The Left’s War on School Choice Continues
Conn Carroll /
The Washington Post calls out the D.C. government for its continued hostility towards the school choice movement:
ANYONE LOOKING for a symbol of the contempt that D.C. officials show toward charter schools need go no further than 2501 11th St. NW. There sits the shuttered Meyer Elementary School. Three blocks away is a crowded charter school that desperately wants to lease the building. Instead, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s administration is turning the facility over to the Department of Public Works. The charter school wasn’t even allowed to state its case. Does the city resent the popular charter schools? We say: Get over it.
Despite spending $14,400 for every child in public school (more than any of the 50 states) Washington, D.C.’s fourth and eighth graders scored lower than any other students in the entire country on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress. D.C. parents desperately want better education options for their children. Now more than 20,000 children—about a quarter of the city’s public school students—now attend one of D.C.’s 72 public charter schools. Approximately 7,200 students have applied for tuition scholarships through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program since it began in 2004—about four applications for each scholarship. Local authorities should be working with Congress to embrace more policies to expand school choice in the nation’s capital.