On May 30, two events will likely determine the future of some DCPS schools of right.

One is the third meeting of the advisory committee for the boundaries study, which is slated to finalize guiding principles for that work. Here’s information on that May 30 meeting, and here is information on all of that body’s meetings.

The other educationally consequential event of May 30 is the last vote on DC’s budget for next year—which, among other things, will memorialize budgets for DCPS schools and provide more money for charter schools (but not necessarily their teachers!) as a result of the DCPS teacher contract.

First, some background.

Recall that the deputy mayor for education (DME) is undertaking 3 bodies of work in 2023:

—the master facilities plan (MFP)
—the boundaries study
—the adequacy study

These three bodies of work are all related, with the first two being done concurrently and with the same team. The MFP will discuss capacity and utilization of school facilities; the boundaries study will also do that by way of addressing DCPS boundaries, feeder patterns as well as “access” to schools; and the adequacy study will look at per pupil funding.

The last meeting of the boundaries advisory committee, on May 3, was notable inasmuch as it got past the polite introductions of the first meeting (in March) to define and outline so-called “guiding principles” for the boundaries study.

As slide 11 of the May 3 presentation shows, the DME’s staff presented the four guiding principles from the last redrawing of boundaries in 2014 (equitable access, neighborhood schools, predictability, and system of choice), along with others selected by the DME.

After some discussion at their May 3 meeting, the advisory committee outlined more and different categories for the guiding principles. Those proposed principles were then re-packaged and presented as the following “possible” guiding principles at the DME’s two town halls on the boundaries work, on May 16 and 17:

By right neighborhood schools
Equitable access
Inclusivity
Predictability and continuity
Proximity
Racial and ethnic diversity
Socioeconomic diversity
Sustainable enrollment
System of choice

(See these possible guiding principles here on the May town hall presentation, starting on slide 18, with definitions following.)

During the May town halls, the public was supposed to vote on what was important to them and to the city of these possible guiding principles—without the definitions front and center and by choosing only two.

There was also the little hiccup that it was not clear what these actually mean.

For instance, “by right neighborhood schools” seems pretty clear—but a large part of “predictability and continuity” is having defined feeder patterns at local schools that have to take you in, which are, uh, by right neighborhood schools.

Then, too, “socioeconomic diversity” can mean fewer people of means or in poverty—or more of each! So: Which is it?

And what is “equitable access” in practice: a lottery preference for X students or a specific percentage of seats set aside everywhere at any time for X students, where X is some as yet undefined thing or demographic?

Then, too, why not include other categories of presumably desirable things in schools, like “well-resourced for the last 5 years” or “fully modernized” or “having parental involvement”?

(A general survey on these possible guiding principles–open until May 29–at least allows more than just two choices, albeit without addressing the issues above.)

The reality remains that this garnering of public feedback does not lend credibility to any conclusion. And for all any of us knows, that may be the entire point. That is, conclusions like school closures, consolidations, and co-locations may have already been reached a long time ago as a result of the expansion of capacity in Ward 3 amid a generally stagnant student population.

To be fair, the boundaries advisory committee seemed aware of these potential problems at its May 3 meeting. Members qualified and added on so many items to the list of guiding principles that the DME finally blurted out that DC’s current path is not “sustainable” and that we can’t have everything we want.

Now this all would be funny (cue the band!) but for the serious consequences and misinformation.

After all, the DME is one of the people in DC most responsible for what he is labelling as not “sustainable.”

That is, what is not “sustainable” is not merely the DME’s not appropriately planning for our schools, such that schools of right are annually forced to cut staff and budgets due to declining enrollments caused by school proliferation and a not-growing student population.

It’s also that the very people responsible for school proliferation are entirely left out of being held accountable for it!

Indeed, what is not “sustainable” (school proliferation amid a not-growing student population) always falls most acutely on a subset of DCPS schools of right—while the DME who actually is at fault for the whole thing pretends that the resulting decline in enrollments and budget cuts are the fault of those schools of right.

It’s a marvelous sleight of hand, and a pernicious lie, but as with so many things in the town hall presentation for the boundaries as well as the town hall that I attended for the MFP, it was never called out for the misinformation that it is.

Indeed, the video of the boundaries town hall I participated in on May 17 makes clear several things around equity that one cannot see at all in the DME’s presentation or words:

—The concept of “equitable access” was chosen as important by participants multiple times for a negative reason—namely, that specific schools are not good. This was echoed in the May 3 advisory committee meeting.
—A commenter at minute 47 noted that not all schools are resourced equally OR equitably, so answers to the polling around guiding principles are not able to be equated with one another.
—Many of the comments had nothing to do with actual boundaries, but with issues of equity. If, as one commenter noted, “gentrification and redlining made the by right system inherently racist,” that raises the natural question of why not look at getting rid of boundaries altogether? And why not immediately address those inequities?
—Someone brought up that the way that this was presented felt like there was a hand on the scale for choice, and multiple people raised the fact that schools of right have been inequitable for a long time.

Yet, at many turns the presenters made clear that they were not supportive OR understanding of the idea of a citywide system of strong and equitable schools of right.

For example, at minute 52 presenter Patrick Davis (formerly DCPS facilities head, now with the private construction firm that is working on both the MFP and boundaries studies) talked about the challenges of traveling to schools and the need to solve those travel challenges, as if traveling is the real issue and not the inequity that drives people to travel—both of which a by right system in every quarter is designed to solve for.

So, instead of having strong by right schools in every quarter so students do NOT have to travel (which commenters at both this May 17 town hall and the May 3 advisory meeting mentioned), DC will merely try to help students travel better.

On May 17, my question about how they were defining high-quality schools was answered by DME staffer Jenn Comey at the 1 hour 2 minute mark, when she noted that they were defining “high-quality” by way of DC’s school ratings report cards; demand; and in boundary participation. Thus, if schools of right don’t get good test scores and/or don’t have high in boundary participation (by the way, this last bit is true for EVERY school of right outside Ward 3), they’re not going to be addressed positively by this study—period.

(Guess some are more equal than others.)

When someone else raised the issue that equitable access is not the same as equitable schools, Comey pointed to the upcoming adequacy study—as if funding alone were the issue when we know it’s a matter of political will in the inequity we see in our schools of right.

Then, at the 1 hour 11 minute mark on May 17, someone asked why they didn’t revise boundaries for Jackson-Reed to accommodate overcrowding at that high school. Comey said that the overcrowding was a longstanding issue and the GDS school became available, so it all worked.

But this explanation completely sidestepped the reality that 1. there was no reason to not redo boundaries (they’ve been done before for these very reasons); 2. the GDS school had been on the market for literally years and DC paid twice its assessed value, indicating not as much a bargain as an inevitability; and 3. the chancellor’s stated rationale for the Ward 3 expansion was to keep out of bounds kids in the feeders for the sake of “diversity.”

And that’s not getting to the fact that none of the questions actually asked at the meeting were provided to the public after the meeting, while the chat itself was unavailable at the meeting and was never made available afterward. Here, for instance, are questions I copied during the 1 hour I attended of the boundaries town hall on May 17.

The same was true of the May 9 MFP town hall I attended: no copy of all questions asked and no chat. Here’s a file of questions I copied for the hour I attended. Sadly, the fact that the questions below were not answered at that MFP May 9 town hall suggests that a fix is in:

–What accounting will the MFP do for the amount of money charters spend and have spent on their facilities? Right now, charters get almost $200 million annually for their facilities from DC, without regard for need, and $0 is tracked by DC. In fact, charters are free to use that money for anything—not just facilities. I happen to know several charters that have banked lots of public money and do NOT need the facilities funds. Other charters may be in a very different place. How will the MFP account for that? [I asked this at a point in the meeting where Patrick Davis, the former DCPS facilities staffer, mentioned that they would take into account the money already spent by charters on renovations of former DCPS school buildings charter are renting].
–How will this MFP account for the return on investment (ROI) for long-term charter leases of former DCPS spaces? Right now, DGS gives leases for decades to charters for free or reduced cost on the basis of anticipated charter renovation costs over a span of time—but as far as I know, no one is analyzing whether these long-term leases are giving us a good ROI and whether it makes sense to do them this way.
–Will there be any examination of out of bounds slots at so-called “crowded” DCPS schools of right?

As I noted before, all of this is underscored by the DME ignoring DC code by making the boundary process NOT about “access to high quality DCPS schools,” as the code language says, but about access to ANY schools, such that this process will involve ALL schools. (You can see this excising of DCPS on slides 6 and 10 of the May boundaries town hall presentation.)

Jenn Comey addressed my query on this subject on May 17 by noting (at the 16 minute mark of the video) that “we consider our public schools to be both DCPS and charters” and then went on to differentiate lottery-only schools from by right schools—as if the most salient aspects of the schools were boundaries and lottery, NOT education rights.

Comey then went on to refer to DCPS schools of right as “boundary schools,” starting at about the 18 minute mark of the video and as shown on slide 11 of the presentation.

Now, it makes sense that planning for schools involves ALL schools. But this boundary study is being undertaken under DC code to outline specifically and directly what this means for DCPS schools of right, to which all citizens are ENTITLED unlike all other schools.

By construing DCPS schools of right as merely “boundary schools,” and thus different only inasmuch as they have boundaries (imagine calling charters “uncertified teacher schools”–I mean, we too can play this game), Comey indicated a view that all our schools are essentially, for this purpose, the same and interchangeable. 

As the public meetings on both the MFP and boundaries thus far have made clear, people expect and need equity in education rights. And only DCPS schools of right can deliver that. They are not one choice among many—they’re an essential public good unlike all other schools.

But the processes as outlined by the DME not only do not recognize that but do nothing to ensure that there is any differentiation.

That means that once budget cuts are memorialized on May 30 and absent pushback by the advisory committee, the DME will be justified in every way—fiscally, politically, and under the guise of good planning—in using these studies as a cudgel to outline DCPS school closures on the basis of school choice.

There’s only one word for that: sad.