School choice complicates Promise Neighborhood’s efforts to help kids
An impoverished pocket of Northeast Washington has been receiving $25 million in federal grants to fund tutors, literacy programs and early-childhood education, largely to improve the neighborhood’s three struggling schools. Officials say school attendance is up, and the local charter high school has seen a boost in math scores.
But the children of Kenilworth-Parkside aren’t all benefiting from the “Promise Neighborhood” program. Less than a third of the 1,600 students who live there attend neighborhood schools; the rest are enrolled in 184 others, scattered across a city that has embraced school choice more than almost any other.
The children in the neighborhood — and similar communities across the country — are living with two sometimes-competing visions of education reform. One offers a better education and a brighter future through a citywide enrollment lottery that sends them to schools far and wide. The other promises positive outcomes from heavy investments in schools and services near their homes.
“Traditionally, many years ago, you could target this sort of effort in one physical geographic location and you would reach students the entire time they are awake,” said Isaac Castillo, deputy director of the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative. “Now you have to be more creative. We don’t have staffing and resources to be at 184 schools.”
Promise Neighborhoods are modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, Geoffrey Canada’s widely publicized effort to saturate 97 square blocks of New York with support from infancy through adulthood. The approach is considered one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments in a generation.
New townhouses in the Kenilworth-Parkside community in Washington. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)The U.S. Education Department has awarded 58 Promise Neighborhood grants since 2010, a combined investment of more than $200 million through 2014. Mary Brown, the program’s executive director, said the work is only beginning and is focused on raising funds and setting plans for the long term. Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited Kenilworth-Parkside three years ago to celebrate its designation as one of these areas.
The District — where 44 percent of public school students attend charter School choice complicates Promise Neighborhood’s efforts to help kids - The Washington Post:
