No surprise that charters in DC serve fewer at-risk students
I’ve never heard of this blog before, but now I’m listening. Charter school lotteries don’t make schools more diverse. I looked into some of the actual data. You can draw your own conclusions, but I have two very interesting observations.
One, I have a screenshot that highlights my own school with the charter with whom we colocate, at 85% and 49% at-risk, respectively. This confirms the many anecdotal observations that I’ve made over the years, most notably the car line that I see during arrival and dismissal. We have no comparable car line because our parents can’t afford cars. That should tell you something.
Two, see how the at-risk line increases from left to right? Also observe that the blue dots on the far left, the ones with the lowest at-risk percentages, possess no complementary orange ones. Those are all schools in affluent parts of town, in the tony Northwest, and one travels across the river into Southeast as you move to the right.
Charter schools in DC almost entirely serve low-income Black and Brown populations. That has indeed been their stated mission: to give families in these communities high-quality alternatives to “failing” public schools. Yet, they do not come close to actually serving the full spectrum of those populations. And for a sector that claims to have all the answers, one would think they would test the virtues of their models on the most challenging students.
The charter ethos is more demonstrative of clever marketing and exploitative branding than it is as a long No surprise that charters in DC serve fewer at-risk students | @ THE CHALKFACE:
