Under Chancellor Antwan Wilson, the children of current and former public officials will no longer receive preferential placement in the District’s infamously competitive school enrollment system. The move follows a report from the D.C. Inspector General that former Chancellor Kaya Henderson had allowed the children of several top public officials to bypass the My School DC lottery system and enroll directly in the District’s most coveted schools.

Adopted to replace a chaotic system of individual lotteries and applications (and the occasional donated brownies), My School DC is a common lottery for a majority of the District’s public and charter schools. A computerized system uses a student’s stated preferences and randomized lottery number to determine which students receive the most demanded seats.

My School DC – and its Denver, New Orleans, and Newark counterparts – was designed for efficiency, transparency, and impartiality. A database of participating schools saves parents hours of researching, and a single, online form replaces mountains of paperwork. Information can be provided in several languages, and the process is fairly simple.

Though it can be complicated by high demand and shrinking class sizes, the lottery in theory is neutral. Those who govern it, however, are not.

Chancellor Henderson authorized the transfers under a regulation introduced during Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure, which predates the district-wide lottery system in place today. Such discretionary transfers are only valid if “in the best interests of the student, and that the transfer would promote the overall interests of the school system.”

The enrollment of a high-profile student in DCPS may spur confidence in the quality of the District’s public offerings. But the condition of their enrollment—bypassing waitlists nearly 1,000 students long—undermines DCPS’s commitment to the common lottery system. In a district already troubled by intense competition, each line-jumper only deepens public distrust of DCPS’s ability to provide for all students.

As growing 21st Century School Systems implement their own lottery systems, the vulnerability of the District’s system to favoritism and Chancellor Wilson’s ban on preferential enrollments for the children of public officials should stand as both a warning and a lesson.

No system of school choice is absolutely fair. But the combination of a lottery system and similar preemptive policies can level the playing field for students regardless of social standing or parental activism.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher everyone loved: Mr. C.

Mr. C told us stories about traveling, he talked about baseball, and he let us sit with our friends and socialize. We completed worksheets; we earned As in the class. We were happy, and our parents were happy with our grades.

When the A.P. Exam results came in, only two students out of our class of twenty-five received passing scores.

The problem with Mr. C. wasn’t that he was a bad person. The problem was that he wanted to be our friend first and our teacher second. Our test results showed that we had learned none of the course content, and, ultimately, Mr. C did a disservice to us as students, regardless of how much we liked him.

Extend that scenario to an entire school: The school creates a comfortable and safe environment. Students are happy with their teachers, and parents are happy with their children’s grades. But the students perform abysmally on standardized tests. Despite the overall satisfaction of parents and students with the school, there’s evidence that the students aren’t learning.

In the new book Charting a New Course: The Case for Freedom, Flexibility & Opportunity Through Charter Schools, Jeanne Allen, Max Eden, and others argue for the end of results-based accountability for charter schools, at least as far as standardized testing is concerned.

The charter sector they envision is one where authorizers no longer carefully screen charter operators prior to issuing a charter, and they no longer shut down schools based on the results of test scores. The free market guarantees quality control: if the customers are happy, the school stays open. If enough families desert it, it runs out of money and closes.

But this would ultimately do a disservice to students, regardless of how much they and their families liked their schools.

Schools are first and foremost places of learning. If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money on them, we need objective evidence that students are learning.

Of course, test scores should not be the only relevant factor in determining the success or failure of a school, and no good charter authorizer judges schools on test scores alone.

Chester Finn, senior fellow at The Fordham Institute, explains that effective authorizers are also looking at various gauges of student growth, as well as graduation rates, pupil and teacher attendance and persistence, and more (e.g., Advanced Placement scores, dual credit results, where kids go to high school after leaving the charter middle school, etc.). Good authorizers also do site visits and pay attention to school climate.

We need authorizers who investigate charter operators prior to allowing them to open schools, then conduct in-depth evaluations of schools based on a variety of factors, including test scores, and finally close or replace those whose students are falling far behind.

Not all parents have the ability to assess schools, and those parents trust regulating bodies to ensure that the schools available to their children are high quality. Parents and students have a right to choice, but we need to make certain that they choose from a selection of effective schools.

In 21^st century school systems, we need well-authorized charter sectors in which strong authorizers scrutinize charter operators, shut down failing schools, and invite successful schools to replicate, so we have no doubt that our students are learning. Otherwise, we’re simply replacing one failing school system with another

On June 22nd, the House unanimously passed the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (H.R. 2353). Referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions the following Monday, the bill is a reauthorization of the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. If passed, it would make headway in creating local programs that address the widening “skills gap” and the threat of increasing automation. While President Trump’s proposed budget would cut $168 million from career and technical education (CTE) funding, this bill essential level-funds the programs.

For the last decade, education reformers have made a strong push for schools to prepare students for college—reinforcing the national narrative that “everyone must go to college.” This national push has ignored kids for whom college is not the right choice, many of whom could earn a middle-class income with the skills provided by a two-year apprenticeship, training program, or community college degree.

CTE programs are designed to create opportunity for these students, while reducing the gap between employers’ desired skillsets and prospective employees’ skills. Today 40 percent of global employers report talent shortages in technical fields.

The bill would require work-based learning for all state and local programs, so students developed the actual skills needed by local employers. It also would require that CTE programs have partnerships with local stakeholders, such as community leaders and small businesses, to make certain students are prepared for in-demand jobs in their regions. CTE programs in different regions would be able to tailor their offerings to ensure that they produced employees suited for jobs that actually existed in their area.

The bill would simplify the state application process and local plan requirements, which should lead to more money being spent on CTE and less on bureaucratic paperwork. It would increase from 10 to 15 percent the amount of federal funds states could set aside for rural areas and areas with high concentrations of CTE students, and from 1 to 2 percent the amount for juvenile justice programs and correctional facilities. Representation in the development of state plans would be expanded to include advocates for homeless children and youth, at-risk youth, and the children of active duty Armed Forces members.

Overall, this bill is a moderate proposal that would not fundamentally change the Perkins law. Instead, it would change the methods of implementing and assessing CTE programs, within the framework of the original law. For instance, it would tweak the requirements for performance indicators, in an effort to improve accountability and transparency. States would also have to publish annual performance results, making shortcomings and successes available to students, taxpayers, and leaders.

The bill would move more control over Perkins funding from the federal level to the state level and from the states to local governments, to allow more flexibility in the creation of programs. It would also give states the authority to set their own performance targets for each of the bill’s core indicators. The Secretary of Education would retain the authority to disapprove of a state’s Perkins plan based on the performance targets that the state sets, but CTE programs would now be evaluated by an independent advisory panel appointed by The Institute for Education Sciences, acting on behalf of the Department of Education. The Secretary could no longer withhold funds from a state that did not meet certain performance targets, if the state developed an improvement plan that met the guidelines set forth under the bill.

The reauthorization would fund CTE for six years, starting with $1.133 billion for fiscal year 2018—only $8 million more than the amount for 2018 under the previous reauthorization. The figure would gradually increase until it reached $1.213 billion in 2023. But if inflation averaged 2 percent a year, that seemingly 9 percent increase would actually be a loss of nearly 5 percent.

While the reauthorization of Perkins is a step in the right direction, Congress should make a more significant investment in those young Americans who choose not to attend a four-year college. Failure to do so is one more sign that this Republican Congress cares not a whit about reducing inequality.

When I was a kid, my parents bought a house in a middle class neighborhood of an economically diverse city. My brother, who is a year older than me, embarked upon his schooling in our local public elementary school – an adventure that lasted one year.

His teacher struggled to control the class, fights broke out, students stole other students’ lunches, and, because of the constant disruptions, he lost precious time for in-class learning.

My parents swiftly made plans to move my brother—and consequently me—to a private school. After elementary school, my brother and I continued to attend the small student-centered private school, skipping over, as did many of our affluent, white peers, the notoriously bad neighborhood middle school.

We returned to our neighborhood public high school, where we received, overall, a good education.

But I am not naïve. I know that part of my academic success in the AP and honors courses at this huge, socioeconomically diverse public high school came from my K-8 education, which included individual attention, undisrupted classes, creative projects, and teachers who not only taught the subject matter but also how to study, meet deadlines, and take control of our own learning.

I wonder how different things would have been if I had been told I had to wait. If instead of my parents having the choice to remove my brother from his disruptive elementary school, they were forced to watch as he fell behind because of factors beyond their control. If they were told that the school district was attempting to fix the school’s problems, and in the meantime, my brother and I would have to make the best of it.

No one ever told me that I had to wait for access to a good education. My parents’ socio-economic status gave them an option, a way around the traditional system when it failed.

Unfortunately, many parents don’t have that option.

Now it’s the NAACP telling parents to wait while school districts fix traditional public schools. Telling them that abandoning their neighborhood public school for a public charter school is a civil rights crime, because saving traditional public schools will somehow save poor and minority kids… someday. Propping up failing schools is so important, in the NAACP’s view, that parents should forgo their right to a choice, just so the traditional system can have all the resources—regardless of whether its students are succeeding.

Last week the NAACP upheld its 2016 call for a moratorium on the expansion of public charter schools. Its edict, much like a recent one from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, demands that the moratorium remain until charter schools implement a series of changes that would essentially make them function like traditional public schools.

The main difference is that this time the betrayal of impoverished and minority families comes from an organization that is historically committed to advancing opportunity for those groups.

Charter schools are about opportunity. They provide choices for those families who lack the economic means usually required to “have a say.” They provide opportunity for millions of low-income kids to graduate from high school and attend college.

Studies have repeatedly shown that public charter schools produce dramatic academic gains for minority students in high poverty areas, compared to traditional public schools. Thousands of black families choose charter schools, and they are happy with that choice.

Former NAACP president (ousted in May 2017) Cornell Brooks previously explained that NAACP’s actions are not inspired by an ideological opposition to charter schools but by the organization’s historical support of public schools. Yet, Brooks embraced school choice for his own family. Both of his sons attend/attended The Potomac School, a private school in Fairfax County, Virginia, where tuition ranges from $33,000 a year for kindergarten to $38,500 for high school.

Why does the NAACP want to deny avenues of choice to parents who can’t afford private schools?

Could it be that the NAACP has been influenced by the hundreds of thousands of dollars it has received from teachers unions? And could it be that its leaders care more about their adult constituents, many of whom teach in public schools, than about the needs of minority children?