DC MONDAY

A FEW QUESTIONS ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS

Sam Smith

If charter schools are so great, why isn't the DC school system modeled on their decentralized pattern?

Why aren't more individual DC public schools using the charter school model?

If charter schools are so great, doesn't that mean the ideas of Fenty and Rhee aren't that great?

Isn't the fact that parents get to choose whether they want to send their kids to charter school a de facto form of tracking, which is to say favoring children of parents with determination and sense of direction?

Imagine a child whose parents are employed and ambitious and a child whose single parent is a apathetic drug addict. Which child will likely end up in a charter school?

A certain number of students drop out, or are pushed out, of charter schools during a school year. The budget, however, doesn't go with them as they return to public schools. How much does this cost the public school system and how much does it rig the results in favor the charter schools?

How many students apply to charter schools but are rejected on some grounds? How many are quietly discouraged from attending for one reason or another?

8th grade math and reading scores declined for DC public schools between 2005 and 2007 while charter school scores improved. How much of this is due to the charter schools being better and how much to them having siphoned off better students from the public schools?

Some feel the charter school movement is driven by anti-union sentiment. If this is not true, are there any charter schools in DC that would accept a union agreement with their teachers?

DC CLIPS

Michael Neibauer, DC Examiner - A D.C. Council member is mulling emergency legislation that would bar demonstrations outside homes in residential neighborhoods, a response to increasingly aggressive protests by an extremist animal rights group. . . The legislation, at least one draft of which was obtained by The Examiner, would make it a misdemeanor "for any person to repeatedly engage in unwanted targeted picketing before or about an individual's dwelling place in a residential neighborhood with the intent to intimidate, threaten, abuse, annoy, or harass the individual."� Picketing under the measure is defined as "marching, congregating, standing, parading, demonstrating or patrolling without the implied or express consent of the occupant." The bill drew immediate repudiation from labor groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. The legislation is certain to affect unions and other organizations that use picketing as a means of getting their message across, said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the ACLU's national capital-area chapter.

Update: Chee has at least temporarily withdrawn this anti-free speech measure.

Washington Times - The District's unemployment rate is 7.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. About 6,000 homeless people live in the city, roughly 250 more than at the same time last year. . . A recent local survey shows families -- particularly single-parent families -- are among the hardest hit by the nation's faltering economy, which started its descent a year ago with failing mortgages, then spread to the financial markets and now to all sectors of the economy. The result has been about 10.5 million people across the country out of work and a national unemployment rate of 6.7 percent -- the highest since 1993. he survey, by the District-based Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, also shows the number of families needing short-term help from one of about 26 shelters in the city increased by more than 58 percent since last year, from 89 to 141 people. Roughly 49 percent of homeless families served locally are single women with children, like 33-year-old Brandi Barrow.

PASSINGS

Robert Prosky

Adam Bernstein Washington Post - Starting in 1958, [Robert] Prosky began an affiliation with Washington's Arena Stage that transformed him over 23 seasons and 130 roles from a struggling actor to one of the most versatile and prolific performers in a top regional theater.

He jokingly attributed his success to his paunch and prematurely gray hair, telling The Washington Post, "This hair and this gut are the two reasons I got started as an actor. I could play men 50 when I was 30, maybe 25. I could always play the funny fat man."

He also excelled in drama and at one point called on memories of his father, a Philadelphia butcher with a seventh-grade education, for his interpretation of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman.". . .

He once told The Post he turned down the role of a bartender on "Cheers" and was grateful not to have been a part of the hit comedy because "doing the same role for 6 1/2 years" sent a chill down his spine. . .

Looking back on his career, Mr. Prosky told The Post: "Survival is of utmost importance for an actor in this society. I remember doing a commercial with Arena actors Terrence Currier and Mark Hammer. We played bugs in tights and leotards, with wings pinned on our backs and a sequined number on our fronts. We were the price of the television set and we did a tap dance. When my eldest son saw it, he said, 'Dad, do we need the money that badly?'. . . "At the time, I recall, I was performing Willy Loman in the evenings."

Warren Robbins

LA Times - When he started the Museum of African Art in 1964, Robbins had never been to Africa, never worked in a museum, never been involved with the arts and never raised money.

His vision of a museum of African art for Washington grew out of a trip he took in the early 1960s, when he was a cultural attache with the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, Germany. He and Sen. S.I. Hayakawa (R-Calif.) were visiting Hamburg one day and strolled into an antique shop where a collection of African sculptures caught Robbins' eye. He bought 32 pieces. . .

Six years later, he heard that a former Capitol Hill home of Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century abolitionist icon, was on the market. Robbins raised $13,000 -- his first foray into fundraising -- and took out a $35,000 mortgage to buy the house, where he put his pieces on display as the Museum of African Art. Later he purchased other houses on the block -- nine in all -- as his collection grew. . .

"With little money, through the largesse of friends and collectors, and an undeterred dream, Robbins established what would become one of the world's preeminent museums for exhibiting, collecting and preserving African art," said Sharon Patton, director of the National Museum of African Art, in a statement.

"He has a handsome facial structure, decorated with a Mephistophelean beard and enough black hair to show he's an artiste," Sarah Booth Conroy observed in the Washington Post in 1979. "He is a hunchback, not that it's kept him from piloting planes, skiing or collecting a number of 'longtime relationships' with women.". . .

Initially, he had to confront resentment against a white man running a black museum. He had a ready answer: "I make no apologies for being white. You don't have to be Chinese to appreciate ancient ceramics, and you don't have to be a fish to be an ichthyologist."