The Education Town Hall announces endorsement of DC Public Education Principles
Six Principles for Public Education in Washington, DC
Building a public education system that is fully responsive to community input and
meets the needs of all our citizens continues to be a critical challenge for our city. This
year’s election offers a chance to debate and formulate a vision for the next stage in
improving our schools. We believe that to reach our goal of providing the educational
opportunities all children and communities deserve, our city must embrace the following
principles:
1. Ensure all families have matter-of-right access to high-quality DCPS
schools in their neighborhoods – a predictable, matter-of-right path
from pre-school through high school. The message from the public in the
Deputy Mayor for Education’s (“DME’s”) Student Assignment process was clear:
Families and communities in all parts of the city want the assurance of matter-of-right
schools in their neighborhoods that are safe, academically challenging learning
environments. While residents want the ability to select alternatives, they do not
want to be at the mercy of a lottery for access to a high performing school that can
fully meet the needs of their children and community.
2. Focus resources on students and communities with the greatest
need. Matter-of-right schools are thriving in some parts of the city and not in
others. Schools serving children with the greatest need often lack the resources they
require and face the highest staff turnover. To address these inequities, we must:
• Fully implement the recently enacted “at-risk” weight in the funding formula.
• Ensure magnet and specialty programs are available equitably and actively
promoted across the city and encourage diversity in our schools.
• Strengthen early childhood education through outreach to communities, wraparound
services, community schools and family resource centers.
• Continually assess the resources needed and proven best practices to meet the
challenges schools face serving children with the greatest economic,
educational, and social needs.
3. Require coordinated planning between the District of Columbia Public
Schools (“DCPS”) and the Public Charter School Board (“PCSB”) to
build a core system of stable DCPS neighborhood schools with a
complementary set of alternative options.
• Currently there is no overall strategy for how we will meet the educational needs
of our children and communities and how we will spend nearly one fifth of our tax
revenue each year to do so. We must have coordinated planning, overseen by
an accountable city agency, with active community input, to consider proposed
modernizations, expansions, closings, and openings of any school.
• Build on the recently opened DCPS office of planning to strengthen strategic
planning, including vertical planning within feeder systems.
• Collect and disseminate successful policies, programs and practices identified in
both the DCPS and charter sectors to facilitate both sectors learning from each other.
4. Responsibly manage our financial resources
• Use coordinated planning to avoid duplication of functions between DCPS and
the charter sector, and between the school systems and other DC agencies.
• Improve transparency of the DCPS budget, and commence budget planning in
the fall so that individual schools can thoughtfully set priorities by the end of
spring.
• Require full transparency of charter school budgets, including how dollars paid to
private entities are used and require that all payments are subject to LEA audits.
• Commit to provide DCPS and each charter LEA the funding required to meet the
needs of their students. The compass point is adequate funding, not
mathematical parity between schools and LEAs with dramatically different needs.
5. Broaden assessment measures to focus on student growth and use
multiple measures to assess a quality education. The District should
follow the lead of other districts that increasingly rely on diverse measures of student
achievement and teacher and school effectiveness in order to provide parents with
accurate information and enable the city to provide targeted support where needed.
• Ensure all students have a well-rounded curriculum in all matter-of-right schools.
• Reduce the emphasis on snapshot measures of proficiency toward measures
that focus on student growth. Schools must be judged on the breadth and depth
of subjects taught, their engagement of students, and the culture of learning they
foster.
• Make public data disaggregated by income, race and geography, with actual
scale scores, so it can be better used to determine whether all groups are
making progress and focus resources most effectively going forward.
6. Ensure families and community members have reliable ways to
exercise the right to participate in public education decision making.
The research is clear that community engagement and ownership are key to
improvement.
• Strengthen and support mechanisms such as Local School Advisory Teams
(“LSAT”) and School Improvement Teams (“SIT”) to engage communities in
school planning.
• Support or create parent/teacher or home school organizations at all by-right
schools.
• Build on mechanisms such as the Budget Taskforce, the DCPS Parent Cabinet,
the elected school board, the PCSB Community Advisory Group and DME
taskforces to secure ongoing oversight and community input in decision making
for our schools.
For a full list of the 50+ people who have signed on to the Six Principles, see
dceducationelection.org/sign-on
Education Town Hall Forum 