Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Patricia Brantley, the CEO of Friendship Public Charter School, a network of fifteen campuses in Washington, DC.
We provide a bio for Patricia below.
Patricia A. Brantley, the CEO of Friendship Public Charter School, is an education reformer, charter school advocate and supporter of the right of all children to receive a high-quality education. Ms. Brantley served with the founding planners of the charter school over twenty-five years ago, when she joined with others under the leadership of Donald L. Hense to create better opportunities for the children of the District of Columbia. Ms. Brantley became Friendship’s chief operating officer in 2003 and chief executive officer in 2015, helping to grow the organization and deepen its impact.
During her tenure she engineered the acquisition and development of multiple public charter school campuses, rapidly growing academic, operational, and financial outcomes.
Prior to joining Friendship, Ms. Brantley served in corporate and nonprofit leadership positions, including as founder of the Partnership for Academic Achievement; chief development officer and adviser to civil rights leader Dr. Dorothy Irene Height; and executive director of the Dance Institute of Washington. Ms. Brantley is a graduate of Princeton University and Chair of the DC Charter School Alliance.
As additional background, we highlight that the DC Council takes up its budget markup on June 9th. Among the decisions it will make: how public education is funded across this city, and for whom. This piece is about the history behind that choice — a history that is repeated in communities across this nation.
The Geography of Good Intentions
I spoke with a man I deeply respect. One who has always shown up with his values, and who is willing to say his version of truth even when we are in disagreement. I stand firmly in the belief of the promise and power of charter schools. He stands firmly in the protection and preservation of by-right neighborhood schools. Those don’t have to be clashing ideals — but we exist in a world that always pushes for choosing sides; that if one rises the other must be falling; that to support one means to hurt the other.
I reject that framing.
I often wonder: if we could understand our shared histories better, could we find common ground? A place where “both and” exists, and not “us versus them”?
So I’d say to my friends who come from a place of privilege and hold power that affects all of us — the privileged and underprivileged alike — you will never know what it is to stand in the shoes of a parent with no choice but to send your child to a school you know will not serve them well. You have no idea what it is to be that child, walking into doors that are hostile or indifferent to you. You can’t know, because the history we share set you up for success — through generations, through accumulation, through proximity to power. And my part of that same history said, by law, that we were not good enough to enter. The communities, the schools, the wealth, the opportunities — all of it flows from a history neither of us crafted, and that one of us can overlook where the other never can.
So let’s examine it. The roots of our difference, and perhaps the paths that might take us from here.
The Map Has a Memory
Pull up any historical map of DC’s racially restrictive deed covenants — the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project will do — and then overlay it with a current map of the city’s school quality ratings. The correlation is not subtle.
The neighborhoods where White property owners and real estate developers inserted legal clauses prohibiting the sale or lease of homes to Black residents — from the early 1900s through 1948 — are, by and large, the same neighborhoods with the most resource-rich, highest-rated public schools in the District today.
DC’s Ward 3 is not an exception to this pattern. It is one of its clearest examples.
The covenants ran heavily west of Rock Creek Park and throughout the expanding subdivisions of Northwest DC. Driven by the Great Migration and the arrival of thousands of new Black residents to the city, developers inserted clauses directly into property deeds: homes could never be sold, leased, or given to “Negroes” or anyone of “African descent.” Block associations formed to sign petition-based covenants enforcing the same. White citizens’ associations systematically confined Black Washingtonians to Shaw, to Anacostia, to the older and more crowded sections of the city — legally walling off the neighborhoods now considered among DC’s most desirable.
It was not informal. It was not sentiment. It was the law.
That lasted until 1948, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hurd v. Hodge — a companion case to Shelley v. Kraemer, argued before the Court by Washington attorney Charles Hamilton Houston — made such covenants unenforceable. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made housing discrimination broadly illegal. But by then, the map was already drawn. The wealth was already accumulating on one side of Rock Creek Park. The political representation, the tax base, the school facilities investment, the PTA capacity — all of it followed the map, and all of it compounded.
The language of those covenants remains written into historical property deeds across the District to this day. The lines they drew are still visible in the city’s demographics, its racial wealth gap, and — unmistakably — the perceived quality of its neighborhood public schools.
What the Map Produced
The families confined by those covenants did not simply end up in different ZIP codes. They ended up in schools built on the logic of that same geography: underfunded, overcrowded, and systematically deprioritized as political capital and civic investment flowed toward the neighborhoods with wealth, votes, and generational influence.
DC’s Wards 7 and 8 today are the institutional heirs of that confinement.
According to the 2024 DC state test results, in Ward 3, 71% of students were proficient in ELA and 60% in math. In Ward 8, those figures were 13% and 5%, respectively. Ward 7 follows the same pattern — among the lowest in the city in both subjects. A 58-point ELA gap. A 55-point math gap. Between two wards in the same city, governed by the same laws, funded through the same formulas.
These are not numbers that reflect what families in Wards 7 and 8 value. They reflect what society has invested — and withheld — across a century.
Even as the city works to close those gaps, a century of deliberate disinvestment will not be fixed overnight. Progress is real and worth honoring. But no reform effort outruns a century of accumulated harm.
The neighborhood school in Ward 3 is excellent. That excellence is not an accident of geography or the natural result of community engagement. It is the accumulated product of generational wealth, political influence, and a housing market engineered to exclude Black families for generations. Protecting it requires very little political courage. Families there are not choosing to leave.
In Wards 7 and 8, the calculus is different. According to DC’s own enrollment data, 52% of Ward 7 students and 56% of Ward 8 students attend public charter schools — both well above the citywide average. But that is only the first layer of the story. Among the Ward 7 and Ward 8 students who do attend traditional public schools, most are also not attending their neighborhood school. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s analysis of District enrollment data, the in-boundary participation rate — the share of students who actually attend the school they are assigned to by address — is 17% in Ward 7 and 16% in Ward 8. The citywide average is 25%. In Ward 3, it is 77%.
Read that again: 77% of Ward 3 public school students attend their neighborhood school. In Ward 8, it is 16%.
That is not a data point. That is a verdict. Families east of the Anacostia are not saying no to public education. They are saying no, in overwhelming numbers, to the specific schools the city assigned them — schools whose condition is not the result of their choices but of decisions made before they were born.
Families in Wards 7 and 8 choose charter schools at rates far exceeding the citywide average — not because they have been misled, or because they don’t value community, or because they have been captured by some ideology of privatization. They choose charters because, in many cases, neighborhood school assignments — shaped by this history — do not serve their child as they deserve. And because they watched the same happen to their parents.
That is not a rejection of public education. It is a demand for it — a refusal to accept that geography, inherited from a history no one in that parent line ever got to shape, should determine whether their child gets a real one.
And if you need evidence that this is not a school problem but a structural one — that the same map produces the same inequity across every dimension of life — DC Health’s own data shows a nearly 32-year gap in life expectancy between the neighborhoods at the top of this city and those at the bottom. The neighborhoods at the top are west of Rock Creek Park. The ones at the bottom are east of the Anacostia. Kent/Palisades: 96.8 years. Washington Highlands: 64.9 years. The same city. The same laws. The same map — and the same history that drew it.
The Policy Implication That Goes Unsaid
When the argument is made for protecting neighborhood schools, it sounds universal. It is not.
Protecting the by-right neighborhood school in Ward 3 costs Ward 3 families nothing. Their school is already good. The policy maintains a status quo that already serves them.
Restricting charter school growth, charter school funding, or charter school authorization produces a different effect east of the Anacostia. There, limiting charter options does not protect the neighborhood school. It reduces the number of high-quality seats available to families who lack the wealth to relocate to a better school zone, lack the political infrastructure to command reform from a system that has long deprioritized them, and have — within living memory — watched generation after generation educated in schools this city never fully resourced.
The argument “I support all kids, but we need to protect neighborhood schools” is coherent only if the starting point for all neighborhoods is equivalent. It is not. It has never been. And the reason it is not equivalent is not mysterious — it is documented, deed by deed, block by block, in the historical record of this city.
Policy made without accounting for that history is not neutral. It is, whether intended or not, policy that protects the people who most benefited from that history and asks the people most harmed by it to accept the consequences again.
What I Am Not Saying
I am not saying that the man I opened this piece describing doesn’t care about Black children. I know he does.
I am not saying neighborhood schools are bad, or that traditional public schools don’t deserve investment and support. They do. Friendship has operated alongside and in partnership with this city’s public school ecosystem for nearly thirty years, and we believe in the strength of the sector as a whole.
I am not even saying the instinct to protect community-anchored schools is wrong. It is not. Stability matters. Rootedness matters. A school that knows a neighborhood, that holds its history, that reflects its community — that is a real and valuable thing.
And I am absolutely not saying that the educators in one place are bad and the educators in another are better. I’ve been in both, and I know what I’ve seen: teachers in Wards 7 and 8 who love their students fiercely, who work harder than they should have to, and who deserve far more than a system that asks them to close gaps history created. The difference in outcomes is not about the people in those classrooms. It is about everything that was decided before those people ever walked in.
What I am saying is this: the “neighborhood school” in Ward 3 and the “neighborhood school” in Ward 8 are not the same institution facing the same conditions. They are products of the same history — experienced from opposite sides of it. And a policy framework that treats them as equivalent, that offers them the same level of protection without accounting for the conditions that made them different, that denies or diminishes the charter options families in one ward depend on and families in the other largely don’t need, is not equity. It is the ratification of the status quo dressed in the language of fairness.
Toward “Both And”
I still believe in the “both and.” I have to — it is the only honest place from which to build.
Neighborhood schools can be strong and charter schools can thrive. Families can have stable community anchors and expanded options. Public investment in traditional public schools can grow and charter school funding can be equitable. None of those outcomes require the other to fall.
But getting to “both and” requires something harder than policy arguments. It requires the people with power in this conversation — those who set the terms of funding, of policy, of which schools survive and which don’t — to be willing to reckon with the full picture: not just the schools they know, not just the neighborhoods they represent, but the full geography of this city and the full history of how it was made.
It requires asking: who built this map, and who was built out of it?
The children at Friendship — in Wards 7, 8, and across the District — are brilliant. They are ambitious. They are entirely capable. What they are not is equally positioned, because they were not equally invited into the city that was built around them.
My friend knows I respect him. I think he also knows I will not let a framing go unchallenged when it asks those children to pay for a history they did not make. That is not conflict. That is the kind of honest conversation that shared history, honestly examined, eventually makes possible.
The map has a memory. It is past time we examine it together.