What Community Prep can teach other schools

There is an ongoing dialogue in Rhode Island about the quality of our public schools and especially the schools in our urban corridor. Can our students succeed? Can they compete for jobs in an ever more competitive world market? For too many, the answer appears to be “no,” and equally distressing is the malaise that these conclusions appear to be inevitable.
After 23 years of running an inner-city private school, I have seen some remarkable successes and learned a variety of lessons. There are strategies that should be followed that will improve our children’s opportunities for success and improve our state’s economic future.
Community Preparatory School was founded in 1983 to provide educational opportunity to low-income students of color. Today, the school is over 80 percent minorities – a figure that reflects the racial composition of most of Rhode Island’s urban schools. A difference is that at Community Prep we offer students in grades 3 through 8 the benefits of an independent school – small classes, challenging academics, and a positive, nurturing environment – while still retaining the cultural and economic diversity of a public school.
During our two decades, we have learned a lot about success and can memorialize it into some thoughts that can be used for consideration for our public schools:
1. Create an environment in which achievement is a critical element of education.
A hallmark of Community Prep is calculator club – a critical part of our curriculum in which students face rapid-fire problems and designated students must solve them in their heads before a classmate works them out on a calculator. The students take turns alphabetically. One student answers, one handles the calculator, and a third registers the number of correct answers on the board.
Calculator club allows students an enjoyable opportunity to memorize basic math tables and then to challenge themselves at higher levels of math. Because students are individually tested at their own levels, the class as a whole gets the practice needed in the proportion that it is needed. It is a very active piece of learning and in entails a component of person vs. machine, which seems to appeal to something basic in human nature.
The lesson: Allow, encourage and creatively challenge children to learn.
2. Allow students to express themselves – not by the T-shirt from the mall, but by the quality of their thoughts. (Community Prep students wear uniforms in an effort to level the playing field, keep costs down and reinforce the focus on learning.)
Recently, Community Prep students participated in “This I Believe,” a national media project engaging millions of people in writing, sharing and discussing the core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives. “This I Believe” is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name that was hosted by Edward R. Murrow. National Public Radio has been airing the essays on its news programs. The quality of the work was mesmerizing, as was the students’ creativity.
The lesson: Create opportunities for students to express their talents, wrapped in creativity and embraced for the accomplishments. The outcome can be remarkable. This requires the community – parents, faculty and the system as a whole to work together.
3. Encourage, foster and drive diversity. We live in an ever-smaller, diverse world. The children who attend Community Prep do so for primarily one reason – they want a high-quality education in an environment in which the student body looks like the world that they live in and work in. The school attracts a number of children from Providence’s East Side. These children could go to any prep school in the area but seek out Community Prep because of the diversity and the educational quality. My bet is that when they go into business or conduct research on a global stage, they will be better positioned for success.
Lesson: Embrace diversity – racial, religious and economic – and learn about all the players in the world, as it will serve you and your business well in the future.
Ultimately the lessons of Community Prep may be lessons transferable to other schools. We are proud of our track record, as 92 percent of Community Prep’s graduates have been accepted into college-preparatory high school programs, and 82 percent of Community Prep alumni go on to colleges and universities across the country. The latter is twice the urban public-school average.
Dan Corley is founder and head of Community Preparatory School in Providence.