Maryellen Butke, MINDSETTER™ - Why We Need Achievement First
Monday, August 22, 2011
There has been a lot of debate over the last few weeks on the level of community support for the Achievement First Mayoral Academy. What is getting lost in the debate, however, is what Achievement First has accomplished in its other districts and what it intends to do for the children of Providence and Cranston. It is critical to keep the focus on the best interest of our children in this debate.
Achievement First isn’t a fly by night charter school. Over the course of twelve years, Achievement First continues to produce groundbreaking results—so much so that in 2007, Achievement First’s Amistad Academy was highlighted by the U.S. Department of Education as a nationwide model for closing the achievement gap. Hundreds of children are now on a pathway towards college as a result of this gap-busting model. Life trajectories have been significantly altered as a result of AF schools.
Achievement First Track Record
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Achievement First’s Elm City College Prep, a middle school in New Haven, has nearly eliminated achievement gaps in math by the time students reach eighth grade, and reduced the gaps in reading by 16 percentage points. While only 70 percent of economically disadvantaged students in Connecticut schools score proficient on state tests in math, every Achievement First school outperforms that average by 10
percentage points or more. In fact, in 2010 Elm City College Prep had the highest performing African-American elementary students in the state and Amistad Academy had the highest performing African-American middle school students in the state.
During a Board of Regents meeting this summer, rising Providence College sophomore, Francesca Calderon, a graduate of Achievement First’s Amistad Academy in New Haven, spoke eloquently about the way AF positively impacted her. She shared that 100 percent of her classmates in the class of 2010 were accepted into four-year colleges. Amistad’s 2011 class also produced the same results.
Like many high-achieving charter management organizations with a mission to close the achievement gap, Achievement First has also shown an eagerness to actively partner with the surrounding community to support system-wide transformation and student growth. Given the large and persistent achievement gaps across Rhode Island, we cannot afford to leave any tool for transforming our public education system on the sidelines. Not only do charter school students on the whole perform higher on statewide assessments in Rhode Island, charter schools themselves can help initiate meaningful conversations and create innovative partnerships within a district to raise student achievement overall. Our kids, and their parents, deserve the kind of high quality choice that AF provides.
Achievement First is poised to offer hundreds of our students the same types of opportunities that their peers have experienced in neighboring states. Denying this same opportunity to the children of Providence and Cranston is unconscionable.
In the end, after the noise has died down, and the debate is over, we must come back to one fundamental question: Do you believe that this decision is in the best interest of our children? My answer is a resounding yes!
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