Reply to Two of DCPS's biggest challenges going forward

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm not going to make any excuses for DCPS's poor performance in educating children over the past decades, but let's admit they've had their share of challenges (self-imposed and otherwise). The current administration is saddled with the impacts from decisions and past events/dynamics that makes improvements difficult going forward. In my humble opinion, here are two issues that make meaningful improvements near impossible: 1. the infiltration of charter schools, and 2. OOB process/lottery.

Charter schools complicate matters for DCPS. For one thing, it makes it harder to efficiently direct capital investment and personnel/programming for the future because the number and location of children to be served is a moving target. In short, there's no coordination and central planning between DCPS and charters so there is the chance of ever-more massive misallocation of resources.  A great example of this is the charter school that's setting up shop directly across the street from a DCPS school. Another issue as I understand it is that charters can play by different rules, like removing disruptive children during the school year whereas DCPS must take all comers. From a performance perspective, this is a tremendous advantage for charters in artificially boosting test scores. Therefore, more and more parents will choose charters all things being equal as time goes on.

As for the OOB process, it might have been a good idea at the time, but it's turning out to be a terrible decision. Now that the District's school-age population is rising, the faults in the system are being exposed and they will only get bigger as time goes on. As it currently 'functions', the OOB lottery serves only to divide the city's residents and forces all parents to scrabble like crabs up the side of a bucket to the few well-performing options.

What do you believe to be DCPS's biggest challenges going forward?[/quote]

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