Reply to DCPS Middle School problem in the Washington Post

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One thing that I have not understood with the growth of charters is how DCPS could be so slow to respond.  DCPS has a huge disadvantage -- that they have to take all comers -- relative to the charters, but they also have a huge advantage that they tend not to use.  Although charters have to run a lottery only take the winners, DCPS is not so constrained.  They can select on other criteria.  Have test-in schools.  Create all the immersion schools they want and organize them in a way more oriented towards children with more support in that language or a mixture of different backgrounds.  In short, they have some means of cherry picking the best students, but do not use them.  Maybe that is a good thing.  But since the charters have soft means of doing so, it seems strange that DCPS does not at least try to combat that with better options of their own.[/quote]

Charter schools are most certainly not "cherry picking the best students".  Students of all kinds end up at charter schools in droves. Like almost half of the public school children in our city. That isn't cherry picking. That is something about DCPS driving them elsewhere[/quote]

On one hand you are right, the charters can't cherry pick the students. The lottery should keep everything equal. However, the fact remains that the parents who play the lottery are a self selecting bunch to begin with and obviously already feel invested in their kids education. Think about it.  Just to play lottery, its likely the parents have reviewed the test scores at their IB school and various other schools, visited multiple charters on tours or one on ones, spoken with teachers about what is the best fit for kid, signed up on line, tracked their number and results and are then willing to drive to god knows where in DC to get their kid to the preferred school.   By and large, just having those KINDS OF parents creates more driven kids who know education is serious business in their house.   That describes a lot of charter families regardless of race or income.  So then you do end up with 5th grades that 9 kids and I am betting those kids are some of the ones who are struggling the most.  The most involved and driven parents have bailed for Latin, basis or private.   In that sense, yes, charters are "selective" just not in an obvious way.[/quote]

Exactly.  Charters select their students via lottery and have to abide by those results.  So no explicit cherry picking.  But they have soft means of doing so.  First and foremost, they are doing something that all of us (I hope) would encourage, namely trying to create good schools that folks want to attend.  PP perfectly describes how that can skew the mix of students.  Of course, (again hopefully) no one wants the charters to be worse schools in order to stop this.  In fact part of the point of charters is to provide competition with traditional public schools in the hope that charter would promote better traditional public school and that charters could experiment more flexibly with educational approaches and by so doing get better outcomes.  Again, carry on.  Now I would suggest that in my limited experience charters also try to encourage their pool one way or another for example by suggesting that parents who are accepted may be "required" to volunteer, and a little more explicitly by trying to shed students back to DCPS who would bring down their scores or who would require them to use more resources than the school wants to.  This is a tougher problem, and ways of cherry picking the class either up front or after they have arrived at the school.

But the point of what I said is not really to complain about what charters do.  It is to point out that DCPS *could* take steps to draw back some of those motivated families back, but either chooses not to do so or just cannot get its act together.  Maybe it is the former: they feel strongly that DCPS shouldn't have specialized schools or tracked schools because it is important to have a standard high quality education for everyone -- they just happen to struggle to make that happen.  But I suspect it is the latter. [/quote]

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