Christine Lopes

What she’s doing:
Taking the helm of a two-year-old statewide education advocacy group as its second executive director, after founding ED Maryellen Butke left seeking political office.

What RI-CAN is about:
Choice, flexibility and accountability. It primarily serves as a mouthpiece for school change and choice across the state. Last year it made news by issuing “report cards” for public schools throughout the state. It has also been at the center of hot button educational policy discussions, advocating for things like Race to the Top and the Achievement First school network’s entry into Rhode Island as a mayoral academy.

Why she’s different:

While her predecessor brought more of a purely educational background to the job, Lopes says, “90% of my work experience has been in the political arena.” That includes a mix of educational policy work, political campaigning, legislative advocacy and government accountability. She’s worked in the State House and gubernatorial campaigns of her native Massachusetts, done political consulting for the Service Employees International Union, spent four and a half years leading a statewide field campaign for universal pre-school in the Bay State, served as Executive Director of government watchdog group Common Cause RI, and was most recently Chief Strategy Officer of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies. “I’ve worked in state government. I understand how the mechanism works, but also how to advocate on the outside,” she notes. “Public schools are now my candidate.”

Why that’s important:
So much of educational policy and school governance is tied up in politics, whether at the municipal level, in the General Assembly, or dealing with the unions. Lopes has experience with them all, and knows how to speak the language of each group and situation. She believes she will be able to bridge the conversation between all sides. “I’d like to see a movement towards figuring out how some of the policies around public schools can be brought down to the school level,” she explains. “One thing I’ve learned is that no two schools are alike. The people on the ground really need to be in power to make the decisions.”