Reply to WaPo opinion piece on charters

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, you should know that "charters do more with less" is a contested opinion.  DCPS funding is different in a lot of ways, and DCPS has the responsibility of taking kids who arrive mid-year, so their budgets are built for that-- charters can just turn them away.  And DCPS has the responsibility of maintaining an adequate education system for all kids for all time so has to be forward-looking and may make financial decisions around future capacity needs.  Also, even charters that serve low-income and at-risk kids as a primary demographic are still serving the easier of those kids and have various ways of pushing out the more difficult ones.  The "at-risk" category is large-- almost 50% of DC students-- and there is a lot of variation within it that isn't being captured by the study that Jay Mathews cites.  I'm no defender of DCPS, and I'm a charter parent myself, but I don't find this article very persuasive.  It's the same old Jay Mathews blah blah blah.

Our charter (ITS) has not offered my kids any more than DCPS friends are getting.  And they aren't offering anything like CARES for people who really need it.  So I would not say ITS is performing any better than DCPS.  Maybe the "resources and technology" are the same, but the kids served by the schools are not the same, and that matters a great deal.  [/quote]

OP here. Obviously you don’t have to answer, but given the above, why did you choose a charter?

We specifically chose to stay at our low-performing IB because we wanted to invest in our neighborhood school and contribute to making it better. But it feels like an uphill battle and in the meantime I worry constantly about my kids’ education. This year has been the cherry on the shit sundae.[/quote]

We spent two years at our IB school and in a lot of ways it was really great.  I definitely did believe in investing in our neighborhood school, and I hope that my efforts made a difference.  It definitely has improved, though I wouldn't necessarily claim it's the result of my volunteering.  I certainly did put in a lot of time.   It had some very real advantages for my kids that our HRCS lacks.  I don't think I can tell you the specific reasons we left without outing myself.  What ITS offers is a cohort of high-performing kids and a middle school that we're willing to attend (though not 100% sold on).  There are logistical reasons as well.  But I also didn't quite grasp that just because a school has high test scores and high-SES parents doesn't automatically mean that the teaching and differentiation will be good.  If anything, our IB school had superior differentiation because the range of ability was so vast, they really had no choice but to set it up that way.  I would not say that my children are receiving a superior education in preschool and lower elementary, relative to our IB school.  The schools are different programmatically but not in quality.  In upper elementary and middle school I think the presence of a higher-performing cohort is important.  So after two years of crap lottery numbers, we wanted to lock that in.

The article is about DCPS and charters more generally, as a policy matter, rather than for anyone's individual child.  ITS is strong in performing arts, social studies, and ELA, which is what my kids are into.  I wish it were stronger in math and science, but honestly my kids aren't into that so it doesn't matter so much to me.  I prefer a smaller school, and a school that's near my house.  But those things are not a quality difference or a policy argument.  [/quote]

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