Norton Says New Federal Funds Should Go to D.C.'s Home-Rule Choice, Our Public Charter Schools

Norton Says New Federal Funds Should Go to D.C.'s Home-Rule Choice, Our Public Charter Schools

January 26, 2011

WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) responded today to an announcement by new House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) of his plan to introduce legislation on Wednesday to re-impose private school vouchers on the District, with a new authorization to expand the program and offer private school vouchers to families above low-income levels and to increase the amounts that private schools would receive. The D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) and D.C. public charter schools would also be funded, as they are today. Norton said that Boehner is ignoring both a compromise reached on this issue, and the home-rule public charter school alternative strongly preferred by District residents. The Congresswoman, who has a long record of working and reaching accords with Republicans, said that this bill appears to signal that it will be difficult to reach good-faith agreements because no compromise ever seems to be good enough.

In 2004, Congress imposed on D.C. an experimental five-year pilot voucher program, as hundreds of D.C. residents and public officials came to Congress for an unusually large mass rally and lobby event to oppose the program. The statutory requirement that only children from the lowest performing D.C. public schools could use vouchers was quickly abandoned. Independent studies of the D.C. voucher program, including a Government Accountability Office report, have shown no significant increase in test scores or difference in scores than those of comparable D.C. public school students. Congress did not to reauthorize the program, but a compromise was reached to permit currently enrolled voucher students to remain in their private schools until graduation. Last Congress, the Senate defeated an amendment to reauthorize the program by a vote of 42-55, but Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) plans to introduce legislation in the Senate to reauthorize the program.

Norton, a strong supporter of D.C. public charter schools, said, "The District's home-rule public charter school alternative has become a model for the nation, and charter schools enjoy strong bipartisan support in Congress. If Members of Congress are interested in our children, we welcome and invite them to join our parents and residents, who, working together, have established nothing less than a new publicly accountable school system here that is subject to the same metrics and public oversight as DCPS."

Norton said that District parents "are entirely justified in seeking alternatives to DCPS and every parent in the District is entitled to such an alternative." Last year she requested $ 5 million in the omnibus appropriations bill specifically for voucher students to attend D.C. charter schools. She was motivated by a meeting with voucher parents, where some told her they had tried to enroll their children in charter schools but could not do so because of waiting lists. "Clearly," Norton said, "our own public charter schools are where both the need and the demand are." She said that, unlike most jurisdictions, the District long ago made a clear choice to create a public charter school system as an alternative to the traditional public schools, and should be rewarded for doing so instead of having Congress decide an issue that, in the United States, is left exclusively to local jurisdictions. She noted that Republicans did not bring a nationwide voucher bill to the floor when they first imposed vouchers here. They again are moving for vouchers for the District alone, instead of nationwide, because they know, from the many state referendums on vouchers, not one of which has succeeded because there is no support for using public money to fund unaccountable private schools in our country.

Norton is particularly critical of the Boehner bill, which steps over the needs of D.C.'s popular home-rule choice, a model, flourishing charter school system whose long waiting lists show residents want expanded. In 1996, Norton, working with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, passed a bill to expand the District's existing, but barely used public charter school law, instead of vouchers, in an accommodation to home rule. Since then, the District's public charter school system has become the most successful in the country, with approximately 40% of public school students enrolled in public charter schools.