Overrun by Charters
DC’s local NPR station aired an interesting piece yesterday about one neighborhood in DC that is feeling overrun by charter schools. The neighborhood currently has seven charter schools located in it, including one that might be closed because of poor academic performance. The residents aren’t very happy about the concentration of charter schools–there are traffic issues, noise and trash from students to contend with, and occasional violence.
At a hearing of the DC Public Charter School Board, one resident demanded of the DCPCSB, “if the board considers other charter school applications, particularly in our neighborhood, we expect–repeat, we expect–that no more charter schools be located in the community.”
This raises an interesting question as the number of charter schools continues to expand in the city–whose job is it to ensure that schools are locating in the neighborhoods where they are needed and, alternately, are not over-concentrated in other parts of the city?
As the NPR piece states, school location is one consideration in the application process, so the DCPCSB is clearly paying attention to where a proposed charter school is planning to locate. And public hearings offer residents an opportunity to speak out. But is that sufficient? Charter school applications can be approved before a school finds a suitable facility (which is difficult), meaning that a school’s ultimate location may differ from it’s original proposed location.
The facilities challenge also means that market forces (i.e., where there is demand for a charter school) are insufficient to regulate school locations–school location isn’t just about student demand, it’s also about finding a building, transportation,
Assessing the “Race to the Test” Guidelines
- Use Assessment to Drive Support for “Fewer, Clearer, and Higher” Standards:Integrating the assessment conversation can strengthen both educator and political support for the common core. There is widespread agreement on the need to improve assessment, so the connection between improving assessment and “fewer, clearer, higher” should be explicit. If you want to assess more deeply and at a higher level of cognitive challenge, you’ll likely need more extended performance-like tasks (like NAEP Science 2009 or PISA). These take more time to assess and can be expensive — in other words, you need fewer. Clearer is also critical — if the standards cannot be clearly defined within the curriculum, then we end up with generic tests and weaker instruments.