RECENTLY, representatives of an old Rhode Island and a new Rhode Island met in the State House for a public hearing of the House Finance Committee on bill H-7874.

The bill, whose sponsors include House Majority Leader Gordon Fox and House Majority Whip Peter Kilmartin, would authorize a plan to create “mayoral academies”: diverse, regional public schools designed to achieve great results for students while containing the cost to taxpayers. Mayoral academies would be a partnership between municipal leaders and the most successful nonprofit public-school operators: organizations that are dramatically beating the odds while a broad spectrum of Rhode Island students are losing out.

As the witness representing the state Department of Education testified at the hearing, these new school leaders will not invest in Rhode Island under the conditions of our outmoded charter law, which denies them the financial and educational flexibility they enjoy in other states. The mayoral-academy bill would change that without requiring a single tax dollar this year.

The coalition for old Rhode Island was discouraging: two long-familiar gentlemen, high-priced lobbyists for the teachers unions, and not a teacher in sight. The first lobbyist tried the shopworn scare tactics of the past — easily-refuted fantasies about the “gutting of employee protections.” The second lobbyist stated for the record that poor student achievement was “a product of demographics.”

How to interpret this except as an official statement by the National Education Association Rhode Island that poor and minority students can’t learn? Are these NEARI officials even aware of the hundreds of public schools across the nation (several within a short drive of Rhode Island) where poor and minority students achieve at levels comparable to or better than students in Rhode Island’s most privileged suburban schools?

Sitting in between these two lobbyists was the president of the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools. Testifying against the bill, to our amazement, he protected his turf. He deferred to the lobbyists’ wisdom by suggesting that key flexibilities enjoyed by many of the nation’s best public charter schools are somehow inappropriate for Rhode Island’s charters. Indeed, he was generally ready with a status-quo opinion about everything except what would be best for kids.

The irony was not lost on the mayors, community leaders and their supporters in the room, many of whom are long-time champions of Rhode Island’s charter schools.

These guardians of the status quo are the sole beneficiaries of a system that shortchanges teachers, students, parents and every other Rhode Islander who is interested in building a healthy community. They maneuver to keep the citizens of Rhode Island out of their business while everyone else suffers under one of only five state education systems in the nation that can be classified as “high cost/low performance.”

The display would have been cause for despair were it not for the presence of a new alliance prepared to forcefully rebut the old guard.

The coalition for a new Rhode Island was striking. As mayor of Cumberland, I testified in behalf of the bill, along with Lincoln Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond of Lincoln. We brought news that Mayor James E. Doyle of Pawtucket and Mayor Charles Moreau of Central Falls had expressed their support, marking a historic moment of urban/suburban cooperation on public-education policy. Ramon Martinez, chief executive of Progreso Latino, spoke approvingly, armed with support from the Pawtucket-Cumberland-Central Falls-based Tri-Communities Coalition.

Alongside these community leaders were formidable policy experts, including the Harvard-trained architects of the mayoral-academy plan, Dr. Bryan Hassel, a Rhodes Scholar, and Dr. Martin West of Brown University.

This team described how we can build Rhode Island’s future on a world-class public-education system. The plan is already national news with education-reform experts and philanthropists. They are all waiting to see whether Rhode Island leaps forward for the sake of its families.

Like so many of our state’s institutions and structures, public education in Rhode Island has been shielded from the good sense of the people. It has sought to convince us that we get what we get and encouraged us to eye our neighbors across the river with suspicion, as if your child and my child couldn’t possibly both learn to their fullest potential. High-quality public education has been defined for us as a scarce resource: terribly expensive and impossible for everyone to possess at once.

For most Rhode Island children, a one-size-fits-all neighborhood school awaits them. The majority of students who have spent the last decade in this system make their way this week to a high school that state education officials say is not making “adequate yearly progress.” They have faces of every color and cross the old economic divides. Healthy communities understand that no one is well served by a system in which well over a third of our children are falling behind.

We have suffered as a state by not trusting you to make clear-headed choices about your child’s public education and — equally — by not trusting our teachers and administrators to rise to the challenge of your ability to choose another option.

We thank Chairman Steven Costantino and the members of the Finance Committee for providing Rhode Islanders with a public hearing on the mayoral-academy bill. In this urgent year let no deal be struck to deny parents the public school options they desperately need and richly deserve. Your representatives hold in their hands the prospect of an extraordinarily hopeful new day.

Daniel J. McKee is the mayor of Cumberland.