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Reply to "Who attends charter schools?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, OP, sorry if this is long. I will try to be blunt as you haven't heard this before.

DC has several different settlement patterns. West of Rock Creek Park is an enclave of some of the country's most highly educated people living in a generally suburban-appearing very high value real estate area, where they feel strong ownership, self-empowerment and they are generally right about that.  This is/was the traditional white part of DC even when DC's white population mostly fled for the suburbs.  Students there go to top-flight private schools or to their local DCPS and basically none of them are going o fail educationally barring special needs, mental health issues, etc. No charter schools are there now; a very few students from those areas go to charters across the city where they might be able to be high performers or learn in some niche manner, e.g., Basis.

To be blunt, east of the Anacostia is, barring a couple neighborhoods like Hillcrest and the beginnings of gentrification, a poor, African-American ghetto. Students there mostly do poorly and their schools do poorly too, though it's hard to separate causation, correlation, etc.  This is fertile territory for American charter operators, and very large percentages of students have moved over to the charter sector here. The sector there is associated with drill-and-kill substitute-for-home-values charter operators like KIPP but despite all the upheaval and change, generally most students are not on some magically changed education trajectory.

Downtown DC has traditionally had less students. Some parents who want to live in more downtown/urban areas want to have educational choices for their kids and put them in charters rather than the downtown-area DCPS, sometimes due to capacity (e.g., Ross downtown has few seats) or educational preferences (some don't like Shaw's DCPS choices). These aren't large numbers in any case.

Capitol Hill is a beautiful post-gentrification neighborhood.  Generally parents like their kids to go to their local DCPS but are notorious for sending them to charters in very large numbers from 5th grade on, e.g., to Basis, due to dissatisfaction with the routine of student success at DCPS middle and high schools on the Hill.

Further uptown in Ward 1 (and increasingly in Ward 4) there are Spanish-speaking families who send their kids to charters partly because they want success beyond what they see in local DCPS and partly because of the language programs at some of the most successful charters, e.g., LAMB, Stokes, Mundo Verde, etc. and the Chavez Prep schools.

Ward 1, 4, and 5 are (my guess) the core of the people you see on this board talking about their school choice anxieties. Many prominent charters started in Ward 1 and as they grew moved to Wards 4 or 5 where they could find school-sized spaces and their students/families moved with them. These are parents who are not so interested in living west of Rock Creek Park due to cost and diversity interests but are similarly educated (let's call them "gentrifiers" shall we?). They want their kids to get better educational outcomes than they see in the local DCPS and say they are "not options." Generally these parents do not like to reveal discriminatory bases for their decision-making, but most of them, at least in part, are concerned about their children, who are likely to succeed in school and life, interacting on a daily basis with the students of DC's longstanding families, who are (given DC and America's track record) not likely to be bound for great academic or life success in most cases. So they want to put their families in the charter system because it offers a set of opportunities to be mostly with families who are seeking greater success, and has the noted by-product of having much lower percentages of DC's (perceived) future failures. As you can guess, there is a strong racial component to this, as DC is unfortunately made up of people mostly from America's top and bottom quintiles in terms of education and income - to overly boil it down, poor black and rich white. These charters have specialized programs generally aimed at things highly educated but diversity-seeking want for their kids like bilingual programs, environmental learning, creativity, Montessori, etc.  They are not drill-and-kill, they accommodate advanced learners, and foster young (future) Democrats.

Additionally, in Wards 1, 4 and 5 there are also the longstanding families who are dissatisfied with DCPS for the same reasons those east of the Anacostia are, and they mostly go to charters that more resemble the KIPP drill-and-kill than the squishy liberal ones that are frequented by the gentrifiers.

So OP, there's a lot of it, laid out as ugly as it probably is.[/quote]

That is a VERY solid summary.  Only thing I might add is the history of a strong and substantial black middle and upper middle class in DC, larger than probably any other American city, other than maybe Atlanta.  This is because of the presence of Howard University, as well as early federal and local action to open up middle class jobs to African Americans, dating back to the 40s and earlier (in the case of Howard).  Many of those families live in Wards 4 and 5, and since the 70s, as DCPS declined, sent their children across Rock Creek Park to the DCPS schools in Ward 3 as part of the out of boundary process, or used private schools, often Catholic, like Gonzaga or Archbishop Carroll.  As the DCPS Ward 3 schools started to attract more in-boundary families, especially in the late 90s, those out of boundary slots began drying up, and many of those families turned to charter schools if they couldn't afford or didn't want to pay for private school.  Many of the black families at the diverse charters are a part of this group.  That's one of the reasons why schools like Yu Ying have a large black population, but a very low percentage of poor students.  They attract this type of family, but not the historically poor black families nearly as much.  [/quote]

You might also add that prior to say, ten years ago, those gentrifiers all moved to suburban Virginia for better schools. So although yes there is a problem with those families going to charters/not investing in local DCPS, but they also would have moved away entirely before they had this option. Which is not necessarily better, is it? And many not only don't want to live west of Rock Creek but cannot by any means afford to.[/quote]

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