Punk-rock pioneers the Ramones created a new genre of music by speeding up 1950s doo-wop songs to under three minutes. I will attempt to follow in their footsteps by speeding up a new study I wrote for the Heritage Foundation on education in Washington, D.C. by giving you the highlights with pictures.
On the surface, Washington, D.C. has been making dramatic academic progress, especially in the charter school sector which now educates almost half of K-12 students in the District.
These gains on NAEP are far larger than those of any state during the same period, but digging a little deeper shows that the vast majority of gains have been achieved by children from middle- and high-income families.
Among low-income kids, only those attending charter schools see gains notably above the national average. A large part of the truly extraordinary gains seen among well-to-do D.C. students seems to be related to sophisticated parents finding open enrollment opportunities for high-performing district schools and charters in preference to moving to the suburbs in Maryland or Virginia. This is a complex phenomenon addressed at length in the study.
Worse still, even after 25 years of gains, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) still ranks near the bottom in comparisons with other urban school districts.
Average incomes and revenue per pupil both dwarf those in Detroit and have been increasing, and yet twenty five years into a reform process we see DCPS and Detroit in a dead heat for school district with the worst results for at-risk students.
Finally, despite the passage of the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2004, private schooling is dying in D.C.
Previous research has established that charter schools have a heavier impact on private schools than public schools. The D.C. charter school law operates effectively as a universal choice program—open to all students and reliably providing over $14,000 per student in revenue. By comparison the Opportunity Scholarship Program restricts eligibility and provides fewer pupil resources for children to attend private schools. Not surprisingly, private schools in D.C. have converted to charter status, and it would take a special type of bravery to open a private school in the District.
The overall picture is very mixed. D.C. has a vibrant and growing charter sector, and has enjoyed important and demonstrable academic gains as a result. It is incredibly important to the long-term health of the city that affluent parents do not automatically move to the suburbs. If they did, they would be taking their taxes with them.
On the other hand, district schools in D.C. show precious little improvement over the last decade outside of high-income students. It is an amazingly complex situation in D.C., full of both encouraging trends and heartbreaking disappointments visible in the data. If you would like to dive deeper, please do read the study. To wrap up our three minute song however—the ultimate conclusion is that the time has come for D.C. to take off the parental choice training wheels by embracing next generation model of Education Savings Accounts.
