In Washington, D.C., where charter schools now enroll over 43% of the public school population, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson recently announced her plan to close 20 more public schools at the same time that charter school operators were seeking fast-track approval for up to 10 new campuses.
Peter MacPherson, the former president of the Capitol Hill Cluster School PTA (DC Public Schools), wrote the following letter to Mayor Gray, calling for Chancellor Henderson’s resignation. Like many public school parents who volunteer for school improvement committees, he lobbied Chancellors Rhee and Henderson and former DC Council chair, now mayor, Gray for school modernization and technology upgrades. This past spring, he organized a city-wide campaign to stop Henderson’s plan to lay off several dozen school librarians. It met with little response from the chancellor, though a member of the city council introduced legislation that would require a librarian in every school.
His letter expresses the widely-felt frustration of many parents, when they realize that their efforts to work with school officials are either ignored or met with disingenuous responses.
McPherson wrote this public letter in response to Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close more public schools and open more charters.
When those responsible for public schools give the order to abandon them, it is a public admission that they have no ideas about how to improve them. If they truly are bereft of their own plans, they should not be in charge. Public schools need leadership, not people in charge working to shut them down.
Leaders of public schools who don’t fight to strengthen them are working for the competition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you Mr. Peter MacPherson,
Your advocacy and voice are instrumental for our kids’ futures.
I am nominating you to move forward with others who feel as outraged as you. Round out your group with parents, educators, public school administrators, superintendents, business owners, school board members, city council members, school treasurers from both political parties… and continue to take your voices to the top, they will have to listen when the public learns the real facts.
This is what we are trying to get going in Ohio.
(see my post below from previous Ravitch blog)
Maureen Reedy ~ Believing in Teachers, Believing in Public Education
November 29, 2012 at 9:21 am
We have to have a campaign that involves educators, parents, superintendents, school board members, city council members, small business owners… from both political parties.
We have to find a way to expose to the public at large the perfect storm occurring under the guise of school choice for corporate profiteering;
• overall dismal performance of for profit charters longitudinally
• divesting, instead of investing in our kids and their futures all in the name of profits for CEOs…. billions of tax dollars over the last decade siphoned from higher performing public schools to lower performing for profits
• loss of connection to community for our kids, the heartbeat of the community is gone when the public schools close… no band, orchestra, sports, spaghetti dinners, drama performances, etc.
• on-line education with increased class sizes and fewer teachers alienates our kids emotionally and gives them no support and guidance for navigating the stresses of growing up in today’s society, whether they be normal stresses of adolescence or traumas and deprivation experienced in their daily lives.
• lower high school grad rates costly to society down the road… higher unemployment, growing poverty levels, higher crime rate, more prisons, higher addictions, mental health issues, higher birth rates, the cycle continues.
Time is running out….
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Parents are finally waking up to the fact that their schools are being stolen from them. Good.
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Bravo Mr. MacPherson!
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Sounds like “under-enrollment” is the new catch-phrase being used to justify charter schools and vouchers. Rahm Emmanuel is using the exact same bogus phrase for expanding charters in Chicago.
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Mayoral control never has worked just look around the country at the terrible results. Lucky for us in California it is against our State Constitution as King Tony found out in AB 1381. To push mayoral control in California Senator Feinstein and then superintendent of Chicago, Arne Duncan, wrote letters to the California Legislature stating that those who ran the Chicago Schools before Daley and Vallas took over in 1995 had put the Chicago Schools into $1.8 billion in debt. They both lied to the California Legislature. I have the pertinent financial pages to the 1994 Chicago Public Schools budget and there was a surplus. Duncan should lose his job and be thrown out for lying to another state for ideological reasons. After all did not Rod Paige eventually lose his job for lying about having a 0% dropout rate in Houston when it was really about 50%? Rhee was a loser when she had about $29,000/student and crashed their finances. She is also caught up in a big test cheating scam in D.C. What does it take for these people to lose their “True Believers?”
When is anyone but me going to do anything about the facts of Duncan concerning mayoral control in California? What is wrong with this so called media? I thought they were supposed to do real stories. Big joke on that after Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act which wiped out a free press. Now how about the rest of you? Is it OK for us to have a Secretary of Education who is a major liar?
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Not only is Hendersons leadership a problem-so is the political situation at large in the city:
Council Member McDuffy (to his credit) has his children are safely placed at a full school in NW DC, and yet there is continual churn in education for communities on the eastern side of the city especially in Ward 5 where I live and which he represents. In addition to that churn, there is a tendency of DCPS not to plan in a way that ensures the development of high quality educational programs that would ameliorate the ongoing issue of low matriculation and school closures.
Continual Educational Churn for Communities East of the Park
….And for Ward 5 in Particular
Case in point is that schools that have already experienced churn and confusion in the last round of closures are continually expected to bear the brunt of DCPS lack of educational planning and programming. Langdon (where my son started elementary school) absorbed students from Slowe and then after that consolidation received a large number of special needs students without the budget to hire additional SPED staff. A parent, who is a friend of mine on the board at Langdon who had to fight with DCPS to get the SPED needs at that school budgeted whereas the process should have happened automatically. Now despite Langdon being a nearly full building of 404 students, it is again to absorb 161 students from Marshall /Fort Lincoln( with Marshall children having to travel in excess of a mile and cross a major highway) in order to attend there. In light of extensive housing development in the Marshal/ Ft/ Lincoln community, the schools closing is simply ridiculous —and I nor any other parent needs to sit at a meeting with DCPS to establish that fact.
However, one way that the Council and Mayor could lead in education would be to demand and end to the churn at previously impacted schools such as Langdon. The council member and the mayor could also ensure that Marshall remain open permanently in order to absorb the potentially hundreds of children who will occupy the hundreds of new townhomes being built at Fort Lincoln- many to be occupied by young families. Those families cannot begin to look to send their children to Marshall as long as it is under threat of closure by DCPS (could that be the unspoken agenda behind closing a school next to a huge new housing development-hmmm I have to wonder with many others who are suspicious of Chancellor Henderson’s planning) . Additionally the council member and mayor could ensure that the programs at Marshall are of high quality (as they once were) to ensure that students achievement rises at that school.
Recently the Washington post reported the following” The chancellor didn’t propose any closures in Ward 3, where schools are overcrowded. Instead, the closures are concentrated in Wards 5, 7 and 8 — areas of the city where many families are already choosing public charter schools.”
This is inaccurate as parent have not had a choice, DCPS had to be sued to agree to open a middle school for Ward 5 where I live, and yet there still is no public middle school serving our ward now 2 years later. How unfortunate it will be if the political leadership does not require the school system to do proper planning and educational program development and instead continues to rely on the populace to have to involve the courts on its behalf
DCPS decision making process for the closure of Marshall (and former gutting of what was a high quality program in the past) makes no sense unless one considers that DCPS is more interested in promoting growth of charter schools in wards 5,7 and 8 than in doing its job which is to develop innovative public school program (such as IB, AP gifted) –which are much more plentiful in NW.
Lack of Quality Educational Program Development
The potential closing of Francis Stevens in Ward 2.* while this school achievement is higher that DCPS citywide 50/52 % and the school is over half full speaks to the educational planning issue. This building at the mouth of Georgetown, can only be seen as a downtown developers delight and loss for DC’s students and families. Some years ago there was reference to the development of gifted programming (referenced in the media but never developed by the previous or current school chancellors). The development of such a high quality educational program would have ensured that Francis Stevens was an educational home for close by Palisades and Georgetown families who don’t seem to want their students in the arts program at Hardy. Instead Francis Stevens is on the chopping block and DCPS plans to harden the neighborhood feeder patterns essentially blocking many NE, SE,SW students from quality innovative programs that exit in NW but not in the rest of the city. With the looming hardening of the feeder plan, along with school closings , students in NE, SE, SW will have not only lack access to high quality educational programs, families like mine will again face the charter only option, many of which are substandard. In my experience the 2 out of the 3 charter (Tier 1 and 2 rated) that we tried in our search for rigorous curriculum in the middle grades were not even basic healthy environments for any child . Now I am very happy that my son is now in a DC Public High School. If, NE, SE, SW families are forced for a sense of security to populate the charter schools, it will be a travesty and I suspect have lasting political implications for leadership in this city.
Yet personally after 10 years of efforts with DCPS, see no benefit in sitting in meetings with people who have yet to be held accountable to develop high quality equitable educational options for all of the cities children an yet want the community to comment on their school closing plan I have tried in the past without success to advocate for rigorous and relevant programming my community only to face continual doublespeak. . The council and mayor need to take a very close look at what is really happening and not rely on its citizenry , which has paid elected official to work on its behalf to continually show up.
I and many hard working and concerned parents will no longer show up at meetings which are largely structured to be contentions media events. These meeting are not about our children, our families and our futures however your job should be to about those very concerns and at minimum building a school system that can more than adequately address them.
I will hold my elected officials responsible for what they allow to continue happen on their watch
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The above was taken from a letter I wrote to the mayor and my city council man. Do you think it will do any good?
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McPherson’s letter expresses the sentiments of so many parents in Washington DC. It is so outrageous though that our politicians are completely ignoring us. Another analysis of the closures:
http://www.truthfromthetrenches.posterous.com
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