From a report by Guy Brandenburg on DC public schools
There are only three DC charter schools with 70 percent or more of their students At-Risk, whereas there are thirty-one such regular public schools. So much for the idea that the charter schools would do a better job of educating the hardest-to-reach students (the homeless, those on food stamps, those who have already failed one or more grades, etc.).
The only schools that have more than 90 percent of their students "passing" the DC-CAS standardized tests remain, to this day, the small handful of schools in relatively affluent upper Northwest DC with relatively high percentages of white and Asian students.
It appears that for the most part, DC’s charter schools are mostly enrolling smaller percentages of At-Risk, high-poverty students but higher fractions of the students in the middle of the wealth/family-cohesion spectrum than the regular DC public schools. There are a few exceptions among the charter schools...
It looks like we are now turning into a tripartite school system: one for affluent and well-educated familes (relatively high fractions of whites and Asians; mostly but not all in regular Ward 3 public schools); one for those in the middle (mostly blacks and latinos, many enrolled in charter schools), and one for those at the seriously low end of the socio-economic spectrum, overwhelmingly African American, largely At Risk, and mostly in highly-segregated regular public schools.
Very, very sad.
3 comments:
Without testing, as bad as the tests are, how would you know to write this article?
Ask the teachers, of course. Their clinical perceptions are far more accurate, if the teachers are any good, than any paper-and-pencil test can be. And I really mean "can be", as in "even theoretically can be".
Everyone is at risk in the school system.
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