The Competition Effect Emerges

I like the Council of Great City Schools and it's director, Mike Casserly, but I confess I'm not really sure what he's getting at here. He's right that muddled governance and Congressional meddling have done DCPS no favors through the years. But his thesis that the lack of coordination between DC's three-part arrangement of a regular district, charters schools, and vouchers is the big problem (really two-and-a-half parts; the voucher program is small, thus far ineffective, and unlikely to grow) strikes me as off. He says:

The issue here is neither the voucher program nor charter schools themselves. It is a Congress and other political leaders who have established two alternative systems that now run parallel to the D.C. school district without boosting its capacity to get better. If this arrangement created competitive pressures to improve, it would have worked in the students' favor. But there is little to suggest that is happening here or in other cities. Instead, D.C.'s educational system is more fractured than ever, with little common ground among boosters of either strategy.

"Little to suggest"? That's hard to square with the following excerpt from an interview with George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union (from NCTQ per Flypaper):

Have your views of the role of the union changed over time? How?

I think it has a lot to do with the landscape in the system right now. We have the second highest number of charter schools-56 or 57 charters. So we are in a competitive market here in D.C.

The union has now had to take on a dual role. Previously our main concern was bread and butter issues—to make sure teachers have good benefits and working conditions. We didn’t have to be that concerned about keeping children in [D.C. schools]. But now around 21,000 of our students are in charters and around 45,000 in public schools. We lost 6,000 students last year. The charter schools have created a competition where the very survival of the union and the job security of our teachers is not dependent on the language in our contract. It is dependent on our ability to recruit and maintain students because we are funded pretty much by the number of students we have enrolled in the public system.

It puts the union in a different light. It’s not just the contract that protects jobs but also student enrollment. We are expanding our professional development because that impacts student achievement and if parents perceive we improve student achievement then we stand a better chance of getting students back who moved to charter schools. The more students we have, the more teachers we can employ, and the more security we can develop in terms of jobs.

Meanwhile, this is Michelle Rhee being interviewed by John Merrow:

JOHN MERROW: What is your relationship with these charter schools, with these KIPP schools? Are they your competition?

MICHELLE RHEE: Well, I mean, I certainly think that, in some ways, you know, they are, but we have 100,000 school-age kids in Washington, D.C. I want every single one of those kids in an excellent school.

JOHN MERROW: But you are losing students. You've 100,000 school-age kids, but you're now at around 50,000.

MICHELLE RHEE: Correct.

JOHN MERROW: You're hemorrhaging students. Is that a concern?

MICHELLE RHEE: I believe that, when we begin to, on a consistent basis, have schools that have compelling, and engaging, and rigorous programs for kids, will we begin to attract back and see our numbers start to go in the other direction? I absolutely think so.

Anything's possible but when the head of the teachers union says we need to do A, B, and C to respond to competition from charter schools and the chancellor says we need to do X, Y, and Z, to win back students we lost from charters school, perhaps some kind of competition is in fact occuring.

And while "fractured" has an inherently negative ring to it, one could argue that giving charter schools space to develop in a way that's wholly insulated from DCPS and all its problems has not been such a bad thing.