Vin Suprynowicz

Just a year on the job, District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has shuttered 23 schools, fired more than 30 principals and given notice to hundreds of teachers and administrative workers.

She’s “making bold changes as she tries to accomplish what six would-be reformers in the past decade could not,” The Washington Post reported last week: “rescue one of the nation’s most dysfunctional school districts.”

So far, Ms. Rhee has streamlined Washington’s central office by firing nearly 100 employees. She dismissed 36 principals she considered ineffective, including one at the elementary school her two daughters attend. She also sent termination letters this summer to 750 teachers and teacher’s aides who missed a certification deadline.

Although the district is “among the nation’s highest-spending school systems,” The Post reports — we’ll examine that understatement shortly — “its students rank near the bottom in reading and math proficiency. Schools have leaky roofs and broken fire sprinklers. Bathrooms are decrepit, with broken toilets and missing stall doors. Not surprisingly, enrollment in the 49,000-student system is shrinking as parents move their children to charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently operated.”

Curiously, this was the only reference in The Post’s report to the capital’s once-ballyhooed experiment with school choice.

Just a week earlier, Post staff writer Bill Turque filed a report which the paper’s editors headlined “School Choice Program Offers Few Options.”

Back in August of 2004, the first ever federally funded school voucher program was launched in Washington, D.C. Eligible students would be able to attend a private school of their choice in the District of Columbia, proponents declared. Each participant would receive up to $7,500 for school tuition, fees, and transportation. In addition, the D.C. Public School System (DCPS) and D.C. charter school system each received $13 million in federal grants to improve their programs.

But for all its promise, “school choice” in the nation’s capital is now largely dismissed as a bad joke.

“Earlier this month, parents of students in 81 low-performing D.C. public schools — almost two-thirds of the District system — got a packet in the mail announcing that federal law entitles them to transfer their children to a stronger school,” Mr. Turque of The Post reports. “The notice goes out every August, required under the federal No Child Left Behind law. But in a system filled with failing schools, parental choice can be a hollow proposition. Perhaps that’s why officials reported Friday that they had received just 34 applications for transfer. The deadline is tomorrow.”

“What a joke,” LaCrisha Butler told the city daily.

Ms. Butler wants to pull her nephew, Travis, out of Coolidge High School, which this year failed, for the fifth time in a row, to hit math and reading test benchmarks required by the law.

But the eight other “mainstream” high schools he might attend also are under federal mandate to restructure and improve, which means they would offer no improvement and are thus “off the table.” That leaves the District’s five “specialty” high schools, including the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, all of which have admission requirements that pose significant obstacles for Travis, a special-needs child who has an individualized education plan.

“Younger students face a similarly narrow band of choices,” The Post reports. “Alternative schools must be academically sound and sufficiently secure so they are not deemed ‘persistently dangerous,’ as defined by D.C. law. That leaves the nearly 5,000 children in the District’s 11 floundering middle and junior high schools have just two choices under the No Child Left Behind option.”

Needless to say, two schools, already operating at capacity, can’t take 5,000 new students.

Add to that the fact that the number-crunching required to decide which kids can (theoretically) change schools, and which few other public schools might be allowed to take them, delayed mailing of appropriate notifications till Aug. 5 this year, giving families less than three weeks to make decisions and apply for transfers before classes begin.

In the case of special tutoring available for kids who stay where they are, notices of available programs were received by parents ONE DAY before the deadline to sign up.

“The notices generally come so late that, practically speaking, they don’t mean much,” The Post reports. “The most desirable public charters are full.”

The best solution?

On April 6, The Post ran an op-ed submission from Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, headlined “The Real Cost of Public Schools.”

“We’re often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child,” Mr. Coulson wrote.

“But total spending is close to $25,000 per child — on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.”

Mr. Coulson added up all sources of funding for education from kindergarten through 12th grade, excluding spending on charter schools and higher education.

“For the current school year,” he found, “the local operating budget is $831 million, including relevant expenses such as the teacher retirement fund. The capital budget is $218 million. The District receives about $85.5 million in federal funding. And the D.C. Council contributes an extra $81 million. Divide all that by the 49,422 students enrolled (for the 2007-08 year) and you end up with about $24,600 per child.

“For comparison, total per pupil spending at D.C. area private schools — among the most upscale in the nation — averages about $10,000 less. For most private schools, the difference is even greater.

So why force most D.C. children into often dilapidated and underperforming public schools when we could easily offer them a choice of private schools?

“Some would argue that private schools couldn’t or wouldn’t serve the District’s special education students, at least not affordably,” Mr. Coulson wrote. “Not so.

“Consider Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, which allows parents to pull their special-needs children out of the public schools and place them in private schools of their choosing. Parental satisfaction with McKay is stratospheric, the program serves twice as many children with disabilities as the D.C. public schools do, and the average scholarship offered in 2006-’07 was just $7,206. The biggest scholarship awarded was $21,907 — still less than the average per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools. If Florida can satisfy the parents of special-needs children at such a reasonable cost, why can’t the District?

“The answer, of course, is that it could.”

Instead, Mr. Coulson concludes, the failure to “think outside the box” leaves Washington’s parents, students, teachers, and even well-meaning reformers trying to “manage a bureaucracy so Byzantine it would give Rube Goldberg an aneurysm. …

“Does anyone worry that Chelsea Clinton will become a threat to society because she attended a private school?” he asks. “Was Barack Obama unprepared for public life because of his time in a Catholic school? The District should give every child the educational opportunities now enjoyed only by the elite.”

Mr. Coulson is right. They should close the District of Columbia public schools.