Reply to DC's School Report Cards are up. Any surprises?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Look nobody on here cares about the bottom charters.  They are not the ones people DCUM are even considering, just like they don’t consider the bottom DCPS schools either.

It’s pretty pointless to make a sweeping statement about how one is overall better than the other and that can also be arguable.  No parent is going to be looking at that lens.  Instead, families on here are looking at what is the best school for their kid.  And that is school specific not a whole system.

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We should all care about the bottom charters because they are serving children so poorly. With public funds comes public accountability. Millions is being spent on schools that accomplish little, and are passed along by the PCSB with extensions and discretion and "flexibility" to avoid political blowback and embarrassment, until they collapse of their own accord. Those students could be educated better, or at least not worse and more cost-effectively, at the many better-performing charters and DCPS, and the system as a whole would function better if funds were not devoted to propping up failing schools.

The fundamental concept of charter schools is that sustained low performance = closure. When charter schools do well, it's a "movement". When they do poorly, it's "let's not talk about it". Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan, as the saying goes.[/quote]

Ok, but a lot of those schools are tiny. Let's talk about schools like Roosevelt High School, a school that's been around for nearly 100 years, which has 1000 students, and which the city has spend a quarter *billion* dollars renovating, and still almost no one there is at grade level on anything. [/quote]

Ok, but a lot of tiny low performing schools add up. Roots 83, SSMA 197, Girls Global 197. Not counting Capital Village because they already announced closure.

Then you have mid-size schools such as Rocketship, which is failing to serve 800+ kids across three buildings. 324 at Cap City lower school. 231 at Two Rivers Middle. 608 at Meridian. 340 at Bethune. 418 at KIPP Heights, 332 at KIPP Inspire, 396 at Quest, 351 at Valor. 358 at IDEA. 356 at Stokes East End. 376 at Chavez. 324 at Cap City lower school. We have to care about the smaller schools because it's a lot of kids total.

Now, DCPS has a lot of low stats too. Nobody is asserting that Roosevelt is a great school. But DCPS can't just up and close schools and wash their hands of it, tell the families to find something else like charter schools do. DCPS does replace leadership, sometimes bring in outside management-- they try any number of things but they can't just give up and lock the door like Eagle Academy did. DCPS is legally obligated to give a seat to every kid who wants it, at all times, forever into the future, and shuffling those same kids around won't necessarily fix anything-- and it might overcrowd nearby schools beyond legal and safe capacity. DCPS does sometimes close schools. It also sometimes absorbs failed charters. But it's a different system with a different set of obligations to students now and in the future. Obligations that charter schools generally resist sharing. Saying "DCPS sucks too" or that DCPS schools should be closed isn't the winning argument you think it is.

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The fundamental problem with DCPS is that it has extremely low academic standards. It doesn't care if the kids come to school, and it doesn't care if they don't learn anything when they do show up. Everyone will be promoted to the next grade regardless. Go stand outside Roosevelt in the middle the day. Why are all these kids who are supposed to be in class standing around smoking pot?[/quote]

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