PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Each classroom at Blackstone Valley Prep is named after a college or university. Ask a student wandering the halls where they’re headed, and they may answer “Boston College,” “Texas A&M” or “Notre Dame.”

The idea is to instill, from kindergarten on, the charter school network’s mission: to inspire and prepare every scholar for higher education. Each spring, the school hosts a loud, spirited and celebratory “college signing day” ceremony for its high school seniors. One by one, the teenagers step onstage to proudly announce their post-graduation plans. Many are the first in their family to seek a degree.

“We have many charters where 100% of students are graduating with a postsecondary plan,” said Chiara Deltito-Sharrott, executive director of the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools.

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country, but it’s here — and not in Minnesota, the birthplace of the charter school movement — that this daring experiment in public school education is paying big dividends for students and their families.

More than any other state, Rhode Island’s charter students are making the most significant gains in math and reading compared with their public school counterparts, according to a recent Stanford study.

Strong state oversight and a uniform and robust accountability system for all Rhode Island charter schools ensure a level of stability that has eluded their counterparts in Minnesota and elsewhere. Financial problems are rare. School leaders must be licensed administrators. And the state grades every charter on its performance, making it clear whether a school is meeting or failing its mission.

In addition to high expectations, the state’s charters generate extraordinary demand: Every charter school in Rhode Island has a waiting list averaging a dozen applicants per seat, guaranteeing a steady flow of revenue that follows students.

Over nearly 30 years, not a single charter school in Rhode Island has shuttered for financial reasons.

In Minnesota, dozens of schools have failed, often after inexperienced leaders were accused of financial mismanagement or malfeasance. Many administrators worry constantly about enrolling enough students to stay solvent. Oversight is scattershot: 12 entities take inconsistent approaches to enforcement, and the state doesn’t even consider student achievement in its reviews of charter schools.

Charter school advocates say Minnesota can learn a lot from Rhode Island as well as other states that have overhauled charter school oversight.

Molly McGraw Healy, a top administrator at the University of St. Thomas, said Minnesota needs to adopt a stronger accountability system — one that prioritizes student outcomes.

“In my experience, Rhode Island is an excellent authorizer,” said McGraw Healy, whose university is ranked highly by Minnesota regulators for its oversight of charter schools.

Rhode Island is one of just five states where the state education department has sole authority over charter schools.

“We were very, very intentional about how we were authorizing because we wanted quality over quantity,” said Keith Oliveira, who served as the state’s first charter school coordinator and is now the executive director of a charter school in Providence. “It made no sense for us to just authorize a bunch of charter schools and see which ones failed and which ones succeeded.”

Before renewing a charter school, the state conducts a rigorous evaluation that prioritizes academic performance. Those high expectations seem to be working: Rhode Island’s charter schools post higher test scores than traditional public schools despite spending less money per student and enrolling higher percentages of students of color, students learning English, and students from poor families.

The state also measures charter schools’ viability. Every charter is expected to keep 60 days of cash on hand. And state regulators review board members’ résumés to ensure leaders are qualified.

“The stability in our charter schools is because the [Rhode Island Department of Education] is making sure of it,” said Kyleen Carpenter, the head of school at a charter high school in Pawtucket.

“There’s not an anti-charter person who can say we’re failing,” she said. “The high standards shut that argument down.”

To avoid saturating the market, Rhode Island officials have strictly controlled the growth of charter schools through temporary moratoriums on new facilities. Those limits have been supported by the state teachers union, which has “grave concerns about the amount of money being drained from traditional public schools to support charter schools.”

Anyone proposing a new charter school, or expansion of an existing one, must show that it won’t harm existing districts by stealing a disproportionate share of their students. New schools also must partner with a local nonprofit and demonstrate that they have the financial wherewithal to survive their first five years, a crucial period during which more than 50 charter schools failed in Minnesota.

It took seven years and multiple applications for Medical Preparatory Academy of Rhode Island, the state’s newest charter school, to move from the drawing board to approval. The school, scheduled to open in 2025 in Pawtucket, aims to diversify the pipeline of students going into medicine.

School founder Anthony Francisco said state officials rejected his first two applications over funding concerns and a lack of community representation among school leaders.

“They really dissected the proposal line by line,” Francisco said. “The feedback just made our proposal even stronger.”

Unlike Minnesota, where charter schools are expected to invent new approaches to educating children, the models for Rhode Island’s top charters were imported from other states.

Achievement First, a network of seven schools, started in Connecticut and now serves children in three states. Blackstone Valley Prep, another big network, was originally modeled on a New York school but later cut ties with its out-of-state partner.

In 2009, when Blackstone’s first school opened, Rhode Island’s governor praised local officials for finding a way to “replicate models that have demonstrated success” elsewhere.

Blackstone and Achievement First both feature an unusual level of local involvement — a local mayor is required to serve as a board member.

Blackstone Valley Prep enrolls students from four different cities. That means the student body is diverse, both racially and socioeconomically. At the high school, nearly 70% of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, compared with about 60% of all charter students in Minnesota.

“This is a school that feels like its own small community, where our teachers really care about us and what we are capable of,” said Alejandro Zuluaga, a 2024 graduate who is headed to Yale University in the fall.

Teachers at Blackstone model lessons around the schools’ pillars of perseverance, respect, integrity and discipline and enthusiasm for learning. When elementary students raise their hands to answer a question, teachers remind them to speak up “loud and proud.” And students are encouraged to support each other with “shout-outs,” where a child shares with the class how a peer demonstrated one of the core values.

“We have the structure of a network but the school has a real family feel,” said Justine Schemel, a teacher at one of the Blackstone elementary schools.

Still, Rhode Island is not an educational utopia. The public school system in Providence is so bad that the state education department was forced to take it over in 2019. Test scores remain stubbornly low.

Private funding from regional education foundations and national organizations like the Charter School Growth Fund have helped prop up Rhode Island’s “mom and pop” charter schools, said Deltito-Sharrott at the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools.

A 2017 report in an educational journal showed that Rhode Island attracted more than $500 per student in philanthropic support, the highest of any state. Minnesota received $100 to $199 per student, according to the study.

The Charter School Growth Fund does not invest in any Minnesota schools. According to the fund’s spokesperson, when deciding to support charters to expand, the organization considers criteria including academic excellence, a commitment to financial stability, strong leadership, and ambition to grow.

Last year, the fund provided about $500,000 to finance the expansion of Segue Institute for Learning, a stand-alone charter school in Central Falls, north of Pawtucket. That money will fund a program aimed at turning students into teachers, which would also help diversify Rhode Island’s teaching community. The majority of Segue’s students are Hispanic and economically disadvantaged. The school offers a food pantry and clothing closet for families in need.

“They really work hand-in-hand with the families,” said Francis Alba, a Segue parent attending a springtime math and science night with his second-grade daughter.

State regulators rated Segue as the same or better than every traditional public school in a suburb near Providence. Segue has an extraordinarily low student-to-teacher ratio of 4 to 1, even though it spends less than a typical Rhode Island school.

“There’s a narrative that kids aren’t performing because they’re poor,” said school co-founder Melissa Lourenco, who serves as Segue’s academic leader. “I think Rhode Island charter schools are showing that is not the case.”

Charter school advocates say Minnesota doesn’t have to fully adopt Rhode Island’s approach to significantly improve its charter schools. Instead, Minnesota could follow the example of Ohio, which overhauled its system with bipartisan support in 2015.

The changes were driven by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative policy group that sponsors 11 charter schools in Ohio and has advocated for stricter accountability.

“Ten years ago, Ohio was facing a situation like Minnesota, including a bunch of bad charters and bad authorizers,” said Chester Finn Jr., former president of the Fordham Institute who also served as a top education adviser for the federal government. “But the Legislature pulled up its socks and changed the rules for how Ohio’s charter world would work.”

Following the unexpected closing of eight charter schools in the middle of the 2014-15 school year, Ohio’s governor called for major reforms of the state’s booming charter sector. The Legislature acted quickly, establishing a tough review process for charter schools and the authorizers that were charged with overseeing their operations. A key component of the new system: student academic performance.

Within a few years, more than 40 of Ohio’s lowest-performing authorizers were gone, and so were more than 100 troubled charter schools. Though Ohio schools ranked low in the recent Stanford study, proficiency rates have climbed for many of the state’s charter schools, which began outperforming traditional districts in reading and catching up in math.

“That is the kind of improvement that changes life trajectories,” said Chad Aldis, Fordham’s vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy.

In Minnesota, there’s no broad consensus over what type of system overhaul would be best — largely because charter advocates say there are too few people pushing the conversations about better charter school evaluation models and oversight.

“It’s like we like the way we are doing it here and we are not going to change,” said Robert Wedl, who led the Minnesota Department of Education in the 1990s.

Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union that has called for a moratorium on new charter school openings, said legislators should consider “new rules for oversight, academics, staffing and the fiscal impact of charters on nearby traditional school districts.”

But Republican state Sen. Jim Abeler, who helped start one of Minnesota’s first charter schools, said it has been difficult to find supporters for legislation that helps improve the quality of the state’s charter schools.

“Some people’s idea of reform is to shut them all down,” Abeler, of Anoka, said. “The problem when you get to accountability is that it is going to be used as a bludgeon by people who don’t like charter schools.”

Former Minnesota DFL legislator Ember Reichgott Junge, who authored the nation’s first charter school law, is disappointed by the lack of political support for improving charter schools.

“In other states, you have bipartisan champions working on this together,” she said. “It’s been ignored here, and it breaks my heart.”

Click here to read more of this investigation and watch a video about charter schools.

Clarification: This story has been updated to note the Charter School Growth Fund does not invest in Minnesota charter schools.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the percentage of Minnesota charter school students living in poverty.