A Pioneering Collaboration to Improve Reading in Central Falls

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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010

An urban school district and a charter school have forged a successful – and 
unusual – partnership to share best teaching practices and collectively support early reading proficiency.

The Growing Readers Initiative is a professional development partnership between an urban school district and a charter school – one of the few examples nationally of such collaboration. The Learning Community, a K–8 charter school founded in 2004, has developed a coordinated program to build strong readers in the early grades. Through the Growing Readers Initiative, teachers, coaches, specialists, and administrators from the charter school are working alongside their 
colleagues in the neighboring Central Falls School District to share best 
practices teacher-to-teacher, share 
systems of support and data analysis, and encourage a team approach to 
student achievement.

Growing Readers is a successful, working example of truly targeted, collective practice. Grade-level teams of teachers design targeted lessons by using Rhode Island state standards and the work of the New Standards Project as common measures. Teachers receive coaching in their own classrooms, 
targeted to their needs and to those of their students. Quarterly assessments measure the results; students who are struggling are offered tailored support from reading specialists. This layered approach affirms common goals, structures daily practice to be collaborative, and aligns resources to be responsive to clear needs.

The partnership embodies the original promise of the charter school movement – to spur innovation in the larger system of public education. Through Growing Readers, lessons learned in one school reach three times as many students. Initial results are positive, but all partners agree that the work is in its infancy and that relationships, whether on a collegial or institutional level, take time and hard work to grow.

Central Falls

For decades, Central Falls, Rhode Island, has drawn immigrants from many parts of the world to the Blackstone Valley, birthplace of our nation’s industrial revolution. Generations came for work and brought with them talent, determination, intelligence, culture, warmth, and, above all else, their vision for a future for their children. For most families, education is the key to that vision.

Like urban districts across the country, the schools in Central Falls have struggled to balance a belief 
in the district’s 3,000 students and their families with the challenging effects of poverty. In 2000, 41 percent of the 
children of Central Falls were living below the federal poverty line – more than half (52 percent) in extreme 
poverty. The challenges facing the young people of this community are 
all too familiar to anyone who has worked with low-income urban families in the United States.

Central Falls has some outstanding teachers, committed leaders, and success stories. Families in Central Falls have made great sacrifices to provide for their children. But Central Falls also has a long history of efforts at change and reform that have left a series of piecemeal programs and solutions in their wake.

Frances Gallo became superintendent in 2007, bringing to the district a commitment to transparency and a vision that success was possible through “teamwork coupled with an unwavering focus on improving the intellectual, social, and emotional well-being of every child in every classroom.”

The Learning Community

The Learning Community, the first charter school in Central Falls, was founded in 2004 by Meg O’Leary and Sarah Friedman as an independent district reporting directly to the state. Based on their years of experience working on professional development in Providence public elementary schools, O’Leary and Friedman created 
a new public school designed to address the common obstacles urban classroom teachers faced. Their vision was to build the school as a laboratory for professional development – a 
learning community not just for one school, but for educators throughout the state and the region.

Central to their notion of school success was the role of working collaboratively. The route to student achievement, particularly in a high-poverty community, is through creating a team of support surrounding every classroom, every teacher, and every learner, giving importance to individual voices, systematically making space for dissenting opinions, and committing to continuous reflection and improvement. All members of the school’s team are encouraged to hold one another accountable for their best work through listening, critical feedback, collaborating, and, where necessary, hard conversations.

Over its first five years The Learning Community has shown some impressive results for a school with such high poverty. Students are outperforming their peers on state standardized tests, the school has the best rate of family engagement in the state, and the demand to become a student or a teacher at the school is high (The Learning Community 2009). Hundreds of visitors have come to the school, drawn by its results on state standardized tests, its groundbreaking work in family engagement, and its reputation as an open school interested in building and sharing new systems to support student achievement.

How the Partnership Began

Superintendent Gallo’s initial interest in The Learning Community grew from her feeling of responsibility toward all Central Falls public school children, whether they are in the Central Falls School District or not.

On a summer visit to a Kindergarten family the phone rang and the parents were jumping for joy. They looked at me sheepishly, telling me they just won the lottery to go to The Learning Community. And I said to them “That’s wonderful!” They were shocked. I said, “You’re still my students and by all means I’ll see you when you’re at The Learning Com-munity.” As I was leaving, I thought, why is it that they are so excited to go there? So I decided to visit.

Gallo’s visit led her to arrange a series of open observation days at The Learning Community for principals, district administrators, and classroom teachers. These visits allowed people to observe and discuss instruction at varying grade levels. Many common concerns about charter schools were raised: What is the poverty level? How does your lottery work? Do you have any special education students? Are your teachers certified?

Central Falls and Learning Community leaders realized they had important things in common. Both groups were focused on success for all students. Both had a corps of excellent teachers. And both believed that the fundamental unit of school change is not the state, the district, or the school, but the classroom. Teachers who visited left with an understanding that the same demographic of students attend The Learning Community as the district schools, including those with special education and behavioral needs, students of color, and ELLS (see Figure 1).

Conversations began about the role The Learning Community 
could play as a partner to the Central 
Falls elementary schools. The conversa-tions quickly focused on reading instruc-tion as a key driver of The Learning Community’s success and a fundamental job of the early grades. Diagnostic assessments from the Central Falls elementary schools suggested that their students read accurately and fluently, but their comprehension lagged.¹ Administrators agreed that this gap contributed to students’ struggles with state standardized tests, which place an emphasis on comprehension. The Learning Community proposed an initial design based on achieving immediate and tangible results recognizable to classroom teachers and building sustainable systems of support. A pilot was launched in August 2008.