Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Washington D.C.'s Charter School Movement
Dion Haynes reports today that 12 out of 31 campuses of Washington D.C. charter schools authorized by the D.C. Public Charter School Board failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals of the No Child Left Behind Law.
On the list of "schools in need of improvement" is The Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy. For 3 years I served on the Board of Directors of Chavez. I also tutored students for 4 years there.
It has been just over 2 years since I attended my last board meeting. At that session I remember like it was yesterday reviewing student standardized test scores. The findings were shocking. They demonstrated that the longer our students stayed at Chavez, the worse the results. (Stanford-9 scores are open for review by the public so I am not revealing confidential information here.)
These findings are also significant because there is so much student attrition at Chavez. So if there are 75 kids in 9th grade perhaps 20 of these complete their senior year. You might expect that with so many students electing to go elsewhere that the school would have an easier time meeting the AYP goals.
Mr. Haynes also includes in his article this quote by a well-known charter school critic:
It is not fair to educate kids in warehouses and church basements. This must stop. Until there is a clear plan for how charter schools can obtain facilities I would support a moratorium on the approval of new schools. Perhaps this will put sufficient pressure on charter school leaders to at last come up with a viable solution.
PermaLink | 5:52 AM |
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On the list of "schools in need of improvement" is The Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy. For 3 years I served on the Board of Directors of Chavez. I also tutored students for 4 years there.
It has been just over 2 years since I attended my last board meeting. At that session I remember like it was yesterday reviewing student standardized test scores. The findings were shocking. They demonstrated that the longer our students stayed at Chavez, the worse the results. (Stanford-9 scores are open for review by the public so I am not revealing confidential information here.)
These findings are also significant because there is so much student attrition at Chavez. So if there are 75 kids in 9th grade perhaps 20 of these complete their senior year. You might expect that with so many students electing to go elsewhere that the school would have an easier time meeting the AYP goals.
Mr. Haynes also includes in his article this quote by a well-known charter school critic:
"We are crushing our neighborhood schools at the expense of an experiment that is failing," said Gina Arlotto, president and co-founder of Save Our Schools, an organization that has filed suit alleging that traditional public schools are inadequately funded because of charter schools. "What we have in D.C. is complete chaos now."I agree that when it comes to the charter school movement in D.C. we are in chaos. Each year the D.C. Public Charter School Board approves many new schools who have no facility in which to open and who have no access to cash for renovating a property.
It is not fair to educate kids in warehouses and church basements. This must stop. Until there is a clear plan for how charter schools can obtain facilities I would support a moratorium on the approval of new schools. Perhaps this will put sufficient pressure on charter school leaders to at last come up with a viable solution.
PermaLink | 5:52 AM |
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