As I read Senator Sheehan’s April 17 opinion piece about increasing oversight of charter schools, I saw many opportunities to myth-bust charter school misconceptions. Given that misinformation about charters was shared publicly and originated from one of our esteemed members of the legislature, I worry that the community might take his misunderstandings as facts. Like Rhode Island’s other public bodies, charter schools are also held to high standards of accountability and transparency.
I read with some interest the Guest Mindsetter commentary of Senator James Sheehan regarding his legislation (2018- S 2816), in which he suggests that our Rhode Island charter schools are not transparent or held accountable for their performance. I recently testified against his bill before the Senate Education Committee to debunk these false notions.
First, Sen. Sheehan perpetuates the false notion that charter schools are “privately-run” schools despite the fact that he knows otherwise. Charter schools are, in fact, public schools for the same reason that district schools are public. Charter schools receive their authority to deliver public education from the General Assembly through Title 16 of the R.I. General Laws. Thus, charter Schools are Local Education Authorities (LEA’s) just as local school districts. To suggest that a local district school board should have a designated seat on a charter school board is tantamount to suggesting that the South Kingstown School Committee should have a designated seat on the North Kingstown School Committee, which is just nonsense. Continue reading “Oliveira: Sen. Sheehan’s False Assertions”
Despite being built by immigrants, the United States has a long and complicated relationship with languages other than English (and sometimes with English, too). Modern education, however, has always placed value on studying the world’s languages. Just ask any high school freshman trying to make the grade in a Spanish I class.
Currently, more and more private and charter schools are offering dual lingual education as early as preschool. These are not simply classes taught once a day. Instead, some schools offer a full immersion curriculum that, in many cases, mirrors the immigrant experience of speaking one language at home and another at school. Others offer a fifty-fifty split between English and a second language. During a presentation in January on reading in a bilingual environment, Christophe Bonnet, head of school at the French American School of Rhode Island (FASRI), spoke about the benefits of “re-wiring” a child’s brain prior to first grade so that a second language becomes intuitive and he or she doesn’t recognize any transition. “We teach the skills, not in isolation, but in project-based learning,” Bonnet says. In preschool and kindergarten, this cross-lingual skill transfer takes place before students even learn to read.
A rendering by Torrado Architects of a plan to renovate a seed barn on The Compass School’s campus into a middle school learning space. [COURTESY OF THE COMPASS SCHOOL]
Too often, tensions over school funding drive district and charter schools apart. Assertions that “Choice costs too much” (Commentary, Jan. 11, by Chariho Superintendent Barry Ricci) question the value of charter schools without honoring their many contributions to Rhode Island public education.
By design, charters were established to “provide high-performing educational opportunities to public school students and develop innovative educational practices that can be shared with other public schools.” It is my pleasure to set the financial tug of war aside to tell the story of one Rhode Island charter’s journey to deliver on this goal.
In a Jan. 14 Commentary piece (“Dismal outlook for R.I. Latinos demands action”) Central Falls Superintendent Victor Capellan shared his thinking on the Annie E. Casey report ranking Rhode Island last in the nation for opportunities for success for Latino children.
Rhode Island is already home to a national model of what success in this realm looks like. The Learning Community, one of the highest poverty, highest performing K-8 urban schools in Rhode Island, has effectively closed the Latino achievement gap.
On the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) English Language Arts assessment, Learning Community’s Latino students outperformed the state’s white students by 7 percentage points and reached proficiency at two-and-a-half times the rate of their Latino peers statewide. The Learning Community also closed the gap between students of color and white students, with our students of color outperforming the state’s white students by 6 percentage points.
Our 18 schools serve the public, are open to the public, funded by the public and held accountable to the public. We enroll students through a fair and transparent lottery system, which is open to all students, including many from low income, diverse communities. We are free to be innovative and are held accountable for improved student achievement. We have flexibility around how we spend our resources and run our programs, helping us explore best practices and share them with both charter and traditional public schools.
We collaborate
Whether we’re working with traditional public school leaders or a team of teachers is working collaboratively within their own department, we are always seeking new ways to improve student achievement. We work closely with families and community partners, providing invaluable educational experiences for students that don’t end once students leave their classrooms.
We succeed
We teach differently because we know that students learn differently. We find innovative approaches to each lesson and we don’t stop until we know what works. We are striving every day to close the achievement gap in our public schools and have shown strong results on state testing and other measures of success.
