A year in the lives of two DC schools: a Q&A with the author of a new book

A new book takes an in-depth look at two DC schools: a DCPS school in a gentrifying neighborhood that is struggling to improve, and a charter school navigating its first year.

Sam Chaltain, an education activist and blogger, has written Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice, scheduled for release later this month. It focuses on a year in the lives of Bancroft Elementary School, in Mt. Pleasant, and Mundo Verde, a bilingual charter school that has adopted a progressive “expeditionary learning” approach.

Chaltain embedded himself deeply in both schools, and the result is an almost novelistic exploration of what teachers, administrators, parents, and students at these schools experienced.

The narrative sometimes breaks away from these detailed stories to consider larger questions like the effect of high-stakes testing on instruction and the role of freedom in education. And a 15-page epilogue catalogs Chaltain’s recommendations for change.

The result is an engaging and thought-provoking book that raises some timely questions. Here are his answers to some of them.

What motivated you to write this book? What questions were you hoping to answer?

So much of the conversation about school reform today is contentious and two-dimensional, and we’ll never figure out how to reimagine public education if we continue to fight over whether unions are great or horrible, or whether school choice is the devil or angel incarnate. It’s more complicated than that.

I wanted to paint a personal, yearlong story about what it’s like to be a teacher, a student, or a parent at this moment in time, with the hope that doing so might help people better see the state of modern school reform as it is—and begin to hint at what it ought to be.

How did you choose the two schools that you wrote about?

I chose Mundo Verde because I believed that the thoroughness of their overall plan would carry them through the inevitable first-year challenges and speed bumps; I wasn’t interested in chronicling a story of failure.

And I chose Bancroft because I wanted a public school that was neither a de facto private school—based on location —nor a school that was struggling to survive. Plus, Bancroft is located in a neighborhood that features both million-dollar homes and public housing, which means it brings together a diverse cross-section of the city.

You recently co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post advocating more socioeconomic diversity in DC’s schools. How diverse were the schools in the book, and do you feel that diversity made a difference to the schools’ level of achievement?

Both schools are extremely diverse, but I think focusing on the schools’ levels of achievement is the wrong way to assess the value of having such diversity.

These days, the word “achievement” has actually come to mean just two things—student reading and math scores—and how well or poorly students score on those exams can almost always be predicted by their socioeconomic status. That doesn’t mean test scores don’t matter; it just means that the way we use them now overstates their value.

Once we view school quality through a wider lens, I think the value of greater socioeconomic diversity becomes clear. The public school system is the only institution that is guaranteed to reach 90% of every generation, and it was founded to help young people become active and productive members of a democratic society.

It’s harder to do that when you’re the only “anything” in a school community, or if everyone around you comes from similar circumstances. And that’s why I believe we all benefit when we feel a sense of shared ownership for our schools and, by extension, our children.

What advantages or disadvantages did you see to being a charter school rather than a DCPS school, and vice versa?

One of the more interesting things I learned over the course of writing Our School was that to a large degree, each sector—the charter community on one side, and DCPS on the other— is in need of the other’s core strength.

In the charter world, for example, there’s so much energy and creativity, in large part because, for better and for worse, everything is being reinvented, from the professional development calendar to the school report card.

What charters lack, however, are the advantages of scale, which is why you see groups of them banding together to defray, say, the total costs of special ed or content specialists.

Of course, scale is precisely what the districts have in spades—but that scale can (and has) come with a cost. Lots of key decisions get made too far from the individual school or classroom, and that distance ends up having a sort of stultifying effect.

So what would it take to unleash the innovative spirit and autonomy of a charter school within the system of a citywide district? Well, this is essentially what they have in Boston, where a certain number of “pilot schools” within the district have charter-like autonomy. I profiled a year in the life of one of these schools, and you can see for yourself what it engendered.

But DC is its own unique entity, and what excites me most about the future is the level of collaboration that exists between DCPS and the charter community. Can these two systems find a way to interact in the interest of creating more high-quality public schools?

Can our city’s policies start to incentivize educators to tend to the full range of our children’s developmental needs—and stop pretending that the only thing that matters is a narrow slice of their cognitive growth? And can we find a way to make our public school system(s) the foundation of a deeper commitment to a more equitable, vibrant civic life for us all?

Our School was not written to answer all of those questions. But I do hope it helps spark some more fruitful dialogue that can point us all in the right direction. Now is the time.

Sam Chaltain will be at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, on April 12 at 1 pm.