Tomorrow the DC Council is likely to take an initial vote the DC Promise Establishment Act, a bill to give college scholarships to low- and moderate-income graduates of DC high schools. The proposal would help pay for college for any DC high school student in a family earning up to about $200,000. Helping to make college affordable is important, but DC Promise has an expensive price tag that may make it hard for DC to invest in other education initiatives. There are other concerns about the program as well. In most communities, promise initiatives are privately funded. And they are implemented as an incentive to keep families from leaving the public school system, but that is not the goal of the District’s program.
Since DC Promise’s main objective is to help students to afford college, narrowing the income targeting — and seeking private funding — would reduce the cost and help ensure that the city can invest in a range of education initiatives.
DC Promise could potentially cost the city $95.5 million over a four-year implementation period, reaching $56 million per year. This could compete with other efforts to improve the quality of our schools, which will simultaneously keep middle class families in the system and adequately prepare all students to graduate from high school with the skills to succeed in college. For example, the District could use those funds to add a poverty weight to the school formula, expand quality out-of-school time programs, or build up our middle schools.
Most Promise programs around the country are privately funded, which would be a great option for the District. Kalamazoo Promise, a successful model for DC Promise, is entirely funded by private investments. If the District were to explore this route, there is a great deal of planning and administrative work to be done before a successful launch of DC Promise would be possible.
Model Promise programs are also focused on keeping residents in public schools, but a few changes to the initial DC proposal raises concerns about the ultimate goals of this program. Many communities, including Kalamazoo Promise, only serve public school students and do not include private schools in their program. The initial DC bill reflected this same goal, but changed after hearing from the public that it should be open to all residents. Under the current version, DC residents who graduate from any high school, whether public or private, qualify for DC Promise. These changes makes DC Promise mostly a program about helping college be more financially accessible, and if so, it should be more targeted to lower-income students.
The intent of the original bill was also to address the 6th grade cliff’where enrollment data shows that many families exit the public school system. That’s why it limited eligibility to students who stayed in either DC public schools or charter schools from middle school to high school graduation. That, too, changed, and the middle school incentive is no longer in the proposal. The original incentive to stay in DC would be better maintained if the proposal kept the middle school and high school eligibility and limited the program to publicly funded schools in the District.
The bill also includes an income ceiling’students qualify if they come from households with less than 200 percent of area median income, or approximately $215,000 for a family of four. To make college more affordable to low-income students, DCFPI recommends narrowing income targeting to better target families who need it most.
In short, DCFPI strongly agrees with the premise of this legislation, that college should be accessible and affordable to everyone. At the same time, funding this bill could make it difficult to fund other education priorities.
