More coordination between DCPS and charters? Not if it threatens charter autonomy, says DC’s top charter official.

How much coordination should there be between DCPS and the charter sector? Probably more than there is now, says the Public Charter School Board’s executive director, but not so much that we return to the era of centralized planning.

The DC education scene has no shortage of anomalies. Expensively modernized DCPS buildings that are half empty sit near vastly oversubscribed charter schools that are scrambling for space. Parents who labor to improve their neighborhood schools sometimes feel their efforts are undermined by an exodus to higher-performing charters. With the approval of 3 new charters and the expansion of two others this week, those challenges could get more pronounced.

The Deputy Mayor for Education, Abigail Smith, recently said that the time has come for joint planning between the traditional and charter public school sectors. But Scott Pearson, executive director of the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), says that while his agency supports cross-sector collaboration on a school-by-school basis, more systemic coordination could jeopardize the autonomy that is essential to charters’ success.

Some have suggested that the PCSB should refrain from authorizing charters in locations that might hinder DCPS’s efforts to revive struggling schools or create new ones. One commentator recently pointed out that parents in Ward 4 are urging DCPS to reopen the former McFarland Middle School, but that the PCSB was about to consider applications for two charter middle schools “that might compete directly with a reopened McFarland.”

In the end, the PCSB approved only one of those schools, Washington Global, at its meeting Monday night. And it’s far from clear that school will locate in Ward 4. Like most charter applicants, the founding group has yet to identify a building for the school, and the application says it will be in Ward 4, 5, 7, or 8.

But Pearson dismissed the idea that the PCSB should take into account something like the McFarland plan when it considers charter applications.

“We wouldn’t have had a charter anywhere in the city if we’d done that,” he said in an interview. “And I think the charter sector is one of the most beneficial things that has happened for education in DC.”

Exodus after 4th grade

Parents also complain that students leave some DCPS schools in droves after 4th grade to attend charter middle schools, many of which begin at 5th grade instead of the usual 6th. They have urged the PCSB to require middle schools to begin a year later. But Pearson said that, while he had sympathy for those parents, “the charters will give valid reasons for why they have to start at 5th.”

Those reasons include the argument that adolescence is beginning earlier than it used to, and “they need to start at 5th to run an efficient middle school,” Pearson said. He asked rhetorically, “Are we going to make a unilateral, centralized decision because we don’t like the impact it has on some other schools?”

More generally, some say that the growth of the charter sector has drained students from DCPS and made it harder for the school system to improve. But to that argument, Pearson responded: “Why can’t DCPS build a school as attractive and competitive as the charters?”

Pearson added that DCPS is “getting better.” And he pointed out that the student population in DC is growing overall by about 3000 students a year, “so it’s not a shrinking pie we need to be fighting over.”

Indeed, some DCPS schools, particularly in Ward 3, are overflowing with students. When asked whether the PCSB saw that as a reason to encourage charters to locate in that ward, which currently has no charters, Pearson said he did not.

“I’d like to see charter schools in every ward,” he said, “but we do not coordinate opening a charter around special needs [DCPS] can’t fill.”

Collaboration in specific cases

But Pearson said the PCSB has been supportive of cross-sector collaboration in specific instances, citing the plan for a high-achieving charter, Achievement Prep, to take over a struggling DCPS school that would otherwise have been closed. And recently the PCSB coordinated with DCPS to have a struggling charter, Hospitality High, become part of a DCPS school.

At Monday’s meeting, Pearson also announced that the PCSB will arrange meetings for the 3 newly approved charter applicants with the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME). And in the interview, he said that the PCSB will probably add a planning position to its staff next year.

Both of these moves are designed in part to promote the flow of information between the charter sector and DCPS. But neither would result in the kind of coordinated overall planning that some are urging. And in both instances, one important objective is to help new charters identify available buildings, always a major challenge in DC.

The new PCSB planning official would also focus on trends in supply and demand, but in the charter sector alone rather than in DC public schools overall. To some extent the PCSB is engaging in that inquiry already, by looking at the length of waiting lists and other indicators.

At Monday’s meeting, the charter school with the longest waiting list after the first round of the school lottery, Two Rivers, applied to expand to a second campus, increasing its total enrollment from 750 to 1,700, which was about the size of its waiting list this year. Pearson said that the PCSB encouraged that application.

But, he added, long waiting lists aren’t the only indicators of need. High-performing charters that serve a largely low-income population usually have shorter waiting lists than more diverse schools that offer dual-language or other programs that appeal to middle-class families. Some even have vacancies. But the PCSB also encourages those schools to expand.

At Monday’s meeting, one of those schools, Thurgood Marshall Academy, also put in a request for a second campus, again at the urging of the PCSB. And previously, the PCSB approved an increase in KIPP DC’s enrollment from 3700 to 5900 by 2018-19.

Consequences of charter expansion

Viewed in one light, those increases are good news for the DC families who will benefit from them. But the consequences for DCPS schools, and the possibly shrinking number of students who will remain in them, could be negative.

While it’s true that the DC school population as a whole is increasing, it’s not clear to what extent that will continue. And by Pearson’s own estimation two-thirds of the increase has gone to charters. In DC, dollars follow pupils, so if DCPS schools lose students they lose funding as well.

Nor is it clear that an expansion in the charter sector will give parents all that they want. Yes, parents want high-quality schools, and the PCSB is focused on filling that demand.

But, as the surveys done in connection with the review of school boundaries show, parents across the District also want predictability. And, especially at the elementary level, they want a school that is nearby. As it’s currently constituted, the charter sector doesn’t provide those things.

Pearson’s aversion to centralized planning is understandable. It didn’t work well for the old pre-charter DCPS, and the current DCPS is still sometimes hamstrung by the unwieldiness of its bureaucracy. But a lack of coordinated planning could leave us with shiny new DCPS buildings that are devoid of students, or families who live next door to good schools they can’t get into.

We need to find a way to bring rationality to the public school sector as a whole, without clipping the wings of high-flying charters or preventing DCPS schools from getting off the ground.