Examiner.com
Exclusive interview with Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda
By Mark Lerner
Monday, March 22, 2010
I started my conversation with Ariana Quiñones-Miranda, Director of Education and Outreach for FOCUS by asking her how she ended up in her current position. "I came to it inadvertently," she responded. Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda started her career in education policy in the mid 1990s through her work as Deputy Director of the Latino Civil Rights Task Force, a local civil rights advocacy organization. During this period, there were calls for enhanced services to immigrant and English language learner students in the city. Oyster Elementary School had the only bilingual program in D.C. and the D.C. Public School system had no plans to expand or replicate that program.
At that time, charter schools were just coming into existence in other states and then-Superintendent Franklin Smith decided to experiment by allowing the creation of school-within-a-school charters within DCPS. Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda became involved with a group that was interested in starting a bilingual charter school. This led to the creation of the Bilingual International Charter School as a school within a school. This school had a short-lived existence but the experience piqued her interest in public charter schools as a means to serve students who were not being well served by the traditional school system.
In 1996, Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda joined the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a Washington, D.C. based national Latino civil rights organization. She brought that charter school interest with her and began researching what other states and the federal government were doing on public charter schools. In the 1990s public charter schools were often seen as a conservative-led threat to traditional public education, but after much discussion and debate, NCLR leaders decided that public charter schools could prove to be a powerful reform tool for serving Latino students. They looked at charter schools as a practical issue to improve education for students and not an ideological one and decided to create a charter school initiative.
NCLR was able to secure funding from several national foundations, including Annie E. Casey, Bradley, Bill & Melinda Gates, and the Walton Family Foundation, to support the development of Latino-serving public charter schools across the United States. In the eight years that Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda was employed by NCLR, she and other staff worked to develop a national network of public charter schools. She had come to NCLR in 1996 as an education specialist and by the time she left eight years later she had risen to the position of Deputy Vice-President for Education growing the education department from a staff of four to almost 20 and the annual budget from $400,000 to $7,000,000.
But the birth of her daughter made the travel associated with her job at NCLR difficult. She wanted to continue this work, but with a focus on students and schools in her own hometown. In 2004, Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda accepted the position as the first Executive Director of the newly formed D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools. She was now transitioning as someone focused on the needs of English language learners to the public policy role of school choice. This being a start-up business, there were many challenges. She spent two years at the Association building the infrastructure and launching key programs and services. After building a solid foundation, she moved on to work for Fight For Children.
At Fight for Children she began to understand and appreciate the role that private school scholarships and vouchers were playing, again not in an ideological way, but as a means to provide quality educational options for low-income students. She was inspired by the work of Joe Robert who was critical to the passage of D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first and only federally funded school voucher program in the country. During her time at time at Fight For Children, Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda helped create the publication "My School Chooser" to help families find a school, whether DCPS, charter, or private or parochial, that is the right fit for their children.
Then a couple of years ago Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda joined FOCUS because she wanted to get back into community activism. She continues to hold this position.
I didn't want my time with Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda to end without asking her for her views on D.C.'s public charter schools. Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda described the movement as "stronger than ever," but she said that the political environment is dicey. She said that with the emphasis on reform of DCPS, charters are seen by some as competitors that will hinder the DCPS reforms. But we now have evidence that even with the growth of the charter school sector, DCPS test scores and enrollments are on the rise.
Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda says the linchpins of the public charter school movement are autonomy and accountability. When both are present and strong, schools can flourish and be successful at closing the achievement gap. She added that politicians and the public often don't understand the importance of autonomy and accountability and there is pressure to make all laws, regulations and policies uniform across all public schools. But it's autonomy, not uniformity, that is leading to academic success. She said that FOCUS is constantly trying to build relationships, spread factual information, and talk about what charter schools have been able to accomplish because of their autonomy and the strong accountability that is provided by the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Lastly we talked about the facility issue. Mrs. Quiñones-Miranda said that ideally public charter schools should have access to public school space. There are enough closed school buildings to house all of the students attending public charter schools in temporary space, and have enough left over for other community uses and economic development. She lamented on the irony of the fact that the D.C. government is converting closed school buildings into office space for government agencies and then public charter schools must convert offices and warehouses into schools. She would love to see some strategic planning around setting aside closed DCPS schools for charter school use so that the needs of all D.C. students in all parts of the city could be met in line with D.C. law.