Anonymous wrote:Which is exactly why I dislike charters...elitist individual schools funded by the public's money, instead of making all public schools elite.

How can you make all public schools elite when most public school students are not elite? The problem is not the schools.

Which is exactly why I dislike charters...elitist individual schools funded by the public's money, instead of making all public schools elite.

Here's how you do this people:

1. Start a charter school based on testing and student accountability;
2. Site your school near Chain Bridge;
3. No bus or other transportation assistance;
3. Mandatory language immersion in first year, bilingual after that;
4. IB-type curriculum from the first year;
5. Mandatory Kumon-style training after school;
6. No sports, no activities;
7. One strike-style disciplinary methods;
Other ideas?

You can create whatever elitist barriers you want to set up the school you want with a charter system and avoid allowing the rest of the city to participate, if you want to try hard enough. Should you?

I'm wondering if you could set it up on a school level. Any student from anywhere in DC could apply for admission, but the school administration would make selections. School would require attending families to pay extra "tuition" beyond just the regular DCPS stipend, and those tuition dollars would go to fund that particular school, perhaps with some 10% kickback being returned to DCPS general fund. In effect, it's a magnet school with a required buy-in.

As a result, students at the school would get a more well-funded education that DCPS can provide, and it wouldn't cost DCPS one extra cent. Indeed, DCPS might get extra money in its budget (per the 10% kickback I described).

Problems:
1. What about the unions? Will the school still be subject to teacher union rules?
2. Many people will rightfully complain that this system is just a mechanism for wealthy families to get better schooling for their kids. But since they're willing to pay extra for it, that doesn't bother me too much.
3. Politically, it will be criticized as DCPS subsidizing a semi-private school for rich white kids.
4. Where does the school building come from? If you take a DCPS building, then where do the kids from that neighborhood go if they aren't admitted to the school?
5. Private schools will hate it because it competes with them.

Anonymous wrote:This sort of thing happened where I grew up. The County provided very little money to schools. Parents in our town petitioned the County to give more funding to all County schools, but the County refused. So the town formed its own breakaway school district. I was too young to care about all the logistical details, but I think it meant the town could impose additional taxes on town residents to raise more money beyond what the County supplied. Town residents still paid their State & County taxes, and thus supported schools all over the State and County, just like everyone else. But they could just raise additional money for local schools via taxes.

I suspect that approach can lead to wealthy kids getting more education dollars than the less well off, but on the other hand, they're paying for it.

Local taxes are not apportioned wrt to ward. They never will be. DC is not a state, therefore has no counties, therefore has little control over such matters; see also, gun laws. Our overlords would never allow this.

There's some appeal in this because priorities may differ. In some parts of town, parents want very demanding schools, rigorous evaluation of student and teacher performance and quick weeding out of underperforming teachers. In other parts of town, schools may be viewed in a broader context, including as employment resources for the community. A heighened accountability system of the type that Rhee championed was really resented. In smaller DC school districts, an elected board could decide what the priorities are and how to allocate funds.

Anonymous wrote:Although very inartfully put, the OP raises a serious issue. Unfortunately on this board (and in the DCPS administration), the prevailing opinion seems to be that no non-poor student should be a priority until all poor students' needs are met.

It's almost as if people think this is a founding principle of our country.

The question, again, in setting up what effectively sounds like a charter school west of the Park, is whether you will let in kids from east of the Park.

Since DC is viewed as a state as far as federal education dollars and OSSE is the Office of State Superintendent of Education, OSSE could designation multiple school "districts" in the District of Columbia just like most states have multiple school districts. Some charters are running like that now with multiple campuses/grades etc. Many places in the midwest there are separate school districts for elementary/middle schools and high schools typically divided at the town/community level and respectively township level. Two or three towns with 3-4 ES/MS each feed one township HS. Certainly would get governance down to a very local level, but as others have mentioned there would be issues with demographics and funding resources unless some sort of equalization of resources happened at the tax administration/OSSE level. Demographics (race/ethnicity/ESL/income) would be a much hard element to address to make all kids had equal access to good education across the disctrict. Though it might get away from the uncertainty and general craziness that is the OOB process.

10:49 again. To be clear, I have no idea if the process I described would work in DC, or would be permitted by DC govt.

This sort of thing happened where I grew up. The County provided very little money to schools. Parents in our town petitioned the County to give more funding to all County schools, but the County refused. So the town formed its own breakaway school district. I was too young to care about all the logistical details, but I think it meant the town could impose additional taxes on town residents to raise more money beyond what the County supplied. Town residents still paid their State & County taxes, and thus supported schools all over the State and County, just like everyone else. But they could just raise additional money for local schools via taxes.

I suspect that approach can lead to wealthy kids getting more education dollars than the less well off, but on the other hand, they're paying for it.

PP again: Another thing I just thought of that those whining about more independence may not know is that DCPS offers opportunities for schools to become autonomous. Here is more info for those who'd like to press their schools about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_Public_Schools (see chapter on Schools and Locations)
Read page 20-21 of this document (also interesting re budgeting): http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/Files/downloads/ABOUT%20DCPS/Budget%20-%20Finance/FY13%20documents/FY2013%20Budget%20Guide.pdf
For those who don't like web pages, here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdfOlE6r4Z8
And if you really insist, there is also a DCUM thread on it: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/93750.page

Our children are at one of the autonomous schools and it's really benefited them I think because deviations from the standard staffing model has allowed our school to hire another specials teacher, we've slowly introduced a new math curriculum, which now happens to be better aligned with the Common Core Standards than the prescribed Everyday Math, etc.

Anonymous wrote:NP here-also doesn't include extra money raised by PTAs

PP here, that doesn't bother me because doing so, you'd send the message that better off schools they have to raise funds to get the same resources, which would be truly at odds with the idea of public education. By contrast, saying that federal and sp ed dollars, should crowd out DC general education expenditures and therefore should inform comparative per pupil spending is fundamentally flawed. Comparing apples to apples, especially if we're talking return on our DC tax-dollars, means comparing per pupil DC education expenditures.

NP here-also doesn't include extra money raised by PTAs

Anonymous wrote:Data from 21 Century regarding middle schools from a few years ago

Per pupil budgeting from lowest to highest:
Ward – Budget/pupil - School
6 – $5,870 - Stuart-Hobson
2 – $6,497 - Hardy
3 – $6,602 - Deal
6 – $6,756 - Jefferson
8 – $6,798 - Hart
6 – $6,833 - Eliot-Hine
7 – $6,977 - Kelly Miller
$7025 - AVERAGE
2 – $7,048 - Shaw-Garnett-Patterson
8 – $7,416 - Kramer
4 – $7,661 - MacFarland
7 – $7,828 - Ron Brown-Merritt
7 – $7,945 - Sousa
8 – $8,339 – Johnson

Ward – Square feet per pupil
3 - 143ft
2 - 271 ft
6 - 273 ft
4 - 275 ft
7 - 284 ft
8 - 289 ft
1 - 309 ft
5 - 373 ft

Ward – Capital spending/pupil
4 – 9,931
7 – 12,921
1 – 15,151
8 – 15,970
3 – 18,364
6 – 18,787
5 – 29,267
2 – 35,938

I'm the one who started the discussion on per pupil spending, claiming that a student in a predominantly poor school will get less DC(!)ed$ than a student in a predominantly rich school. I assume this list is trying to disprove that (Deal getting less, Sousa more). Well, you didn't because these figures contain (federal) Title I funds as well as the wholly separate special ed expenditures. If you take the per pupil portion off of of these figures, the picture is a different one altogether.