Connecting with the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition

While Atlanta was covered in snow and ice for the last part of the week last week, I was in Denver (which, oddly, was sunny and in the 60s) along with our middle campus assistant principal Mark Sanders for a convening of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition (DCSC).  As I have written about in this blog on several occasions in the past (see here for the most recent example), since its founding, ANCS has been committed to trying to serve a diverse student body that reflects our surrounding neighborhoods and to creating an educational experience in which students learn with and from peers of different backgrounds and have equitable opportunities and outcomes.  We’ve been more explicitly focused on issues of diversity and equity at our school these past few years, and connecting with the DCSC has been an important resource in this work.

The DCSC helps bring together and support charter schools from around the United States that seek to serve racially, economically, and culturally diverse student populations, and the organization is guided by these core values:

  • Charter schools can and should contribute to solving the historic challenge of integrating our public school system.
  • Diverse charter schools promote equality by ensuring that students from different backgrounds have the same high-quality educational opportunities.
  • Achieving diversity often requires deliberate efforts through recruitment, admissions policies, and school design.
  • Diverse schools provide greater opportunities for students to learn from one another.
  • Diversity is an effective method of boosting student achievement.
  • Diverse schools promote the celebration and understanding of other cultures and viewpoints.
  • Diverse schools invigorate and strengthen urban neighborhoods by bringing community members together.

One of the ways the DCSC supports its member schools is to host an annual convening at which schools can share practices, explore dilemmas, and problem solve together.  This year’s convening in Denver began with a visit to one of the schools that is a part of the Denver School of Science and Technology network where we heard about strategies to recruit a diverse student population and observed classrooms to interact with students and talked with them about their experiences at a school intentionally focused on learning across differences.  As the convening continued, we took part in sessions including building cultural competency as a faculty and staff, bringing students into the process of assessing how equitable your school is, and diversity-oriented teacher and student recruitment.

Throughout the convening, some common threads emerged.  Sustaining a schoolwide focus on issues as critical as race, class, and culture requires leadership from across the school–yes, from the administration, but also from teachers and parents.  Rising real estate values and a dearth of affordable housing hitting many of the cities in which our schools are located is making it harder to achieve a truly diverse school, and underscores the need for schools to work with city governments and neighborhood organizations to ensure families of different income levels can live in the same neighborhoods.  And lifting up the learning that occurs from bringing together students of different backgrounds is just as important as showing what students can do on a standardized test.

I’m so appreciative of the schools within the DCSC and the opportunity to learn and grow with them, both at this convening and from the many times during the past few years when I’ve reached out to some of these schools with questions or to share an idea.  Creating and sustaining a racially and economically diverse school is hard, and having a network of other schools striving for the same goal is critically important to helping us get there.