For those who *really* want to get their nose into the DC schooling thicket, the DC Education Blog provides oodles of links and running commentary of schooling issues.

Meanwhile, parents hunting for charter schools who desire to acquire just enough information to empower them to choose wisely might begin with the website of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools.  It offers maps displaying the location of charter schools.  These are helpful and can be used in conjunction with the public transportation maps available from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

The DC Public Charter School Board (DCPCSB) also offers basic information on enrollment procedures and deadlines here.  DCPCSB also has a 127-page report, which provides student achievement and other data.  The Appendix includes further data on the number of children scoring proficiently in reading and mathematics.  Unfortunately, the achievement data included is of limited utility.  First, the SAT-9 data is norm-referenced; that is, it only measures students against the national average.  One can’t look at these scores, then, and discern how well students are learning particular content standards.  Rather, if one reads that a school has a “mean NCE score in reading” of 39.1, then 39.1 percent of its students are learning as well as the average student in the U.S.  Second, the Appendix does not define for the reader what is meant by the figures given for the percentage of students proficient in reading and mathematics (e.g., see p. 70 of the report, which includes two tables with columns labeled “% proficient 2005”).  Nevertheless, the scores are useful as a means for getting a crude perception of skills levels of students in individual charter schools.  The amount of that acquisition that may be attributed to the schools themselves, of course, cannot be determined from any of the data presented.

So far, I have been unable to locate what I believe would be a super-helpful source— a single volume that contains the education standards of all the DC charter schools.  Standards, as you probably know, are the skeleton of the schools educational mission.  The standards make clear just what students are expected to have learned at each grade level.  Read them and you can get a good feel for the rigor of a school.  Clear, demanding standards are good; vague and opaque standards are bad.

Unfortunately, then, parents who want to see the standards of charter schools in DC will need to contact each school directly.  While this may appear to be a tedious task, it is worth undertaking.  Beyond the importance of learning about the curricula, making this request can be viewed as a test of a school’s administrative competence.  If the person who picks up the phone says, “Yes, Mr. Jones, we’re happy to mail you a booklet that describes our education standards,” then you might reasonably infer that the school is responsive to parents.  If, though, you get bounced from one extension to another and cannot find anyone who can help you...well, perhaps you can scratch that school from your list.

Mr. Kosar is the author of Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005).