After Central Falls High School missed its test score targets for the fifth consecutive year, the No Child Left Behind Act required that the school be reconstituted. Interim Schools Superintendent William Holland followed the successful lead of districts in Worcester and Chelsea, Mass., and recommended turning Central Falls High School into a "university academy" to be run by the University of Rhode Island.
Time will tell if this Hail Mary pass works, but from our vantage point, it looks like a good strategy that deserves support.
Consider the case of Worcester, where Clark University runs the University Park Campus School, which has 231 students in grades seven through 12. Two-thirds of the students speak English as a second language, and three-quarters qualify for subsidized lunches. Yet all of the school's graduates since its inception in 1997 have gone on to college, and all are first-generation attenders.
The Chelsea school system has been under Boston University's management since 1989, and the system's performance has been exemplary, with attendance and test scores rising significantly since the schools were taken over.
The successes in Massachusetts do not guarantee similar success in Central Falls. But they do prove that schools where students have to cope with poverty and language problems can still achieve great things. We look forward to seeing how URI shoulders this important mission of providing full educational opportunity to the children of Central Falls.