Rampaging Toward Choice - vouchers and charter schools in Washington, D.C

Reason, Jan, 2000 by Michael W. Lynch

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.

Covering these costs means giving up the monthly meal out, a summer amusement park trip, and visits to the beauty parlor. "I haven't been to the hairdresser in three years," says Rose. For Franciscoe, a polite child who answers question with a disarming "yes, sir" or "no, sir" followed by a toothy smile, it meant spending all but $31 of the $347 he earned at his summer job on the gray slacks, white shirts, and green blazer that constitute his uniform.

And then there are the living quarters. Seven hundred dollars a month buys Rose and her five housemates a two-bedroom apartment in the city's southwest quadrant. Franciscoe gets one room. Rose's aunt, who has been living with her for 13 years after spending most of her life on the streets, gets the couch. Rose, Lapria (5), Diamonesha (7), and Shantese (8) share the other bedroom. "Look around," Rose says, gesturing around her comfortably furnished but crowded apartment. "No one here has space. There's nowhere to go to be alone."

After a year of having Diamonesha in private school, Rose can see where the local government schools are lacking. "The kids who went to pre-K at St. Thomas More were already reading," she explains with some surprise, as if she'd been duped. "The public school kids were just ready to read."

Diamonesha had to catch up, but after a year she made the principal's honor roll. For Franciscoe it's been a tougher haul. His first year at St. Thomas More was challenging, and he struggled at first to earn C's and B's. There were many nights when Franciscoe and Rose stayed up past midnight doing homework. But his academics improved, and the next year he earned mostly B's and some A's. Now at Archbishop Carroll, Franciscoe is again struggling with English and religion courses, and Rose thinks she will have to get him a tutor. "He started at a good school at a later date. That's what hurting him," says Rose. "He got into the good school too late."

Franciscoe, who wants to attend Howard University and become a doctor or a lawyer, will probably succeed. But Rose's late date observation is borne out in the experience of others as well as hard data. A 1997 report from the D.C. Control Board on the city's schools concluded that "the longer a student stays in the District's public school system, the less likely they are to succeed." On the Stanford 9 Achievement Test, one in three D.C. fourth graders scored "below basic" on reading. One in two graduating seniors did. On math, three in ten fourth grade students and three in four seniors scored "below basic."