I have lived and breathed the field of education for over 20 years. My career started as a public school teacher in Chicago, Ill. I became a school administrator and subsequently was appointed to a position in the central office as a district-wide administrator. My last position in Chicago was chief of staff to the Chicago Board of Education. In 2010, I began my current position leading the education nonprofit DC School Reform Now (DCSRN) and am a current parent of a daughter and a son, both attending traditional public schools in DC. I have seen education from arguably every angle, but being a parent of two school-age kids is the greatest responsibility I’ve ever had. The choices I make about my kids’ schools can affect them for the rest of their lives.

EdFEST, DC’s only citywide public school fair, took place this past weekend, unofficially signifying the start of DC public school choice application season. The DC public school choice lottery opened on Monday, December 14 and over the next few months, parents from all over DC will make choices regarding school options for their own children. Last year, over 20,000 applications were submitted to the lottery, so there are a wealth of parents just like me who are exercising choice in order to find the best public school option for their child.

Next year my daughter will transition to high school. We began researching school options this past summer and as of today we are considering applying to as many as 10 different schools, several of which have nuanced application processes and requirements.

Last year, the DC Public Schools system adjusted the district’s traditional school boundaries, and overnight my son’s right-to-attend middle school assignment changed. My wife and I wanted him to still be guaranteed a seat in his original right-to-attend middle school. To make this possible, we chose to move to an entirely different neighborhood to ensure him a seat in that school.

Although I am deeply involved in the DC public school choice sector on a daily basis, even I still find it at times complicated and confusing. I can only imagine that if I feel this way, other parents who are not nearly as immersed as I currently am must feel just as—if not more—overwhelmed.

I would do almost anything to give my children the best educational options possible, and the steps my family has taken to secure quality schools for our children are no different than what many other families would do in our position.However, many families do not have the flexibility to move from one neighborhood to another, which can put their child at a disadvantage in accessing quality schools. Moreover, most children don’t have parents whose job it is to have their finger on the pulse of their city’s public school choice sector. 

We at DCSRN decided to play our part in making school selection easier for parents, which is why we launched the High Quality Schools Campaign (HQSC). The campaign levels the playing field of access, especially for families in underserved communities so that no matter your zip code, you can compete for quality schools. The HQSC supports families applying to, enrolling and persisting (maintaining enrollment) in quality schools. The HQSC informs parents about the characteristics of high quality schools and helps parents identify and pursue quality education options for their children. Last year DCSRN served families representing nearly 600 students with a pool of well over 1,000 waiting to be served.

​To our knowledge, DCSRN is the only organization in the U.S. doing this type of targeted work. As parent engagement becomes increasingly important in the national public school choice sector, I’m proud to lead an organization on the forefront of leveling the school choice playing field so that all families can compete for quality seats.

David Pickens is the executive director of DC School Reform Now. 

Orr Elementary has had its share of controversy in the past year (see here, here, and here). The actions of the principal that DCPS appointed in the 2013-2014 school year outraged parents and many teachers. And while that principal has since left the school, Orr still has a major problem: It is one of only two schools in the entire DCPS system that has not undergone any phase of modernization since its construction in 1974. As a result, a plethora of issues have plagued Orr for some time now, from building heating and cooling issues, to poor air quality, to pests such as cockroaches and mice. On April 27, a group of Orr students went to testify before the D.C. Council about the issues they face on a daily basis in their learning environment.

Orr Elementary School is located in Ward 8 next to the Anacostia River. Its student population is 97% black, 2% Latino and 1% Asian. All students receive free breakfast and lunch. Many of the students who attend Orr have parents and other relatives who attended Orr as well. It is a true “community” school. Yet Orr’s facilities have remained exactly the same for generations now, and students and staff are not happy. With the help of Teaching for Change, Orr families and staff have been contacting the mayor’s and the Chancellor’s office for years in search of new funds.

The D.C. Council promised Orr funds for modernization in 2012. Last year, Teaching for Change and Orr parents successfully advocated for a $3 million grant to secure an architect to design a new school that would open for the 2017-18 school year. Due to the vast amount of renovations that would be needed, it was decided that it would be more cost-effective to build a new school than to modernize the current one.

Work on the new building was supposed to begin last fall.  However, in the fall of 2014, Orr was informed that they would not receive their new funds for another year, and the new building would not be ready until 2018-19. But if the D.C. Council does not include funds for the architect in their final budget for school year 2015-16, which is due June 6, the entire project will be pushed back further—potentially indefinitely. Throughout all of this delay, Orr and Teaching for Change have been left in the dark about the project’s progress.

Conditions at Orr are reprehensible. Parts of the ceiling are crumbling, the building receives poor natural light due to its triangular shape, the ventilation system is outdated, toilets don’t work, and cockroaches and mice roam the halls. This past winter, the heat in the building was so low that on several days, classes relocated because the temperature in their usual rooms was 50 degrees or lower.

Although Orr is in the bottom 40 of D.C. schools, it has made some significant progress, most notably in its ESEA classification. In 2014 Orr moved from a “focus” school to a “developing” school. Enrollment has increased since the appointment of a new principal.

Despite this progress, Orr continues to be passed over while other schools continue to renovate and add on to their buildings. One project at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts is currently $39 million over budget and is the most expensive D.C. school renovation to date. Orr is one of the last two open-space schools that have yet to be modernized, according to a representative for Teaching for Change. The only other is West Elementary School—and while West has not been modernized, its conditions have been presumed to be much better than those at Orr.

While the city has made intensive investments in school modernization in the last seven years, D.C. Council member David Grosso also recently lamented that there are at least 26 schools that have not been touched. Many of them, like Orr, are east of the Anacostia River in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Despite Grosso’s concerns, funding continues to be delayed for Orr’s modernization. Orr has made their critical move in bringing their concerns to you, Council. Council, what’s yours?

(Ed. note: As of May 14, the D.C. Council's Committee on Education recommended a $1 million appropriation to Orr Elementary School for modernization. The Committee's budget proposal is available here. The D.C. Council will vote on its full budget proposal tonight, May 27.)


Amara Pinnock is an elementary school teacher in DC. Reach her via email or Twitter.

In 2010, early in my Teach For America days, I had the opportunity to hear Jason Kamras talk about the changes taking place in D.C. Public Schools. One of the more memorable things he said that day was that if all families in the District of Columbia were forced to send their children to a randomly selected public school without moving out of the city, the city’s education woes would be fixed in a year. His thinking was that if you gave parents of means some skin in the game, they could put more pressure on policymakers to fix the system.

I was reminded of this provocative argument when I read Allison Benedikt’s polemic in Slate, asserting the moral bankruptcy of parents who send their kids to private schools. Though the two arguments differ slightly (Benedikt doesn’t think the positive effect would come as quickly as Kamras did), the fundamental issue is the same: The problem with schools is that parents do not put enough pressure on teachers, administrators, and policymakers to make the necessary changes to fix public education; and the lack of pressure is attributable, in large part, to the fact that the parents with the most political capital either send their kids to private school or to high-performing public schools that are de facto segregated by income level because of property values.

Although Benedikt concedes that change might take a long time, the power she seems to see in parent pressure would work over the short term. She explains: