It seems to be working. In 2010, 91 percent of its students scored proficient or above in reading on the annual Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) tests. In addition, 98 percent were proficient or above in math, and 60 percent were proficient or above in writing. The scores are so excellent — especially for a school with a high number of low-income students and English-language learners — that the academy has won several prestigious awards. Earlier this fall, Congressman Jared Polis heaped praise on the school in a speech about a pair of bills to support quality charter schools.
"She has learned so much," parent Mireya Vega says of her daughter, who's now in fifth grade. In addition to being more academically advanced than her peers, Vega says, her daughter is the number-one chess player in the state for her age.
Anthony Camera
Ethan Hemming is the new deputy executive director of the Charter School Institute.
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The academy has a number of shiny trophies, including one for winning the state championship in boys' ten-and-under tennis, in which RFMA students faced off against country-club teams from around Colorado. As for its other extracurricular activity, chess, Martinez says that in "every single tournament, our kids have finished either first or second" in the Denver metro area.
Students wear red T-shirts printed with the school's name as a uniform. But on Fridays, the staff gives green shirts to those who did well that week. The shirts are a source of pride for kids who earn them, Martinez says, and an incentive for those who don't.
The school itself is a source of pride for Martinez. "We've always had great press," he says. "Always. We've never had one bad article."
Born and raised in Denver, Martinez, 34, attended Catholic schools and spent his early adulthood as a community organizer and a teacher at a Denver charter school (though he won't say which one). In 2005, he was chosen to participate in a year-long fellowship program through a Boston-based organization called Building Excellent Schools, which provides fellows with training and a $90,000 stipend to found what it calls a "high-achieving, no-excuses urban charter school that is independently managed."
"I realized that I wanted to put a college-prep school in the toughest area, the area with the lowest test scores," Martinez says. "So I researched, researched, researched and found Adams, north Denver — especially at the time — had the lowest test scores. And I said, 'That's where I want to put my school. Right there.'"
Martinez envisioned a school that would hold low-income, Spanish-speaking students to high academic standards. He chose tennis and chess as activities because they are what he calls "thinking sports" usually available only in wealthy suburban schools.
He also chose a name to reflect his vision. "We wanted to name it after someone that the community can identify with. At first I thought, okay, maybe Emiliano Zapata or Pancho Villa, but I said, you know, even though those guys believed in their people and their cause and they were great leaders, I thought, you know, I want to name it after someone who used their intellect. Not their gun. Not violence. Ricardo Flores Magon was an intellectual. He was a lawyer. He has written numerous publications. And he used his pen and his brain to make change."
In 2006, Martinez and his supporters began shopping the school around to a few districts, including Denver Public Schools and Adams 50. But both of them rejected his plan. DPS documents show that the district felt the school's application was incomplete, especially with regard to its curriculum, its budget and its plan for teaching children in both English and Spanish. Adams 50 had many of the same concerns and was also worried that the school's special-education and transportation plans were lacking.
So Martinez turned to the Charter School Institute, a quasi-state agency that had been created just two years earlier to help approve charter schools rejected by school districts with an ax to grind. And there were plenty of them. The law allowing charter schools had been on Colorado's books since 1993, but many school districts resisted them, fearing that charter schools would siphon off state money and students from the traditional public schools.
"Several...were willing to fight," says Jim Griffin, the president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools. "They didn't care if it was a good school or a bad school. They were just saying, 'Hell, no.'"
So Griffin and others decided to create a way for charter-school hopefuls to bypass those districts, a cause that gained momentum in 2004 when the school board in Steamboat Springs defied a state Board of Education decision by flat-out refusing to allow a worthy Montessori charter school to open in town. The Charter School Institute was born that year, but local school districts didn't give up. In 2005, the Adams 50, Poudre and Boulder Valley school districts sued the state, arguing that it was unconstitutional for the institute to be able to sidestep the districts and usurp their control. After nearly two years of arguments, a judge sided with the institute.
CSI's backbone is a nine-member board of directors who approve or reject charter schools, and it has added paid staff members as it has grown. Novel at the time it was created, the institute remains something of an anomaly today: Only six other states and the District of Columbia have independent boards whose sole purpose is to authorize and oversee charter schools.
