D.C. students have few good choices
In 2009-10, 12,000 Washington, D.C. students transferred from a school that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress. But only 29 percent found an opening at a “higher-proficiency” charter or district-run school, concludes Choice Without Options, an American Enterprise Institute study. Almost three-fourths of transfers “made a school choice that can be described as choosing the bad over the worse or the unknown over the known.”
Washington, D.C., has an environment that, on the surface, is ripe with school choice. Last year, 70 percent of all public school students attended a school other than their zoned neighborhood school; nearly 40 percent attended public charter schools and another 30 percent attended selective magnet schools or traditional public schools using the out-of-boundary application process. Residents of D.C. can apply to more than ninety public charter schools and more than
