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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yea, real problems.

Can we include a cram school housed in a cramped office building graduating 50 students a year substituting for acceptable neighborhood public middle and high schools EotP?[/quote]

Not everyone at Basis has an acceptable public school option. Our options were Walker Jones and Dunbar.[/quote]

What Fenty and the city council myopically chose to do over a decade ago was create a parallel public school system--dozens of DC charter schools--to address the problem of failing neighborhood schools.  They did this rather than run with a vision to work with DCPS leaders and the teachers unions to dramatically improve at least some of the existing traditional middle and high schools, enabling these programs to begin to attract sizeable cohorts of UMC families.  The unions were seen as the enemy, vs. partners in reform.

For example, the City could have created a serious test-in International Baccalaureate Diploma program at the rebooted Eastern HS with a City-wide draw and neighborhood preference, fed by a serious IB Middle Years Program at a DCPS MS.  Instead, the politicians allowed DCI, Latin, BASIS etc. to be established as alternatives to failing Capitol Hill DCPS programs.  In the suburbs, voters wouldn't have tolerated this short-sighted variant of ed reform, which has created classes of the unlucky and lucky in the charter lottery.  It has also led to the rise of a variety of charters with decent academics but weak facilities and no real obligation to serve all comers (e.g. Sped and ELL students).  If you aren't lucky, or even if you are and can't abide by somewhat dreary charters which don't serve all comers well (e.g. BASIS), your best option is often to move to a VA or MD suburb to access a strong neighborhood school.

DC could have had created strong comprehensive neighborhood middle and high school programs EotP, rather than charters, partly to keep UMC families in the City. We already had the demographics to support robust academics, but there was no political will to create the programs to house them.  In short, DC voters have let the politicians off the hook.
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