Activities / Initiatives

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FOCUS has the following advocacy priorities:

Facilities

• Freeing up underutilized DCPS school buildings for DC students attending public charter schools

Local Funding

• Ensuring equitable funding for and access to city services such as crossing guards and school nurses for DC students attending public charter schools.

Federal Funding

• Equitable access to federal stimulus funding
• Improving the implementation and dissemination of charter school startup funding and other entitlement programs.

Data Collection & Transparency

• Helping the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to develop a longitudinal data collection and dissemination system

Organizing and Engagement

• FOCUS and the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools have joined ogether to establish the DC Charter Ambassadors Network (DC CAN). DC CAN is an initiative to organize and mobilize the families of the more than 25, 000 DC students that have chosen public charter schools to engage them in building citywide support for public charter schools.

Freedom from central bureaucratic control has been a key element in the creative energy driving charter schools in D.C. and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, giving more autonomy to individual school system schools also pays dividends. In Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton, Canada, progressive superintendents and school boards have found that decentralization, if done properly, produces outstanding results.

FOCUS believes that students attending DCPS schools would benefit enormously if more authority (and funding) were devolved to the school site from central office. To that end, we are bringing to the District a variety of school superintendents and others with first-hand experience of decentralization and putting them together with school system and District leaders. Our goal is to encourage the school system to begin to provide increased autonomy to high-performing and improving schools so that they can move to the next level.

It is well known that, on average, performance in school is directly linked to family income, and it is primarily for this reason that urban school systems struggle to improve the academic performance of their students, most of whom are poor. Overwhelmingly, poor students start school with huge deficits in literacy, cultural exposure, social development, even health. None of these problems is the fault of the schools but schools must do whatever they can to close the gap between disadvantaged and better-off students.

Overall, 78% of D.C. public charter school students are eligible for the free and reduced lunch program, the best current measure of poverty. Most of these students – including the very youngest -- are years behind where they should be when they first enter their charter schools. A number of the charter schools, especially at the elementary and middle-school levels, have had remarkable success with these students, while other schools, especially high schools, have made much smaller gains.

FOCUS has begun its drive to help charter schools close the achievement gap by exposing potential charter school leaders to the realities they will face and helping them to design their schools to effectively address the many deficiencies their students will need to overcome. As time goes on, we will work with the D.C. Public Charter School Association to ensure that already-existing schools have the same degree of understanding.

We also are working closely with the State Education Office and others to develop a data collection and dissemination system that will help charter school leaders (and principals of school system schools) better understand which of their efforts to address the literacy and other deficits of their students are working and which are not, enabling them to make needed changes.