January 2, 2009
Increasingly renowned for raising test scores for D.C.'s most disadvantaged students, the District's public charter schools—which now educate more than one in three D.C. students—have found that their growing prominence attracts press interest.
Recently, the city's other daily newspaper ran an inconclusive—later partially corrected—piece on the bank loans taken out by some charters. Sadly, their enthusiasm for a big news splash failed to guide them to the real scoop.
The story reporters at The Washington Post missed is why the city's charters have been forced into the commercial loan market in the first place. D.C. law requires that charters be given “the first right of offer” on vacant school buildings before condo and office developers or D.C. government agencies can bid for them. The scandal is that the city has continuously denied charters the public school space their students need.
Thanks to the city's defiance of its own law, D.C.'s public charter schools pay high costs to acquire and remodel often-inadequate space—lacking playgrounds, cafeterias, auditoriums and other school necessities.
The unsuitable buildings that charters are forced to occupy include church buildings, basements and converted warehouse, retail and office space. Meanwhile, record numbers of surplus school buildings stand empty under lock and key.
Recently, acres of school-appropriate space became available following Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's decision to close 23 under-enrolled traditional public schools.
Yet the D.C. government allowed the charters to make offers on fewer than half of these. Worse, following the offer process charters were invited to negotiate with the city on only three buildings; adding insult to injury, two charters are in competition for each of the three.
If not for public education, what are the city fathers' plans for D.C.'s vacant school facilities? A total of 11 school buildings that the charter schools badly need have just been offered to developers.
Another six have been reserved for city agencies. Even if this didn't break the law, it simply doesn't make sense for the city to spend money to convert schools to office use while schools have to convert offices for school use.
These vacant public school buildings—like those the city has denied charters over the years—were built at taxpayers' expense to be used for public education. Public education today means both DCPS and the charter schools, but while the government has committed more than $2 billion to provide state-of-the-art school buildings for the children of the former, public charter school students do not even merit space in the decayed school buildings discarded by DCPS.
The law that the city flouts is there for a reason, so kids come first. Economic development is obviously important, but not more so than public education. Perversely, D.C.'s government would benefit from letting students use the surplus school space.
By making charters move into commercial space, the city government loses the property tax receipts that their previous for-profit occupants would have paid. Charters also save the city precious public education dollars by completing school renovations at far less cost than the city's traditional public schools.
Few, if any, District residents want public school buildings converted into condos when children in good public schools lack appropriate facilities. Denying kids schoolroom space in which to learn says much about the attitude of the city government to the education of the District children who are our city's future.
D.C. law and our consciences say that D.C.'s public school buildings are for our children. It's time that the Mayor and council members said so too and let the children in so all D.C. kids have a good place to go to school.
Robert Cane is executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates school reform in the District via the creation of high quality public charter schools.