Charter schools expanding in R.I.

PROBLEM SOLVING: Founded in 2009, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy has prospered despite opposition to expansion of charter schools in Rhode Island from local teacher unions. Above, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy second grader Daniel Marino works out a problem on an interactive whiteboard with his classmates. / COURTESY JONATHAN BELLER
PROBLEM SOLVING: Founded in 2009, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy has prospered despite opposition to expansion of charter schools in Rhode Island from local teacher unions. Above, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy second grader Daniel Marino works out a problem on an interactive whiteboard with his classmates. / COURTESY JONATHAN BELLER

Sara Tucker, dean of academics at one of two Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy elementary schools, adjusts classes throughout an eight-hour school day to ensure that academics and enrichment all fit into every student’s schedule.
What that means, Tucker said during a tour of Elementary School 2 on Broad Street in Cumberland recently, is that school administrators must give enough time between academic blocks to ensure students in larger and smaller groups can clean up for, say, a science lesson before moving on to reading or art.
She calls the process both flexible and rigorous – two hallmarks of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies schools. In Tucker’s previous schools in Louisiana, transitions were rushed, she said, but “here, everything is expected to be timely [and geared toward] maximizing your time.”
Blackstone Valley Prep has been successful enough to win federal support through a $2.4 million, five-year grant to aid its expansion from four to seven schools serving Cumberland, Lincoln, Central Falls and Pawtucket.
Blackstone and Achievement First, a mayoral academy in Providence, are nonprofit public charter schools overseen by the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies. They were founded in 2009 and 2013, respectively, and have prospered despite at times intense opposition to expansion of charter schools in Rhode Island from local teacher unions.
The state now has 25 public charter schools. And Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, itself a nonprofit, is looking to grow more charter school networks around the state, including RISE, another mayoral-academy charter school that will serve Woonsocket, North Smithfield and Burrillville, said Rosalind Murphy, a former teacher at Revere High School near Boston. She has completed a Boston-based Building Excellent Schools fellowship, which trains educators to found and lead charter schools across the country.
Rhode Island Mayoral Academies has tapped Murphy as founder and leader of RISE, which is an acronym for Respect, Integrity, Self-determination and Excellence.
“There’s a significant demand across the state for more public school and mayoral academy school choices,” said Murphy. “There are thousands more applications than there are slots.”
This past year, there were 9,436 applications for 851 seats in all charter schools in the state, said Katelyn Silva, Rhode Island Mayoral Academies’ chief communications officer. At Blackstone Valley Prep and Achievement First combined, there were 2,575 applications for 263 seats at both schools, she said.
This year, Achievement First has 272 students in K-2 while Blackstone Valley Prep has more than 1,000 students in K-9 across four campuses, she said. Besides adding RISE, said Magee, Rhode Island Mayoral Academies is working with the state’s 2013 Teacher of the Year, Jessica Waters, to develop a statewide, blended-learning mayoral academy that mixes online education with a personalized learning approach. The school would leverage technology with “a lot of self-directed learning,” he said. A location has not yet been chosen, he added.
“We are fairly agnostic about school design and school models,” Magee said. “We’re looking for schools that will deliver excellent results for Rhode Island students and in particular make [them] college and career ready. We will entertain any idea in terms of school design but we want compelling evidence in terms of its being successful with kids.”
While Blackstone Valley Prep in particular has achieved some milestones in educational testing, results are mixed.
In February, the eighth graders ranked the highest percentage-wise in the state at 94 percent for proficiency in math in the New England Common Assessment Program administered in October 2013, said Jen LoPiccolo, Blackstone Valley Prep director of external affairs.
Silva pointed to several milestones in traditional settings, including Cumberland ranking the fourth-most-improved district for math in the state in 2013, and graduation rates that rose from 55 percent to 76 percent in Pawtucket between 2008-09 and 2012-13.
“We’re not taking credit for those things,” Silva said. “That’s the hard work of superintendents and teachers and district leadership. But we’re really creating a culture of thinking about education and improvement in a way that is improving the educational ecosystem for both public and charter schools.”
Despite the achievements, the fall 2013 NECAP results for students in grades 3-8 and grade 11 show modest improvement at Blackstone Valley Prep, with 78 percent of students scoring at or above “proficient” in reading compared with 74 percent the year prior. Math scores remained flat at 76 percent both years, according to data supplied by the R.I. Department of Education.
Chiappetta said the statistics may not be a fair assessment, since they include fifth graders who had only been in school four weeks before being tested.
“None of our data is nearly as good as we want it to be,” he said. “We have a lot of work to improve every grade level. We have done well, but at the end of the day we know we have to do more and we have to do better. I truly believe every kid and every staff member is doing their very best and that’s all I care about. Are we more than a test score? Absolutely.” Opposition to public charter schools remains strong in some communities, despite their proliferation.
“It’s not just the teachers unions, it’s a lot of school boards and communities that have opposed these [mayoral academies],” said Lizabeth A. Larkin, president of the 1,174-member Cranston Teachers Alliance AFT Local 1704. “They take needed funding from the public schools and they can accept private funds, which we cannot.”
Their expansion is going to hurt traditional public schools, Larkin added. “If the federal government is giving money for public schools, it should be to the true traditional public schools, so students can get an equal access to education, with all the programs we were able to have at one time and have basically lost over the years.”
Perhaps the most telling measure of the mayoral academies’ success, however, is parents’ enthusiasm over the Rhode Island Mayoral Acadamies approach to longer school days, inclusion, diversity, college and career readiness and “high expectations” that Rhode Island Mayoral Acadamies espouses and employees repeat like mantras to visitors.
Initially, Brad Collins of Lincoln thought he’d have his son, William, now a second grader at Blackstone Valley Prep, and daughter, Laura, a kindergartener there, attend Lincoln public schools. But when a neighbor made him aware of what the mayoral academy had to offer, he said he leapt at the chance to have his children attend a mayoral charter school.
“When we looked into it, we saw what they had to offer, the high expectations, the longer school day – it was right up our alley,” Collins said. “I’m a physician and my wife’s a nurse practitioner and education is extremely important to us. The teachers do a great job to make it fun and understandable for the kids, so [William] is excelling. He’s been on the chess team since first grade.”
Another parent, Lori Barden of Pawtucket, is the mother of a boy with a speech impediment. She wanted to avoid the potential for bullying that might be found in more traditional school settings.
“There is no ceiling,” in terms of the potential to learn unimpeded, she said, and the school fosters a culture of support that extends to staff’s interaction with parents, who review educational challenges as a partnership with parents. She had talked with Chiappetta in 2009 when signing up her son, William. Chiappetta was then head of school at one of two elementary schools.
“The first night of registration,” she recalled, “he looked at all of us and said, ‘This is going to be a job for all of us. It’s going to require reading [to students]; it’s going to be a longer [school] day.’ But it was never, ‘You have to do this;’ it was, ‘We need to do this, we need to get them excited about school, we need to encourage reading.’ It was a partnership. “Every parent got the same pep talk,” she added, “and we’re all held to the same accountability.”
The philosophy behind these schools is to provide a longer school day that accommodates both academics and the arts nearly every day, said Michael Magee, Rhode Island Mayoral Academies’ co-founder and CEO, with the aim of getting students career- and college-ready. High expectations behaviorally and academically are standard, he said.
Mayoral academies are regional public charter schools that pull from both urban and suburban districts, with the intention of being both socio-economically and racially diverse. They are governed by a mayor-led school board.
The schools are open for eight-hour days instead of the traditional six or six-and-a-half, and focus on career and college readiness. Students must apply in a lottery to be accepted.
In Rhode Island, Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee was the first mayor to advocate for Rhode Island Mayoral Academies.
According to McKee’s colleague, Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, political leadership brings with it the opportunity to forge partnerships in the community and have a hands-on role in making sure the schools are well run, which includes overseeing, in Diossa’s case, Executive Director Jeremy Chiappetta and his staff.
Diossa also has been working to secure a new location in Central Falls for the middle school currently located in Lincoln.
“The biggest value I see is when I hear the stories of parents, [who] speak with a lot of enthusiasm about how they love the school and how it’s benefiting their kids, giving them hope that they’re going to get a great education and put them on the road to someday go to college,” Diossa said.
The mayoral academies also have some flexibility in hiring and compensation, through changes in state law, Magee said, that exempt teachers from tenure and allow for the option for teachers and staff to invest in 401(k)s instead of pensions. Magee said public criticism of these changes is part of the reality of fostering change.
These changes “allow for more innovation,” he said. “You can be less restrictive in how you design your hiring and compensation systems for teachers. So big changes are always going to be somewhat controversial, but we feel mayoral academies are a very important contributor to the overall plan to move Rhode Island forward.” •

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