Bringing social justice to D.C.’s children

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. We met when Duncan visited a high-performing D.C. public school. He was there to highlight the importance of nutrition — a big focus of the school’s meal provider, Revolution Foods — but he was at least as interested in the school’s education program and in the academic performance of the students.

DC Preparatory Academy, the public charter school where we met, is on Edgewood Street in Northeast. Many D.C. residents who live in Northwest, as I do, probably don’t have much contact with schools in that part of the city. But DC Prep is an example of a new District trend: high-performing public schools serving underserved children.

The secretary’s visit — and his praise for the achievements of the students in reading and math, and for the intellectual curiosity they displayed — should draw attention to this exceptional school. The six-year-old school’s students are 96 percent African-American. Seventy percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch. At DC Prep’s middle school campus, the economically disadvantaged students who qualify for school lunch subsidies are nearly twice as likely to be proficient in reading and math as their peers in neighborhood D.C. public schools.

DC Prep’s highly successful middle school has closed the notorious “student achievement gap” — the difference between the academic performance of black and white children — by 50 percent. The middle school’s students also exceed the D.C. average by 20 percent in math and 18 percent in reading on D.C.’s standardized tests.

What lessons can we learn from this remarkable school?

First, public charter schools are leading the way in school reform in the District. Charters have pioneered innovations such as longer school days, weeks and years and have specialized at working with children from challenging backgrounds to prepare them for college. D.C. public charter schools’ high-school graduation rate is higher even than the national average, and 85 percent of their high-school age students are accepted to college. Charters now enroll 38 percent of all public school children in D.C. — the highest of any jurisdiction in the nation except for post-Katrina New Orleans — with thousands of children on waiting lists hoping that a space opens up.

The second lesson is that our city government has failed to give charters the space they need to expand. Successful public charter schools typically expand one grade level at a time. Despite growing rapidly, charters have to try to find buildings to house their students — unlike traditional public schools, which receive a school building upon opening.

Typically for a public charter school, DC Prep occupies converted warehouse space, which it has adapted to bring in light and create child-friendly spaces for classrooms and other essential school features like a cafeteria and an auditorium. Yet while D.C.’s government continues to close underenrolled city-run schools at a ferocious rate — 24 schools last year — very few surplus school buildings are sold or leased by the city to charter schools that need them. D.C. law says that charters have a right to make an offer before developers. But despite high demand for the buildings from the charter schools, many of the city’s old school buildings lie empty or are sold to become condos, hotels or health clubs.

Last but not least, people shouldn’t forget how challenging the work is for schools like DC Prep, which have succeeded where so many others before have failed. Data show that the longer children remain at the school, the better they do academically. As a charter school, DC Prep is held to a high standard. The D.C. Public Charter School Board turns down two in three applications to operate a charter school, and one in four charter schools lose the right to operate.

The “secret” of success in D.C.’s public charter school movement is that these independent public schools are free to be more innovative and are held accountable for improved student achievement. D.C.’s charters have arguably inspired the mayoral takeover of the city-run schools, and they offer hope for improvement to increasing numbers of vulnerable children. Secretary Duncan has said “education is a fight for social justice.” On D.C.’s Edgewood Street in Northeast, it most certainly is.