Reply to WaPo Editorial today on DCPS/charter collaboration

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Reply to "WaPo Editorial today on DCPS/charter collaboration"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]See the thing is, if we didn't have charters we'd have a greater number of better neighborhood schools because the many families that flee for HRCS would be forced to put their resources into their "focus" or "rising" schools that a few are already trying to improve. Yeah, some would move, but not all.

We will NEVER have universally good by-right schools if we perpetuate an easy opt-out for families. It will never happen. I'm not suggesting improvement would stretch east of the river immediately, but our Wests and Garrisons and Brookland Middles and Coolidges and Amidon-Bowens and Takomas and Truesdells would be much improved if all the families that go charter were there instead. I'm also not suggesting that we shouldn't have initiated charters when we did; it seems like it was necessary for our failing city schools at the time. But now? We can reevaluate our definition of and path to "excellence for everyone."

The mayor knows this, and to not continue to move us down this separate-but-equal-but-not-really road we are on is the right move. [/quote]

What you fail to acknowledge is that the freedom to innovate and do things differently than DCPS is part of what is making some of these charters work. I have a child who have profound and significant language based learning disabilities - now in high school with minimal accommodations. The charter school was willing and able to provide much more targetted and better services for him because they had the freedom to hire contractor specialists who were trained in his rare disorder and these services enabled him to now be succeeding beyond all of our expectations. We tried our local DCPS (Takoma) and were offered a fraction of the services by people with no experience. Rather than suing the school system - which we could have done and secured a private SN school placement - we have stayed in charters.

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