Coalition advocating for school choice

PROVIDENCE – Led by the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a coalition of school reform advocates has launched “Bright Today Educational Choice,” a campaign espousing school choice in Rhode Island.
The center, a nonpartisan think tank, has published “The Case for Expanded Educational Choice,” a paper that references national research and the perspective of the coalition partners as a group.
“The Rhode Island public school system is failing far too many students and families,” the paper’s introduction reads. “Collectively, our schools yield one of the lowest values in New England and the nation when it comes to educational performance as compared with per pupil spending.”
The coalition advocates that parents should be empowered with new options to choose the best educational path for their children. In a 2013 poll conducted by the center and the Indianapolis, Ind.-based Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a coalition partner, only 29 percent of Rhode Islanders indicated they would select a regular public school as their first choice, the coalition notes.
The campaign holds that no child should be required to attend a failing school or have to wait for “tomorrow’s reform promises … and that every child deserves an education of their families’ choice – today.”
The Bright Today coalition will announce specific policy solutions in the coming weeks and propose a package of related bills to the R.I. General Assembly. One coalition partner, R.I. Families for School Choice, will host its annual school choice legislative reception at the Statehouse on Jan. 29, as part of the National School Choice Week celebration.
Other coalition partners include FACE of Rhode Island; the Roosevelt Society; the Gaspee Project; the R.I. Catholic Schools Parents Federation; and the Providence Hebrew Day School.
Campaign Community Outreach Adviser Gertrude Jones, who is also a diversity advocate, former Lifespan executive and president of the Providence School Board, said: “Take the time to review the definition of insanity, and then ask yourself why we keep educating our children with the same system while expecting different results. Educational choice creates real freedom for families and can give Rhode Island’s children a fighting chance at lifelong success.”
Visit the campaign website at www.brighttoday.org.

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  1. Having school choice will destroy the public school system. Small neighborhood schools are the best where parents and neighborhood leaders can work together to solve problems and make neighborhood public schools better. To improve school performance, the “School-Within-a-School-Concept” should be employed in each school with more than 350 students. If a school has 600 students, it would be divided up into two separate schools with 300 students each. In each school, administrators, faculty members, parents, non-instructional staff and students would have an opportunity get to know and trust one another. In a short period of time, almost everyone would begin acting like a family where most members care about and want to help each other. A social commitment would develop where most members would begin working together to make the school a successful community. Because these schools would be small, curriculums designed to meet the cultural diverse needs of at risk student populations could be developed. Administrators, teachers and students, in these small schools, could use the team approach to implement curriculum goals and create group portfolios to represent their achievements. These small schools would be the equivalent of well run charter schools.