Reply to Calling all charter school parents, teachers, and staff to go to the DC Council legislative meeting on June 2

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Reply to "Calling all charter school parents, teachers, and staff to go to the DC Council legislative meeting on June 2"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DC will spend $100 million renovating a single school, even if it only has a few hundred students, but only if it's DCPS. Sorry charters! A sampling of the cost recent school renovations. Notice a pattern?

Duke Ellington -- $180 million
Coolidge -- $160 million
Jackson-Reid -- $130 million
Dunbar -- $125 million
Roosevelt -- $125 million
Woodson -- $100 million
Tubman -- $100 million
Deal -- $100 million
JO Wilson -- $91 million
Cardozo -- $90 million
Deal -- $90 million
Ballou -- $90 million
Jefferson -- $90 million
Burrville -- $85 million
Truesdell -- $80 million
Oyster Adams -- $79 million
Burroughs -- $75 million
Janney -- $70 million
MLK -- $65 million
Dorothy Height -- $63 million
Garfield -- $60.5 million
Anacostia -- $60 million[/quote]

So exhausting.  The big items on the list are from 15 years ago.

The BS of presenting your case with this list was discussed extensively in the other thread.

It doesn't help your pitch to argue against data points that aren't relevant, nor does it help to argue that two wrongs make a right.[/quote]

Uh, you can drive by Tubman and see it's not finished. They're spending $100 million to renovate a school that has barely 400 students. That's more than twice as much as it cost to build DCI, which was built out of an old military dormitory and has 1,700 students. [/quote]

DP and DCI built both a middle and high school so really 2 schools and cost less than all the schools above.

It’s ridiculous how much money was wasted and unnecessary with all these renovations with no budget constraints or accountability.  As taxpayers, we should all be upset about this.[/quote]

Agree there needs to be a better process. Disagree that charters should be part of it. [b]That’s the price of independence. [/b]If you want more money, backfill your seats and stop returning the kids you don’t want to their neighborhood schools. [/quote]

This is a strange myth DCPS people tell themselves. There was never any trade where charters got less money in exchange for independence. Charters were created because people felt that DCPS was doing a *terrible* job. The city couldn't exactly close all DCPS schools, so they created a second school system to compete with DPCS. It would be like if your employer hired someone else to do your job, but didn't fire you. Everyone is free to choose from the two systems and they're supposed to be funded equally. Instead DC has retaliated by systematically shortchanged charters while lavishing money on DCPS. The funny thing is people still choose charters. [/quote]

Well, even though they are shortchanged by DC, some charters in DC still offer great educational options, including BASIS DC, Latin, and DCI.

[b]Why should BASIS DC, Latin, and DCI receive less money per student than, say, any random DCPS school?  As a principled matter, that is unfair.[/b]

It is also doubly ridiculous because these charter schools are doing an outstanding job educating kids.  In contrast, many DCPS schools are a complete failure and waste of money.  For example, over 90 percent of kids at Anacostia, Ballou, and Cardozo high schools are functionally illiterate.  Those schools are doing a terrible job with the money they already receive.  Why are they receiving MORE money per student than successful charters such as BASIS DC, Latin, and DCI?
 
Worse, DCPS has spent over $340 million completing modernizing and renovating just Anacostia, Ballou, and Cardozo high schools, even though most of the kids there can't read or do basic math, and billions more modernizing and renovating other DCPS schools.  Meanwhile, successful charters who send many kids to Top 20 colleges every year operate in crumbling buildings and have to pay for their own renovations.

Utter stupidity.[/quote]

As a principled matter, these schools should have to take all comers if they want the same funding.[/quote]

You keep saying this. But what other posters are trying to say is that even if DCPS schools technically accept students, they are completely failing these students by not teaching them. Ballou, for example, is very under enrolled, bc parents who live in Ward 8 who want their kids to have any kind of future put them in a charter. And secondly, the chronic absentee rate at Ballou is 90 percent. That is an insane number and a complete failure on the part of DCPS.

I sent my kids to DCPS for elementary and loved it. But I can acknowledge that the system is failing to teach a huge number of kids, and that many charters have stepped up to teach them, with variable results (some good some bad). [/quote]

And the parents who live in W8 or any other ward who don’t care? Their kids are at DCPS schools where teachers and admin have to provide a social safety net that charters do not. These are the expensive kids. These are the kids charters throw back. [/quote]

Most kids in Ward 7 and 8 go to charters. Students at DCPS, on average, are whiter and wealthier than charter kids. [/quote]

Yet you do not name any excellent charters in those wards. You always compare by saying Basis or the like needs the money.

Saying DCPS fails the kids like the charters in those wards are doing the same job as schools like Walls, Basis, etc. Seriously? How disingenuous. [/quote]

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