At Age 10, Booming D.C. Charters Feel ‘Growing Pains’
Washington
A decade after the first charter schools opened in the nation’s capital, they have mushroomed into a major presence here, serving a larger segment of students than in almost any other city.
One in four public school students now lugs a book bag to a charter each weekday. If trends continue, a new report suggests, charters will serve more than half of Washington’s students by 2014.
But the massive charter experiment hasn’t exactly produced the sea change in the quality of public schooling that some advocates had hoped for. By many accounts, the charter landscape here is a mixed picture, and even advocates for the largely independent public schools are finding reasons to worry about low levels of student...
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Correction:
An earlier version of this story cited an incorrect figure for the number of regular public schools in the District of Columbia that did not make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act for last school year.
The print version of this article misstated Superintendent Clifford B. Janey’s remarks as reported in The Washington Post. He said his master education plan was an attempt to persuade more parents to keep their children in the public school system after the elementary grades, but he did not explicitly mention competition from charter schools.
An earlier version of this story cited an incorrect figure for the number of regular public schools in the District of Columbia that did not make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act for last school year.
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