Rampaging Toward Choice

Why parents in Washington, D.C., are embracing vouchers and charter schools--and what that says about public schools.

Michael W. Lynch from the January 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Charter schools came to Washington in 1996, when President Clinton signed the D.C. School Reform Act. Schools started forming immediately. This year, 31 schools will educate roughly 7,000 students, nearly one in 11 students in city schools.

Ashlee Williams, a 12-year-old with a mischievous smile, is one of them. Washington's charter schools have tended to the specific: Schools have been founded to serve students with learning disabilities--roughly 10 percent of the D.C. government school population--and students who have been in the juvenile justice system, the very types of students public school apologists blame for the system's dismal performance and then cite as the reason government schools are needed. Charter schools providing rigorous math and science education have also been established, as have schools devoted to public policy and technology. Ashlee attends a unique charter school: the nation's only public boarding school, the SEED Public Charter School. Each of its students must come from D.C.

Ashlee's needs are special, according to her mother, Angelia Orr-Williams. Ashlee is bright. Having combined second and third grade in a single year, she was ready to attend seventh grade at 11 years old. Angelia planned to send Ashlee, who sings in the church choir, to the Duke Ellington School of the Performing Arts, which specializes in music. But before that loomed middle school, where so many of the city's children have been derailed. Says Angelia, "I was dreading it."

Ashlee was assigned to Ronald Brown Middle School. It wasn't so much the academics Angelia was worried about. "They had high credentials," she says, but her concerns centered on safety. Ashlee would be two years younger than most of her classmates, and, says Angelia, "She tends to be feisty at times. She gives off body language. I didn't want that to be misinterpreted by kids from the hood."

Private school wasn't an option. Her husband Andrei, Ashlee's father, was serving time, and Angelia didn't think she could make tuition on her salary as a legal assistant. Riding the bus one day, she saw a sign about choosing a charter school. She called the number, attended a charter school fair, and settled on the SEED School.

Ashlee's time at SEED has not been without turbulence. She has found the work challenging--skipping a grade in the D.C. government schools doesn't necessarily mean one is working at grade level--and the attitude that her mother so worried about has continued to cause problems. Ashlee is the first one to admit it. "I get in trouble with my mouth," she confesses. Ashlee was suspended for a week during her first year, which at SEED meant she was sent home for home learning. But SEED includes parents in the schooling process: Angelia has been called in more than once to discuss Ashlee's progress, and attitude, with the school principal.

Ashlee has spent a month and a half on probation. Still, nobody's getting beaten, she's not being harassed for learning, and she's planning to attend college. She'd like to go to Stanford, which she visited last year with other students from SEED.

If the demand for scholarships across the country demonstrates anything, it's the deep dissatisfaction of city parents with their assigned government schools. People just don't give up free services, or services they've already paid for, to spend 10 percent or more of their income to purchase similar services. Yet this is exactly what the 1.25 million parents who applied for Children Scholarship Fund scholarships last year did.

"These people are low-income, yet they are willing to give up a free education to pay for one with significant costs," says NYU's Viteritti, who is appalled by the political effort to block school choice. "The hypocrisy behind it. The political leaders who say we need to support public schools don't have to send their kids to public schools," he observes. "I don't know how long it can be sustained."

However hard it may be for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jesse Jackson--who send their kids to the best schools money can buy--to keep low-income parents from exercising school choice, it's harder yet for parents with scholarships to keep their kids in school, uniforms, and extracurricular activities. Rose Blassingame, for example, is sharing one bedroom with three of her granddaughters, just one sacrifice she is willing to make to keep her kids enrolled in private schools.

Like Bernice Gates, Blassingame wants the grandchildren she is raising to have the best education they can get. Rose has struggled all her life to be educated. The oldest of 14 kids, she was born and raised in Washington, attending what she thinks were then better schools. Her parents thought the way for a woman to gain financial security was through marriage. When she was 14, her father pulled her out of school to get married. Fifteen months later, she had her first child. Another 15 months passed and another child came. She went to work at D.C. General Hospital, where she would work for the next 29 years. She was 17 years old, working an eight-hour day and attending school at night. At 19, she left her husband, took her two babies and moved into her grandmother's basement.

Now, at 49, she's rearing four grandkids. Rose was satisfied with the elementary school her eldest, Franciscoe, attended. But when she started looking for middle schools--and she visited just about all of them--she didn't like what she saw. "I found out there were some good ones," she says. But the best, Jefferson, was unavailable.

Her requirements weren't unreasonable. She was looking for good education in a safe environment. "If you are going to school and are afraid to go, no matter how well you're taught, you're not going to learn anything," she says.

She found private schools expensive. But she was ready to make the sacrifice and pay the $2,600 it would take to put Franciscoe in St. Thomas More. In 1997, a friend told her about the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF). She called, was invited down for an interview, and was offered a scholarship for Franciscoe. She then decided to send his sister, Diamonesha, to St. Thomas More, too, and pay the same amount. This year, her youngest, Lapria, started kindergarten at St. Thomas More. Diamonesha is in second grade, and Franciscoe is now a freshman at Archbishop Carroll.

All this comes at considerable cost. Last year, Blassingame's portion of tuition at St. Thomas More for Franciscoe and Diamonesha was $175 a month. This year it's down to $150, thanks to assistance from the archdiocese. In addition, she faced miscellaneous expenses that parents don't face with government schools and that don't count as costs when WSF scholarships are calculated. Franciscoe's uniforms, for example, cost $670. His books cost another $540.