If you ask a District of Columbia politician what the city’s most pressing issue is, the answer is education. If you ask them what issue most of them won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, you get (surprise!) education.
D.C.’s under-funded and overwhelmed education system is a shambling wreck. Its infrastructure is rarely renovated, its teachers overworked and its students are testing low.
But how do you solve the problem? More money means raising taxes, and ideas like charter schools, school choice and vouchers are politically controversial (one source for this column refused to publicly discuss them).
Everybody involved in the debate, though, has the same goal: getting D.C.’s children into strong schools.
“We have to give these kids the opportunity to succeed while fixing the places they are coming from,” Kalim Caire, Executive Director of Fight for Children, said. Caire says he supports any solution that works.
It is the local African-American population that suffers most from the school problems, according to Caire. The mix of highly educated out-of-towners and under-educated locals is a problem.
Most cities have 30 percent of their youth in public schools, while D.C. has around 20 percent because of its large transient population. The Progressive Policy Institute reports that 21 percent of D.C. residents have a graduate degree while 30 percent lack a high school diploma.
In 2004, Congressional legislation gave increased federal funding to public and charter schools and to a pilot program run by the Washington Scholarship Foundation that allows students to receive scholarships to attend private schools.
The Georgetown Public Policy Institute recently released a study of the program. While it doesn’t determine that efforts have been successful, the news is positive, according to Dr. Patrick Wolf, the study’s principal investigator. He predicts that a quantitative study of the program will take several years, and while he is reluctant to draw conclusions, his investigation shows a majority of parents involved think the program is a success.
But many public school advocates, including Iris Troyer, the co-chair of Parents United for D.C. Schools, and Marcus Burbley, founder of fixourschools.net, worry that these programs distract attention and funding from public schools while draining the kind of active parents who would be a boon to school reform.
Caire and Scholarship Foundation President Sally Sachar, however, scoff at the idea that school choice (which in D.C. does not currently involve direct funding loss) hurts public schools.
“If they choose to go to a public school, I cannot imagine the argument for holding them back,” Sachar said. “Who are any of us to say they should not get that opportunity?”
It seems that any D.C. schools solution is going to require a hybrid, since the city lacks enough non-public schools in the city to support a full swing to vouchers and enough funding for either charter or public schools.
D.C. Councilmember Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), chair of the Education Committee, has proposed a tax raise, which, while opposed by business interests, is supported by most of the education advocates I spoke with, whatever their stripe.
“I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s legal,” Caire said.
