Bureaucratic Washington provides road map for education reform

It wasn’t immediately obvious why the security guards at the Department of Motor Vehicles in downtown Washington DC were armed. After three hours waiting to get a driving licence it was obvious.

You couldn’t help but feel sympathy for one guy when he lost the rag after waiting three hours to change his home address on his licence. The DMV is notorious in glacialmoving US bureaucratic life and the Washington department, it would appear, is no different from anywhere else in the country.

It is little wonder that in the Simpsons the Springfield DMV is the workplace of Homer Simpson's curmudgeonly spinster sisters-in-law, Patty and Selma Bouvier.

If the DMV is Washington officialdom at its worst, the District of Columbia public school system is an example of the city at its most efficient and progressive, insofar as it can be.

In his State of the Union speech last month, which set out his wish-list of goals, president Barack Obama fixed an ambitious target for early childhood education, saying he wanted high-quality preschool education made available to every child in the United States.

Fewer than three in every 10 four-year-olds are in preschool education, he said, and that a lack of formative education can “shadow them for the rest of their lives”.

Design
The president has to look no further than his own residential area to find a design that could suit his grand plan. The District of Columbia has even gone one step further than Obama's objective. Where most children in the US start school at the age of five with kindergarten, the DC public schools system offers free education at preschool level from the age of three, and pre-kindergarten from the age of four.

The Washington Post recently cited figures indicating nearly 13,000 of the city's estimated 15,000 three- and four-year-olds attend public preschool, a participation rate rare in the US.

The ability of working parents to children to school from the age of three has helped rejuvenate DC, gentrifying inner-city districts once considered no-go areas, because parents can save on tens of thousands of dollars in preschool childcare costs. It has given charming neighbourhoods a new lease of life by drawing young families into the city.

We decided to try to enrol our daughter in a preschool class in one of the city’s elementary (primary) schools for next autumn, given that she will be eligible after turning three next month.

The system is relatively easy to navigate once you know what schools are “in-bounds” for a particular home but that can be the hard part. The system can seem arbitrary, with one side of a street falling into one school area and the other side into an area for schools some distance away.

Enrolment consultant
A long-standing resident of Capitol Hill, our neighbourhood in DC, acts as a school enrolment consultant and helps walk confused parents through the application process at a cost of $150 (€115). A friend who had researched the system also mapped out a clear path through it for us.

A lottery for applications closed at the end of last month. We applied for six schools in the DC public system in order of preference. Another range of options was available in the charter schools system, another publicly funded school system, similar to the Educate Together schools in Ireland.

In the public schools system preference is given to children with a sibling at the school and to families living “in-bounds” of a particular school.

The results were published last week. For our first-choice school on Capitol Hill, 35 children were accepted, of whom 14 had a sibling in the school, while 21 fell into the “in-bounds” category, including, thankfully, our little girl.

The demand for places was exceptionally high: applications were made for 201 children in total for our preferred school and those refused a place included 23 “in-bounds” children.

The DC model struggles to cope with the demand and can be tricky to understand. More classes should also be added or the application process should be means-tested so it is not reliant on a lottery system and takes the question of need into the equation to ensure earlychildhood education is made available to those families that really need it.

While flawed, the DC blueprint could be a good starting point for Obama as he seeks to overhaul the US’s early-childhood education.

The Irish Government could also take a leaf out of Washington DC’s education manual and help reduce a cost that, for two working parents with children, can be as heavy a burden as a boom-time mortgage.