The quality of an education that District of Columbia students receive still depends far too much on the neighborhood in which they live, the income of their family, the color of their skin and whether they have a disability. The District needs the ability to address these inequalities through equitable school funding so that the students who need support can get it. The Washington Lawyers’ Committee worked with a coalition of DC education advocacy groups and parents in every Ward to protect the District’s ability to create high quality schools for every student. A charter association and two charter schools brought litigation under the School Reform Act to limit the District’s ability to invest in the lowest performing schools and sought a ruling that would favor charter schools over DCPS.
In this suit, the DC charter school plaintiffs’ claims could result in the transfer up to $100 million from DCPS to the charter system each year. Essentially, they sought a windfall at the expense of DCPS students. The potential loss of funding would be devastating for DCPS neighborhood schools, which serve a higher percentage of impoverished and special education students than charter schools. Yet the DC charter sector already has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in operating reserves. The lawsuit did not assert that the charters needed these funds to operate effectively, but instead challenged the Council’s Home Rule authority and relied exclusively on a technical argument about funding formulas.
We support the DC Council’s Home Rule authority to make funding decisions based on the needs of students. Without this authority, students in traditional public schools could face funding shortfalls while at the same time charters increase financial reserves.
The Washington Lawyers’ Committee, with Steptoe & Johnson PLLC, and Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on behalf of DC education organizations and parents throughout every Ward.
The Committee’s Amicus Brief is available here.
The amicus brief of the General Counsel for the DC Council is available here.
The brief of the Plaintiff-Appellants Charter Schools is available here.
The lower court decision of the U.S. District Court for DC is available here.