This past June 20, two and a half years after taking office, Mayor Gray gave an address on “Next Steps” in his plan for public education at the Savoy Elementary School in Anacostia.
Simply put, his plan is to continue the “education reform” of charter schools that began 15 years ago, which mayoral control in 2007 was intended to speed up, into the future. Through three “overarching strategies” he expects to create, “as One City, a comprehensive system of schools that provides high quality options to all children.” He pointed to the “partnership” between Savoy ES and Thurgood Marshall Academy Charter School as a “snapshot of that future.”
Each of the strategies has a number of measures. But, the Mayor said, to reach the goal, “it is imperative that charters and DCPS collaborate” and that people give up favoring one education “reform philosophy” over another, such as advocating for DCPS or for charter schools. They must give up their “fear and distrust” and the “language of competition” and embrace instead “a new spirit of collaboration and problem-solving that ensures parents and students are first.”
Below are the three strategies and their measures, some of which are already in place:
1) Scale up
• by replicating successful programs so they serve more students such as linking a middle school with McKinley Tech High School and merging School Without Walls with Francis-Stevens preK-8
• by giving the chancellor authority to grant charters
• lease more DCPS school buildings to charters
• have DCPS and charter schools look together at city-wide data in making plans to fill gaps, expand, close or move schools.
2) Strengthen
• by raising the quality of pre-K programs with two new tools for quality and assessment
• continue Race to the Top grants for training DCPS and charter school teachers in the Common Core Standards
• build Career and Technical Academies in DCPS and charter schools in line with jobs in demand and the Five Year Economic Development Plan
• develope a Graduation Pathways Project to get off-track students back on track
• continue the OSSE pilot program offering DCPS and charter schools access to a consortium of special education service providers
• expand Flamboyen Family Engagement Partnership to 26 more DCPS and charter schools
• revamp the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula and
• find ways to link LEA payments to enrollment throughout the year while also insisting on more equity between DCPS and charters in providing special education services and truancy prevention.
3) Simplify
• with a single lottery for DCPS and charters using a common application and a common enrollment deadline
• release new standardized state-wide report cards from OSSE for all schools
• create a Re-Engagement Center as a single source of information for dis-engaged youth to re-engage (deadline for blueprint, October 1, 2013)
• use the Malcolm X Elementary School and Achievement Prep Charter School located in the same building as a model of two schools fully integrating the strength of a neighborhood school and the innovation of a charter school
• create by legislation that has been submitted to the Council, the “option for charter schools to elect to provide a neighborhood preference” and for schools chartered by the chancellor to become schools-of-right in high need areas
• allow for cross-LEA (Local Education Agency) feeder patterns in the coming school boundary revisions “where a DCPS school might feed into a charter school, or vice versa.”
This is what the Mayor is referring to when he says we must “stay the course.” It is clearly a plan to knit, link, merge, mush and subsume the city’s traditional public school district, into the charter school ethos of using public money to pay for the private dreams of people who want to run their own school. Or for the private dreams of those who wish to profit by the “steady revenue stream” of public tax dollars going into charter schools and back out to real estate companies, hedge funds or charter management organizations, among others.
But, is this what we the people want? Is this what we expect from our elected leaders who are responsible for using the power we have given them to spend our public dollars in the public, not private, interest?
