
4. The assumption that seems to be lacking in your post is that this city needs a systemic approach to improving its schools. The problem right now is that both sectors are rife with churn and instability. Neither sector can hang onto its teachers or pricipals. Getting more kids into charters is not a systemic approach to the problems the city faces. In and of itself it is not reform. It is an excuse for failing to have a strategy for improving the quality of teaching and learning.
I would suggest that the Fiscal Policy Institute re-think its posture of climbing on what seems like a bit of a lazy bandwagon of assuming that the continued expansion of charter schools, located randomly, with little accountability, and using random education strategies somehow represents a solution for our city.
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. DCFPI did not intend to promote public charter schools as the preferred educational model in DC in this blog. In fact, we have concerns about the city’s rapid expansion of charter schools and the impact of having two competing education sectors on the city’s finances, the future of DCPS, and on DC residents.
The blog was written specifically on the mandate in the FY 2013 budget to create a task force to study a neighborhood admissions preference for charter school. Given that charters now have an admissions policy that is distinct from DCPS and that there is an effort to consider modifying it, we decided to weigh in on this narrow issue. As a result, the language around access to a quality learning environment may have given the impression that such environments are only found in charter schools. But that was not the intent. Similarly, by not setting more context with a discussion of the larger system issues around the growth of charter schools, we may have implied that we accept the inevitable growth of charters and the further decline of DCPS, but that wasn’t our intent, either.
We agree that altering the admissions process for charter schools is not a systemic change or itself adequate to address the needs of low-income students. We would welcome an opportunity to talk about these larger issues with you.
This sounds good on paper. Until you realize that middle class parents of all races in DC are at a wits end and a fair chance at a charter when you neighborhood school is poor is all that barely keeps them in the city. If a significant preference is give based on income there may be an unintended consequence of the reversion of the middle class influx which adds to the quality of the schools and the bottom line of the tax revenue. A small preference may have little effect, but perception is often everything.
Thank you for your comment. You’re right that a balanced approach is key. We want to focus on helping low-income children without squeezing out middle class families.
If I’m not mistaken, there are more low-income students in DCPS than middle income students. No matter if you shuffle them to charter schools or not, if the balance in each school changes too much to favor low income students, the quality of the schools will go down. What I mean is that it has been shown that if you have no more than 40% of low income students in a school vs. 60% of middle income students, everyone does better in the school. My concern about giving more preferences to low income students is that the balance will be shifted. Middle income parents are not going to want to keep their children in schools that loaded with low-income students because they know that the culture will change and the school will probably turn into a failing one.