Reply to What would you pay for your dream charter or DCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Funny you should ask this.  I have wondered if at some point a bunch of parents would band together and say we want to start a charter school.  We'll each put in $X in as seed money, be founders and be guaranteed to get in.  If the sums were large enough and enough parents were involved, you could have a good start on the resources for a charter school.  Wouldn't be enough to build a school (unless you were talking very large sums or a lot of people), but would certainly be enough to start up.  Of course, if it were a bunch of wealthy Ward 3 families that did this, I'm sure support for charter schools in the city would take a hit.[/quote]

That's pretty much how private schools got founded. If you look at the private schools in DC, an awful lot of them were founded in the 1950's and 60's -- GDS, Field, Burke, Lab, WIS, St. Patricks's, Lowell, just off the top of my head. DCPS cratered during the desegregation era, losing over 100,000 students, and families with kids either moved out of the city or went private. Those that went private started their own schools because the existing schools couldn't handle the influx.

If you talk to parents of that generation, they feel about privates the way that today's parents feel about charters, that they're community-building and giving families an opportunity to stay in the city. They have no shame about directing public resources to private schools. If you've ever talked to Mary Cheh about education you'll know that she sees no distinction between public and private schools, to her they're all just interest groups jockeying for public resources. She sent her kids to GDS during that era, so it stands to reason.[/quote]

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