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][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]

KIPP DC College Preparatory (charter) has just as many kids and also isn’t showing results.

The things is you mistakenly believe it’s about hating charters as a whole. It is the systemic issues they cause. Whether you want to believe it or not charters can find ways to kick students out after count day of course and do.

DCPS can never refuse kids not really ever kick them out.

And you have to be a fool to think renovations will cause a school to be successful. But this still doesn’t mean that these schools don’t deserve it, you obviously have never seen the horrible mice, roach, and cooling/heating issues -as well as an overall decrepit environment some of these SE schools especially have. [/quote]

DCPS does kick kids out of schools -- they just kick them back to their home schools or to special placements. Choice isn't just in the charters. Many DCPS families are choosing DCPS campuses they feel are better -- and their kids can and do get kicked out of those schools. Those aren't stats that anyone wants to talk about though.

What systemic issues are charters causing? If you live in Ward 7 and 8 and are zoned for a city school that has NEVER been successful in the way most on this board defines success, charters AND DCPS's out of boundary program are solving a systemic issue. Furthermore, even if you are not in those wards, if you want Montessori, language immersion, advanced curricula, you are most likely to get those opportunities in charters. DCPS could offer more of these but it hasn't yet.

Let's stop faulting parents for needing options and charters for giving options. Persistently low performing charters should close -- and they do. I'm not suggesting that the same should be true for DCPS but comparing the two groups and giving either a pass for persistent low performance is ridiculous. [/quote]

One charter-only systemic issue is sudden closures and DCPS having to absorb large numbers of kids who have been poorly served by failing charters. Such as the collapse of Eagle Academy last August. It put a sudden strain on all receiving schools, DCPS and charter. DCPS is ultimately responsible for all the kids, but has little control or warning over when this is going to happen. Similarly, although with such egregiously short notice, the failures of Hope Tolson, I Dream, and Capital Village are or soon will have a similar effect. Looking back, DCPS assumed operation of Excel and of Dorothy Height after the Amos scandal, and taking in all the kids from WMST after their financial failure. This happens regularly enough to be described as a systemic issue.

Now, in the long run it's not necessarily a bad thing for DCPS to add a school to its portfolio, and not all kids abandoned by a charter end up in DCPS anyway. But still, it's a problem. The PCSB has finally made some efforts to align closures with the lottery cycle and been embarrassed into upping their financial oversight, so I hope it improves. [/quote]

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