"We have not delivered on quality education here in D.C., both with respect to charter schools and to DCPS. That's why I would advocate for a moratorium," Janey said. "This is not a push back against charter schools. It's rather a reclaiming of the purposeof public education to be one of quality. It would be a mistake to continue to grow without having a handle on quality."
In one way, Janey is right. Too many of D.C.'s charter schools haven't met their promise to improve student performance, a point many in the charter school community have made, including me last fall. But the solution isn't to stop authorizing new charters--it's to close down existing charters that are low-performing--something the Public Charter School Board has started doing--and replace them with better-performing charter schools. Given that, as Janey acknowledges in the interview, most of the DCPS schools children would be attending in the absence of charter schools are themselves low-performing, a moratorium on additional charters might actually work against improving charter school quality, by making it more difficult--politically and pragmatically--for authorizers to close down low-performing charter schools without the opportunity to charter new, better, schools to replace them.
What are the practical implications of Janey's position? That's not entirely clear. Janey has no official authority regarding charter authorizing in DC. The Board of Education, one of the District's authorizers, has been very supportive of Janey's reform efforts so far, so they might seriously consider a moratorium on their own authorizing if Janey wants one. But this is something they were already considering anyway in the wake of scandals involving the Board of Ed's charter school office (sidenote: a WaPo editorial today calls for a quick investigation of those scandals) and something that, quite honestly, might be good for the charter school movement in the District. (One might wonder if that's what Janey was really aiming for to begin with.)
But Janey most certainly has no authority regarding the District's other charter school authorizer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, whose chairman, Tom Nida, has been quite clear that the Public Charter School Board has no intention of curtailing its authorizing in response to Janey. Leading mayoral candidates, Linda Cropp and Adrian Fenty, have also expressed opposition to the idea of a moratorium, although Cropp has supported such a notion in the past. And D.C.'s charter continue to have strong congressional support.
One might also wonder how this will affect Janey's standing in D.C. more generally. Just about everyone in the city has been rooting for him because DCPS needs positive change so desperately. But the call for the charter moratorium is going to cause a rift between Janey and some pro-charter folks in the school reform community and office in D.C., and possibly also undermine support with parents and community members among who charters are clearly popular (you don't get to have 25% of kids in the city enrolled in charters without building a decent base of public support for them). I'm still wishing him success improving DCPS, because I care about the fate of the kids in this city, but I'm concerened his inability to see the potential of charters as a tool to support this goal--by filling niches DCPS isn't currently serving well, whittling down the DCPS population to make a more manageable system, and providing potential renters to help DCPS recoup funds from its millions of square feet of excess space--may undermine his efforts.
More from Charter Blog and Mark Lerner here.
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