Reply to D.C. City Council Has Given Up on Improving Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The lottery/charter system plays into lack of accountability and focus on schools.

Don't like your IB school? Use the lottery to go to another one. No incentive to actually engage with your IB school and improve it, which could take years and might not ever benefit your kids who are currently attending. It's easier and better for the individual to just attend a different school.

Don't like DCPS? Go to a charter. No incentive to engage with DCPS, care about oversight, improve internal processes, examine curriculums, teacher certifications, calendars, anything, because if you are unhappy you can just go find a charter that caters to your concerns.

Don't like your charter? Go to a different charter or try DCPS.

And on and on. There is a really high level of cynicism and apathy about schools in this city because the system is designed to create lots of options to bail out of a bad situation, and lots of scape goats for problems. Plus the city has a large transient workforce that didn't grow up in the city's schools and thus don't learn what they are like until their kids are in them, and then if they are unhappy about what they find, are simply encouraged to use the lottery to find a different school.

And then still more people will just say "just go private" or "just move to the suburbs."

There is virtually no willingness in this city to engage with the idea that every child in the city deserves a quality public education at their neighborhood school. Even people who agree with this in principle mostly just engage in a blame game when it doesn't happen.

It's not a good system, and I say that understanding that the system in place before the lottery and charters was worse (so many failing schools and so few options, a lot of families just not served at all). But just because the lottery and charter system was an improvement over the total failure we had before does not mean it's a good idea or that it is working. It's not.[/quote]

Disagree. DCPS needs to make itself attractive to people with options first. If nobody wants to go to DCPS schools, it’s because they’re bad, and no amount of blaming families will change that.[/quote]

But it's very hard to improve a DCPS without buy in from families, preferably IB or at least nearby families. Sometimes schools are able to do it because it become so hard to get into other schools (whether nearby DCPS or charters) that families at least try out the IB, and then you can build some trust and they stick around past K.

But if there are other options readily available, then even when are doing a great job with PK and K, it's hard to retain because if they can get into the already-great charter or DCPS nearby, they will, rather than sitting around to see if the IB follows through on the positive trend they have going. It's so hard. And it's easy for that nearby charter to deliver "great" because they have a population of self-selected parents who were invested enough to do the lottery and pick the charter, and therefor by definition don't have the high-needs kids you will find at most DCPS in the city.[/quote]

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