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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That’s a feature, not a bug. If you want true autonomy for the school leadership then you give up accountability.[/quote]

I think poster raises a good point. Charters are essentially set up to be their own fiefdoms paid for with taxpayer dollars. I am at MV and while my kids have had generally good experiences so far, I am starting to find it disconcerting that if I ever have a problem there is essentially no where to go since school leadership is pretty useless. I am considering moving to the suburbs to be part of a functional school system.[/quote]

Exactly.  There is nowhere to go, if your neighborhood school is egregiously underperforming.  It may be fine for early grades, but what is a 5th grader or middle schooler to do?  Sacrifice the whole educational pathway through high school, to express discontent that will be ignored anyway?  Leaving is not a viable strategy to make change, if they can easily replace you.  Parents need some way to at least force the charter board to take an interest.  A hearing with public testimony could compel the board to answer parent questions, at least.  Nobody likes to bring bad publicity on their school, but I'm running out of other ideas.[/quote]

This. Things are generally okay for ECE - even poorly performing DCPS schools frequently get this right. Then the problems start after we've already committed years to Chinese immersion. That's when we realize the admin lacks the skills and motivation to resolve serious issues. So do we accept that we sacrificed years of our children's education for the language immersion to pull them out and end the language immersion experience? Accompanied by a move to a better school district (likely suburbs)? Or do we stick with it in the hopes that DCI is better than our feeder? Or will we encounter the same types of admin issues at DCI?

As PP suggested, we need better oversight of the charter schools. There has to be some way to hold the admin accountable, because right now it's brick wall city.[/quote]

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