ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

by John Weaver, Editor at Large

Washington, DC has long been a laboratory for the national charter school movement, and recently charter schools have been at the center of attention there, as public oversight of these schools and their expansion throughout the city have come into serious debate. Enrollment in DC public schools have declined by 10,000 to 58,000 students, and charter school enrollment has risen to 17,500. Earlier this summer the district's Board of Education considered giving up its supervisory role over charter schools. At the same time it agreed to a moratorium on approving new charter schools so that it can consider how the 17 publicly funded, independently operated schools it oversees affects its supervision of the 147 tradition public schools.

Board members argued that charter schools have become more and more of a distraction, taking valuable time from their primary focus of reforming traditional schools. Victor Reinoso, board member from District 2, said that he did not want to serve on the school board "because I wanted to be an authorizer of charter schools, but because I wanted to have a substantive impact on the DC public schools."

Some proponents of charter schools are in favor of DC's desire to focus on public schools. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) believes that the DC School Board giving up chartering isn't necessarily a bad thing as there is another board - the DC Public Charter School Board - that does a good job. Indeed, the NAPCS doubts the ability of the DC School Board to enact meaningful reforms at all, arguing that "[a] district that tries to modernize itself by doing what its always done but doing it a little better strikes me as a horse-and-buggy company inventing a new carriage to compete with automobiles."

But board members, such as JoAnne Ginsberg, reject this pessimism. Ginsberg argues that "we're at a critical point in our regular public school system... We're instituting major reforms that hold a lot of promise, and I'd like to spend more time to make sure those reforms go through."

These competing viewpoints highlight a tension common between some advocates of charter schools, who feel that innovative solutions must come from outside the traditional public school structure, and other advocates of public school reform, who fear that charter schools divert much needed resources from traditional public schools. But not everyone agrees this tension exists. Deval Patrick, a former head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, suggests that charter schools can be a vehicle for strengthening traditional public schools, not for permanently diverting students to a different system.

For Patrick, "the most compelling argument for charters is that they would serve as a laboratory for innovation that then could be imported into the district schools." Under this vision, charter schools will not compete with traditional public schools, but instead will provide them with models for future reform.

The recently approved alliance between Scott Montgomery Elementary School and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a national organization of charter schools widely regarded as excellent, will test out Patrick's ideal of a charter school that introduces innovation to traditional public schools without undermining their ability to serve all students. Detractors claim the partnership will not radically improve the elementary school while forcing the middle school to compromise its program. Proponents, on the other hand, hope that introducing the KIPP system into a DC public school will bring to the school district at large the kind of improvement seen in KIPP charter schools, particularly vastly improved reading and math skills. The Scott Montgomery-KIPP partnership may end up being indicative of the relationship between public and charter schools in Washington, and therefore the nation.