Reply to Are charters keeping you in DC - or are they holding back your neighborhood DCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If there were no charters and no OOB then our neighborhood school would without any doubt be excellent.

It's currently a good school with a great principal, but results suffer in the testing grades because of high poverty and the problems associated with it.  If all the high(er) SES families in the neighborhood (really the majority now) sent their kids there the school would be more diverse, there would be more involved parents and everyone would benefit.

There's this fallacy here on DCUM that a charter somehow is hugely superior to DCPS, when in many cases the notable differences (aside from some specialist focus) is the higher SES of the students.  Our local DCPS schools (Langley and Seaton) don't differ significantly in terms of teaching staff, extra curriculars, resources or buildings from any of the HRCS I toured. [/quote]

I live EOTP and send my daughter to our in bounds DCPS, which is not highly regarded on this site, has a large percentage of low SES kids, and didn't score well on PARCC. By and large, our experiences have been wonderful, being on the front end of the "turnaround."

I want to be clear that even in shitty schools, education is still happening somewhere. There are strong teachers who do the best they can with what they are given by DCPS to support their students' learning - intellectual, emotional, social. There are also motivated parents in very low income schools who care deeply about their children's education. It is not an either/or situation.

I can understand completely how a motivated parent of a child in a failing school in SE DC would find a charter school attractive. Our school community is not cohesive. The PTO is active on some things, but parent engagement is always hard, particularly in a community where everyone works, some at multiple jobs. We do the best we can, but it's still frustrating sometimes to feel like you are the only one who is working hard (even if you know in your heart that you are not actually the only one). There have been more than a few times when I have considered sending my child to a "better" school, if only because there are times when I really wish I could be disengaged and still remain confident that her experience of school will be great. I can only imagine how the motivated parent at the failing SE DC school feels, with the added pressure that education is one of the only things that effectively breaks the cycle of poverty.

We all want what's best for our kids. In my part of the city (Ward 1), the perception that charters are better than the local DCPS is not entirely accurate. If measuring things by test score, many of the "better" charters have not even been around long enough to have test scores. There are also barriers to charter entry that do not exist for DCPS - including selection bias of who applies and the ability to counsel out kids who are not succeeding at charters (I don't think this happens as much as many fear, but it does happen). In any case, I think that some of the PPs are correct when they say that the main differentiator between charters and DCPS EOTP but WOTR is the SES of the student body. EOTR, however, the same does not hold true. There are schools with strong communities, but there are also a lot of schools that are simply failing, and charters that outperform them by leaps and bounds.

The thing is, though, that the parents in those schools who choose charters (any of the ~15 KIPP campuses, for example) were not going to vote with their feet on education anyway. For those families, it's not "charters or suburbs." It's "charters or almost guaranteed educational failure."

In WOTR DC, it used to be like that. The "competition" between DCPS and charters now, however, seems to be one of perception, rather than one based on reality. I'm committed to the school my child attends now. In middle school, we will have some other things to consider, but that's not for several years. I do think that starting last year or so, the "DC parents have so much choice" argument is beginning to flatten. There are a lot more kids entering the system city-wide, and many of those kids will end up attending their EOTP schools by default, because there will be no space at WOTP schools for OOB kids or charters for non-siblings. If that turns those EOTP schools around as happened to Deal or Eaton or Ross, that's great. I'm sure some families will still choose to move out of DC anyway, and cite "shitty schools" as the reason for doing so.[/quote]

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