(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Lindsey Burke on the lay of the land in the District of Columbia Public Schools, which inches ever closer to having a majority of charter school students and which is leading the nation by a wide margin in academic gains, led by charter schools. Oh and where district school principals have taken to the streets to sell their schools to parents in search of students.
What do you make of all of this Chewie?
Yeah, me too.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I was working with a charter school in DC and the principal was lamenting the fact that a competing school was now offering free after school programs to parents. Her quote “now we are going to have to find a way to offer free after school programs” – – all I could think about was how great this competition was for DC parents! It is a buyers market there and parents have become such savvy consumers of education. GO DC!
Or you could have gone further back with the classic Alice Cramden line, “I don’t want to say I told you so, Ralph….”
Both my parents were DCPS teachers for decades (60’s through 80’s). I can still see the lament in their faces at the dinner table over the ineptitude they suffered within such an abysmal bureaucracy, and almost being punished for being too good, to committed to their students. Almost 30 years removed from their time as teachers and we’re finally seeing some change, yet so much still left to be done in my beloved hometown.
This is truly what ‘power to the people’ look like.
The average NAEP 4th grade reading score for a FRL eligible student in DCPS was 172, which is heartbreaking. It was 192 in the district and 201 in the charters for FRL eligible kids in 2013, which is still very bad but enough to more than double the Basic or above rate in the charter sector.