ride – Page 4 – RI Future

May 7, 2013May 8, 2013

More illogic from RIDE

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In a reply to my post about sneaky changes in the NECAP documentation, the RI Department of Education spokesman wrote this:

“The NECAP assessment is designed to measure whether students have attained the knowledge and skills expected at each grade level, that is, whether students have met grade-level standards.”

This, of course, is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? I claim the test is a poor measure of the mastery of a body of knowledge, and therefore it is, shall we say, an outrageous act of irresponsibility to use it for a graduation test. RIDE, of course, says otherwise. This is precisely what is at issue in this whole controversy, and simply stating it as fact at the head of a reply doesn’t really address the point at all, but simply seeks to override it with the voice of authority.

In truth, as was pointed out by the psychometricians I’ve spoken to, RIDE has done little or no work to demonstrate the “validity” of the test, this very question. For an employment test, by contrast, the laws insist that the employer demonstrate — with real data — that good performance on the test is a good way to identify good employees. RIDE relies on correlation between NECAP scores and survey questions that ask piffle like “how much homework do you do in a week?”

The NECAP test was designed with the grade-level expectations (GLE) in mind, and it uses questions relevant to those GLEs. Does that make it a good measure of whether a student has mastered those or not? Tom Hoffman, who runs tuttlesvc.org, a great education resource, showed us at a Senate hearing that performance in Massachusetts and Rhode Island is not so very different on the 8th-grade math NAEP tests (administered by the federal Dept of Education and widely considered the “gold standard” of testing). Overall, Massachusetts does do better than Rhode Island on that test, but they’re not in a different league. But performance is dramatically different on the 11th-grade math tests administered by each state (NECAP in RI, the MCAS in MA). Can anyone explain this? Do our kids get dumber in the 9th and 10th grades? Or are the tests different in ways that haven’t been adequately explained?

“NECAP was not designed to provide, in isolation, detailed student-level diagnostic information for formulating individual instructional plans.”

This is a quote from the NECAP documentation, earlier in the paragraph that they “clarified.” According to RIDE, then, we should read “in isolation” in the sentence above as “only taking it once”? This is comparable to the way RIDE claims that “multiple measures” is to mean that you can take the NECAP more than one time. This is silly. What the above means is that NECAP is a clue to student achievement, but should only be used as one of several measures, as was policy under the previous commissioner. Making passage a graduation requirement is contrary to the meaning of the NECAP designers’ instructions.

Let’s end with a brief but important digression.

One hundred years ago, Henry Goddard, who went to school at Moses Brown and was a member of the first generation of psychological testers, persuaded Congress to let him set up an IQ testing program at Ellis Island that eventually proved that most immigrants were “morons.” (He coined the term.) During World War I, intelligence tests used to select officers were later shown to have profound biases in favor of native-born recruits and those of northern European extraction, which is another way to say that lots of Italian-American soldiers were unjustly denied promotions. For decades, misused IQ tests classified tremndous numbers of healthy children as disabled, or mentally deficient — well into the 1960s and 1970s. The history of testing in America is littered with misuses of testing that have had profound and unjust effects on millions of adults and children. Does the available evidence about the NECAP test persuade you that we are not in the middle of one more chapter of this terrible history?

A graduation test is not a trivial thing. The results of a test can have a significant impact on a young person’s life. It seems to me that the burden is on the people who think a high-stakes graduation test is the only sensible way forward to demonstrate — with a great deal more rigor than they have so far bothered to do — that a test measures what it is supposed to measure. The IQ tests at Ellis Island, in the officer corps, and in the schools, did not measure what they claimed, and thousands upon thousands of lives were changed, few for the better.

If these policy changes are being made for the sake of our children, then can’t we stand to have a little more compassion while we’re making them? This means intellectual honesty, and it also means being careful not to ruin lives you say you’re trying to help.

May 6, 2013May 7, 2013

Sneaky changes in NECAP documentation

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The NECAP-as-graduation-test has occupied a lot of my attention recently. As I have written before, the NECAP test is a fundamentally different kind of test than one you would use as a graduation test. The questions you’d put on a graduation test are exactly the ones that the test designers consider a waste of time and leave off. This is a matter of relatively simple statistics, and even if it were not, there are plenty of psychometricians (testing experts) who agree with me.

In discussions of this matter, it’s tempting to quote a page from the “Guide to Using the 2012 NECAP Reports” on the subject, and several people have drawn my attention to this passage:

“NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and results of a single NECAP test administration should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions.” (page 6)

At a hearing on the matter a couple of weeks ago, a Senator read that passage to Deborah Gist, who replied by pouncing on him to emphasize that the word “single” was the key word in that sentence. She pointed out that giving kids who flunk the opportunity to take the test again complies fully with this caution.

At the time, I wondered how any sentient speaker of English could read that sentence and think the critical word in it was “single.” To me, it seems like a caution against using the test as a graduation test or a special ed placement test. In truth, the sentence is a tad gratuitous, since the statistics of the test say the same thing, and say it in much stronger language. It seems odd to read the sentence any other way. However, if it was my career and reputation that depended on reading it in just the right way, I suppose I too could find a way to claim that never has the word “single” played such an important role in any sentence of the English language.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that the word “single” was added to that sentence in 2011. Measured Progress, the company that designed the NECAP test, publishes a “Guide to Using the NECAP Reports” each year. For the most part the report is just boilerplate, updated each year by changing it slightly to accommodate some of the changes to the test. That year, for example, was the first year for the writing test in the 3-8 grades, so there was some text about that. But before February 2011, when the guide was reporting on the 2009 test, the sentence above — same page, identical rest of the paragraph — read like this:

“NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions.”

Let’s have a big hurrah here for the internet archive’s Wayback Machine, from which I learned that the old version was still on the RIDE web site as late as January 18 of this year, and that the change was made for the report on the 2010 results, in early 2011.

What’s interesting to me is that the earlier sentence seems pretty clear — and to be clearly different than it became after 2011. There is no wiggle room in “should not be used.”

More important, this is how the text read back when the NECAP was adopted as a graduation requirement. At that time, it seems that the Department of Education was fairly clearly contradicting the advice of the NECAP designers — who subsequently changed that advice! Are we to assume that the technical documentation for this test is only advisory? Or maybe not proofed very well? Which other simple declarative statements in the documentation are ok for the department to ignore? Can schools ignore some of it? How about students?

Or is it only the people who pay Measured Progress who can get them to change their advice?

The guides for the NECAP science tests were never changed — after all, they’re not used for graduation tests — so they continue to read just as the reading and math guide did before 2011. (The 2011 science report is here. A friend downloaded the 2012 report a few weeks ago, but there appears to be no link to it any more on this page, so maybe they’re changing that one now, too.)

What we’re talking about here is dishonesty. This isn’t the same as simple dishonesty, or lying. This is intellectual dishonesty, and here’s the problem with that. The world is what it is. The facts of the world do not care about your opinion, or your triumph in some argument. Intellectual honesty is important in science because it’s the only way to get our understanding of the world to approach the world. Fudge your results, and you’ll find that your cure for cancer doesn’t work, that your miracle glue is really an explosive, or that your economic policy just makes things worse. This is why science is supposed to progress by scientists checking and criticizing each others results: that’s how you maintain intellectual honesty. Sometimes the disputes get personal or political and distract from the real aim, but the real aim is to get at the truth via intellectual honesty, enforced by the scientific community.

The truth is that the NECAP wasn’t designed to be a graduation test, and this was obvious from the very beginning. It has been coerced into the role not because it was good for kids, but because it was cheaper than designing a dedicated graduation test. The features that make it a bad graduation test are objectively true facts about the test and its design. Neither editing technical documentation, committee-hearing filibusters, or cutting off public comment at Board of Education meetings will change those facts.

I have no doubt at all that the commissioner can fend off challenges from the public over these matters, indefinitely. But reality will — as it usually does — have the last word. And children will pay the price. The question for Board of Education members, legislators, school administrators, teachers, and parents is which side they want to be on.

April 3, 2013April 4, 2013

How RIDE Undermines Their Own NECAP Test

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If I had to pick one thing to complain about with the high-stakes NECAP testing regime it wouldn’t be the pressure on the students, the deformation of the curriculum, or any of that. If it was just one thing, it wouldn’t even be the misguided policy to use NECAP as a graduation test. It would be that RIDE policies have taken a tool they could be using to understand what’s going on in our schools and deformed it so it can never be useful for its intended purpose.

What’s the problem? Just this: the NECAP test was intended to gather data about our schools, but the high stakes — teacher evaluations, potential school closings, high-school graduations that all depend on NECAP scores — have guaranteed the data we get from the test are not trustworthy. It has been turned from a useful tool to a gargantuan waste.

As any scientist knows, it’s hard to measure something without affecting it. But if you affect it, then what have you measured? So you measure gently. If you really want a measurement of how a school is doing, a sensible testing regimen would at least try to be minimally intrusive. Testing would be quick and not disruptive. Test results might be used to monitor the condition of schools, teachers, and students, but important decisions about them would depend heavily on subsequent inquiry.

The NECAP test itself is more intrusive than is ideal, but it could easily meet these other conditions, if scores were kept quiet and not directly tied to any sanction or punishment. The federal NAEP tests are like this, and they provide good data in no small part because there’s no incentive to push scores up or down. By contrast, the state Department of Education trumpets school scores, encourages school departments to adjust curricula to game the test designers’ strategy, and creates the conditions that virtually ensure that some school administrators and teachers will at least consider ways to cheat on the test.

To be completely clear, I know of no evidence at all that any teacher or administrator in Rhode Island has cheated on the NECAP tests. However, though it’s hard to find cheating, it’s easy to identify incentives to cheat. In a climate where professional advancement or even keeping one’s job as a teacher or principal requires improvement every single year (no matter how good you are already) the incentives are obvious. And in school system after school system, across our country, similar incentives have led to completely predictable action.

Lately, we’re hearing from Atlanta, where the former superintendent — the 2009 superintendent of the year of the American Association of School Administrators — and 45 principals and teachers are now under indictment for orchestrating a huge conspiracy that apparently involved locked rooms full of teachers pressured into “correcting” student tests and administrators wearing gloves while handling doctored test papers. But before Atlanta, we heard about DC schools. Before that, there were similar scandals in Texas, Maryland, Kentucky, Wyoming, Arizona, North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Connecticut, California, Michigan, Virginia, Utah, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Kansas, New Mexico, Tennessee, New York, and Massachusetts. This list doesn’t count all the mini-scandals that might have just been misunderstandings about test procedures, or maybe weren’t.

This is hardly all. Last year, when the Atlanta scandal broke, reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution surveyed testing data from a few thousand school districts around the country last year, and found 196 of them showed statistical inconsistencies similar to the ones that led to the Atlanta investigation. That doesn’t exactly imply that Atlanta is an exception.

Predictably, the policy responses to these scandals have been simply to tighten security requirements, not to rethink the testing policy. Unfortunately, it’s not as if this is new territory. Let me acquaint you with an observation made by Donald Campbell, a past president of the American Psychological Association. He published an article about measuring the effects of public policy in 1976 that stated what has come to be known as “Campbell’s Law”: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

He wasn’t the only one to notice this. A banker named Charles Goodhart made the same observation around the same time, as did anthropologist Marilyn Strathern who put it succinctly: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Cheating on high-stakes tests is only one manifestation of this. You saw the same thing when Barclays and UBS conspired to rig the LIBOR interest rate (an index rate meant to be a market indicator), or when stock prices become the focus of company policy rather than just a measure of how they were doing. Enron became (in)famous for this, but they were far from unique. If you want to read a detailed (and uncharacteristically entertaining for an academic) account of how the principle affects testing, try “The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing” by researchers at the University of Texas and Arizona State. (Where I ran across that list of testing scandals above.)

All of these are observations about how the world actually works. ignoring them won’t change them. You might complain that if Campbell’s Law is true then we can’t use testing as a valid measure of teaching and then where’s the accountability. Sadly for you, your complaint won’t change the world to something you prefer. This gets to a fundamental distinction between sensible policy and the other kind. Sensible public policy takes the actual, real, world — the one that you and I live in — and finds ways to work within the contraints of reality, be it physical, psychological, economic, or diplomatic. The other kind posits a world as the policy maker would wish it to be and careens forward regardless of the consequences.

In other words, if we know that applying high stakes to a test distorts the data we get from that test, then sensible policy dictates that we don’t use it that way. There are lots of creative and intelligent people out there capable of finding ways to use the valuable information this test could have provided in constructive and useful ways. But that’s not the way we’ve played it.

So here in Rhode Island, we now have the worst of both worlds: a test that can no longer do what it was designed for, while at the same time it has a deeply destructive effect on students, teachers, and the curriculum. Plus it costs millions of dollars to develop and administer, not to mention lost instruction time and wounded lives. Congratulations.

March 30, 2013March 30, 2013

Students Statewide Should Boycott NECAP

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It is a bright autumn day in early to mid October. Students from all over the state are sitting quietly in rows. On their desks are booklets and number 2 pencils. It’s NECAP time. Soon the teacher gives the O.K. to begin and in unison kids take out a book and begin reading instead. Thus begins a peaceful protest to the standardized testing craze imposed upon young people as a graduation requirement. Wishful thinking? Maybe not.

Much emphasis has been placed on who gets hurt by testing. English Language Learners, those with special needs and kids from the poorer neighborhood are cited most. As more and more voices representing these students are heard the general public is taking notice. I strongly believe that all students are hurt by this testing mania – even those who test well.

Take a look at those who are driving the testing bus. This is a corporate model that is overly simplistic, designed to fail kids and creates a crisis by blaming teachers. It is a self-perpetuating system that will make money for the testing people and also keep teacher’s salaries down.

I am not a psychometrician. But like Bob Dylan once wrote/sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” While it is nice that some really smart people argue in mathematical terms the world turns and kids in RI are still being threatened with not graduating due to a standardized test. We need more than mathematicians and Providence kids standing up in protest. What we need is a good old act of civil disobedience that would make Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King proud. Parents, teachers and students will all be needed to turn this thing around.

Over a 30-year period I have worked with hundreds of talented and caring teachers. Have there been those who were not the greatest? Yes there have been a few. But, far and away the teachers I have encountered have been talented and committed professionals. To say they don’t care or are not effective based on standardized test results is sad.

To say that East Greenwich teachers are better than those in Central Falls based on tests is also not fair. We are talking about two completely different dynamics. It is insulting to compare teachers based on standardized tests. Blaming them and comparing them helps create part of the ‘crisis’ we are hearing about in education. It also allows for a standardized system of learning where teachers are interchangeable parts and kids are empty vessels waiting to be filled with mandated knowledge.

Along the way the art of teaching is lost. The unique ability for a teacher to connect with those in his/her classroom is essential. Information is only part of a quality education. Why are people trying so hard to erode the student/teacher dynamic?

Sure, measuring student progress is important. Sure, having good teachers in the classroom is a vital component of a quality education. With all of this said there are other things that are equally (if not more so) important. Sure, the student/ teacher dynamic is essential. Sure, no one measure should determine the academic success of a student. Sure, socio-economics and other social factors need to be factored into this debate. Sure, teaching to tests, flunking 40% of the student population, blaming teachers and stressing kids out is, at best, counter productive.

On a whole different level we should be teaching our kids how to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. By doing so, we might add a bit of panache to a system intent on producing automatons. Freedom of thought should be considered a primary right and goal of how we educate our kids. It may take more time and effort to do so but the end result would lead to a more empowered group of kids. Malvina Reynolds wrote a scathingly sardonic tune “Little Boxes’ back in the early 60’s. She basically was offering commentary about how our society was promoting conformity as success. Who would have thought that there is still a push to make kids out of ‘ticky tacky so they’d all look just the same’. Thank goodness the kids are beginning to figure this out. We need more adults to chip in moving forward.

The education industrial complex will soon impose a new round of tests in a few years. Yahoo! This will mean more money spent on tests, computers (for the tests) and remediation. Maybe if we could get parents to support their kids bringing in books and dropping the pencils (on those crisp autumn days) much of this can be averted. At the very least parents can call up their superintendents and ask that their child’s scores not be included in the districts aggregate.

We could call this movement ‘Bring a book for the NECAPs’. Now wouldn’t that be one heck of a civics lesson?

March 9, 2013March 9, 2013

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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beatings morale graph — Graph courtesy of this blog.

It’s been said in jest that ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves.’ But to some this seems increasingly to be the Rhode Island’s guiding principle as it tries to improve its struggling public education system.

One of the most salient concerns has to do with importance of standardized tests. Recently we learned that almost half of the junior class (40 percent) is in danger of not graduating.

Millions of dollars have been committed to Rhode Island to support such ‘Race To The Top’ initiatives. But the public is starting to seriously question where the race is going. The slowest schools in the race will eventually be closed, or the state will take control. The last time this happened was in Central Falls. Have this helped their test scores? Or learning?

Would we be better off calling for A Journey Together than a Race to the Top? Rather than districts being compared to each other – why not establish a dynamic where they can share and learn from each other?

Those who support testing as a graduation requirement see it as a motivational dynamic as well as a means of measuring basic content knowledge. Those who don’t support the new graduation metric see the high-stakes test as being an unfair tool to students with special needs and Limited English Proficiency learners. Barrington and East Greenwich have long histories of performing well on standardized tests. On the other hand Central Falls and Providence traditionally struggle. It appears as though socioeconomic advantages help produce good scores.

Along the way, teachers get blamed when students perform poorly. This is the newest, new evaluation system for a skill set that many believe can’t be measured. Some say we are inviting teaching to the test. If that’s so, are we creating a generation of game show contestants? Is this like losing weight by reading the scale differently, rather than exercising and eating right?

Blaming students and bashing teachers will not produce the changes necessary to improve education. In fact, this proposed ‘cure’ will actually do more damage than the ill it was intended to fix.

Turning teachers into automatons will not improve education. Teachers need to be provided with the skills and leeway to diagnose and assess their student’s needs and then create strategies that establish a healthy learning environment.

January 16, 2013January 16, 2013

Chafee Takes Economic Center Stage Tonight

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chafee_bryant — Governor Chafee addressing a much smaller crowd at Bryant University in 2012. (photo by Bob Plain)

While Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed may have tried to focus some of the attention away from marriage equality with a press conference on the economy yesterday, the real news will happen tonight when Gov. Linc Chafee gives the annual State of the State speech.

In it, he will outline his proposal for next year’s budget and thus likely frame the fiscal debate for the month’s to come.

Will Chafee again suggest lowering sales taxes across the board while broadening the base? This hasn’t been popular with some small business owners or legislative leadership in past years. Or will he pick up on the idea progressives have been pushing for and reverse the Carcieri-era tax breaks to the wealthy? This idea should be popular with small business owners, and it’s gaining traction with leadership too. Ted Nesi reports this morning that Teresa Paiva Weed is still open to including tax equity measures in this year’s budget.

Perhaps the governor will suggest a some of both?

Paiva Weed’s report with RIPEC suggests our high unemployment rate is the biggest drag on the state’s economy. The governor last year cut funding to this vital and struggling 10 percent of the state’s workforce. I’m hoping there will be a number of policy suggestions to reverse Rhode Island’s trend of being pulled down by our poor.

To that end, I’m also hoping Chafee will declare 2013 the sequel to the year of cities and towns. Last year, he pledged to help our poorest cities which have been decimated by state aid cuts and tax and spending policies that benefit the suburban class over inner city folk. But in offering the poorest communities relief from labor laws, he tried to do so in a way that would have hurt the same working class people he was hoping to help.

A better way of addressing this issue would be to reexamine the state’s education funding formula, which still doesn’t adequately address the urban/suburban inequity that exists in the Ocean State.

What are you hoping the governor addresses tonight? Let Rhode Island know in the comments below…

October 4, 2012October 3, 2012

Why High Stakes Tests Shouldn’t Grade Students

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A broad coalition of education activists and defenders of the less fortunate will attend the Board of Regents meeting tonight to ask the public education oversight committee to reconsider a new rule that would require high school students to pass a standardized test – traditionally used for grading school performance, not student – in order to graduate.

“The proposed revisions have been described to the public as an abandonment of the universally decried three-tier diploma system,” said a letter sent to the Regents by the coalition. “However, the public is largely unaware that they propose to substitute a two-tier system through a Regent’s endorsement which would, for all intents and purposes, yet again effectively label as ‘not proficient’ those students with unendorsed diplomas based on their standardized testing score.”

The letter goes on to read:

According to 2010 NECAP scores, this group would once again include the overwhelming majority of students who are non-white, poor, have disabilities or are English language learners.

Given the significance of these changes and their potential impact on the most vulnerable youth of Rhode Island, it is critical that the public have further opportunity to comment on the new proposal through public hearings so that the intended and unintended consequences of these regulations are fully understood and addressed.

Writing in GoLocalProv, Aaron Regunberg describes why using high-stakes testing for a graduation requirement is such a bad idea:

Last year, 71% of African American students and 70% of Latino students in Rhode Island scored less than partially proficient on one of the NECAP tests and so would not have graduated. And the effects would have been even more serious among other student subgroups—86% of students with IEPs (special education students) and a full 94% of students with Current Limited English Proficiencies would have failed to graduate. It should be clear to most readers that any regulation that puts this many students at risk for failure to graduate is beyond unfair. It puts the entire weight of educational accountability and responsibility on the shoulders of individual students, many of whom have been academically underserved since elementary school and have not been provided with the resources necessary to address their weaknesses in test-taking.

And Providence Business News reported recently that the gap between the haves and the have-nots in high-stakes testing results is increasing:

While the statewide proficiency improved, the NECAP results showed that achievement gaps separating many groups of students widened. Gaps between black and white students, Hispanic and white students, English and non-English learners and the gaps between economically disadvantaged students and non-economically disadvantaged students widened at all three grade levels.

“Although I am pleased by the statewide improvements on the 2012 NECAP Science assessments, the persistent achievement gaps across all grade levels remain a significant concern that we will work to address,” David V. Abbott, acting commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said in prepared remarks.

The Regents meet today at 4 p.m. at the Department of Education headquarters at 255 Westminster Street in room 501.

September 28, 2012September 28, 2012

Protest RIDE’s High-Stakes Testing Policy Thursday

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How could this not lead to higher standards and higher expectations?

Next Thursday youth, parents, and other advocates will be heading to the Board of Regents meeting to protest against the new high-stakes testing graduation requirements that Commission Gist and the Regents passed last year.

This discriminatory policy, which is scheduled to be implemented in Rhode Island schools this October, is an absolute disaster. It uses a test, the NECAP, that was not designed to evaluate individual achievement, and it will undoubtedly keep many Rhode Island youth from receiving their diplomas (and will have a disproportionate impact on students of color, students with IEPs, and English as a Second Language students).

We need to delay or halt the implementation of this discriminatory testing requirement. Next Thursday is the Board of Regents’ second to last meeting before disbanding in November, so it’s imperative we get them to add this issue to their agenda and let them know, loud and clear, that our focus should be on improving our school systems, not on punishing young people.

To do this, we need a big turnout on Thursday. I’ll be there with youth from the Providence Student Union and a number of other youth organizations and advocacy groups, such as the ACLU. Can you join us?

Details: Thursday, October 4th, at 4:00 pm at the Shepard Building (URI’s Downtown Campus, 5th floor), located at 80 Washington Street in Providence.

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/353281238092356/

June 1, 2012June 1, 2012

Budget Would Create One State Board of Education

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Perhaps the biggest policy proposal in the draft budget is the idea to merge to board of regents, which currently oversees elementary and secondary public schools, and the board of governors, which oversees public higher education, into one board of education.

The nine member board would be appointed by the governor and would employ a chancellor of education whose responsibilities would be “determined by the board of education,” according to Article 4 of the proposed budget bill. The current commissioners of education “shall be subject to the direction and control of the board of education.”

House Finance Committee Chairman Helio Melo said the idea is to “make the education system in the state more efficient and effective.” Because of Rhode Island’s small size, he said, the two current education boards should be able to merge into one sort-of super committee that would oversee all public education in the state.

Melo and others said the proposal is in the nascient stages.

“Is it a plan to combine the staffs of the two [education] organizations, I don’t know,” said Tim Duffy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Assocation of School Committees. “There’s a lot that still needs to be straightened out.”

According to the bill, the change would take place in 2014.

Rep. Frank Ferri, a progressive Democrat from Warwick, said, “I don’t disagree that we need to see if we can make the system more efficient and responsive, but I’m concerned about the time limit. In Vermont and Florida it took five to seven years to create.

Melo said, “I don’t think it will take years but it will take months. It’s going to be very long process.”

May 30, 2012May 30, 2012

RI Progress Report: Marijuana Decriminalization, Brien Defends ALEC, Doherty Distances Self From Norquist

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Two legislative committees last night passed a bill that would make possession of less than an ounce of marijuana punishable by a ticket rather than potential jail time. The bills now head the floors of the Senate and the House. Decriminalization of marijuana makes a lot of sense as it would save taxpayers money and resources without any real downsides.

Rep. Jon Brien, a conservative Democrat from Woonsocket who is also a member of ALEC’s board of directors, has a letter to the editor about how the conservative group has been treated in the media as of late. He writes, “The attacks on the American Legislative Exchange Council have grown louder over the past few months, and even more so over the past few weeks. The real reason ALEC is under attack is because liberal front groups are attempting to completely silence our organization. This was never about the way we operate or a few pieces of legislation. It’s about the fact that they vehemently disagree with our free-market, limited-government principles.”

We applaud Republican congressional candidate Brendan Doherty’s decision not to sign Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge but suspect it has more to do with running for office in generally-liberal Rhode Island than it does with his ideas on how to fund government.

Telling headline of the day: “Over 50% of Dropouts Come From Just 12 RI Schools”

Equally telling lede: “The Providence schools are not meeting the needs of its English-language learners, even though they make up 15 percent of the district’s 22,000 students.”

Why isn’t the national media covering Florida’s attempts to purge registered voters from its books?

Rest in peace, Doc Watson.

May 24, 2012May 24, 2012

Citing Legality, Town Might Scrap Tuition Plan

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Barrington will likely not move forward with its controversial idea to let a limited number of students from outside the community pay tuition to attend its high-achieving local public schools, said Barrington School Committee President Patrick Guida, who is also a member of the state Board of Regents.

“There’s a good chance we won’t move forward with this,” he said, noting that he does not speak for the committee, which has a meeting tonight at 7:30. “I don’t know if we’ll vote, we often do things by consensus.”

The school committee was considering offering about 10 out-of-district students the opportunity to pay tuition of $12,800 to attend Barrington schools. The average cost per pupil in Barrington is $12,800.

The program raised concerns because it was potentially discriminatory to students with special needs. At first, Barrington didn’t account for special needs students because they cost more to educate and the committee wanted to profit, not lose money, on the idea. Then, it considered offering slots for special needs students who could pay the cost of their education, which can often be more expensive than the average students because they may require either special services or individual attention in some cases.

Guida said the committee’s own legal research as well as a second letter from Steve Brown of the RI ACLU that questioned the legality of that idea, too.

“Under the circumstances, there is no lawful basis for proceeding with an out-of-town tuition program that would treat students with disabilities differently from other applying students,” said Brown’s letter to Barrington. “We therefore strongly urge the school district to abandon any efforts to charge disparate tuition rates based on special education status.”

RI Future was the first media organization to raise questions about the legality of the tuition idea.

May 22, 2012May 22, 2012

EG Wants iPads, CF Wants Enough Textbooks

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It’s another sign of the increasing education disparity between Rhode Island’s affluent suburban towns and its economically challenged inner cities: the East Greenwich School Committee is considering getting every student at the high school an iPad, while in Central Falls, Pawtucket and Woonsocket students sometimes share textbooks, taking turns getting to take them home for assignments.

“I don’t disagree with you that there should be a better statewide technology funding program,” said East Greenwich School Committee Chairwoman Deidre Gifford.

Elliot Krieger, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education agreed. In a statement he said, “We are aware that at present not all students have equal access to technology; one goal of the Funding Formula for aid to education is to ensure that all school districts receive adequate funding to educate all students. The formula is phasing in over a ten-year span.”

EG Supt. Victor Mercurio pitched the idea to the school committee last week after a visit to a school district in Burlington, VT that had successfully used iPads as educational tools. “We tried to show the school committee that students would engage more deeply than they would with a book,” Mercurio told me.

The high school, recently named to Newsweek’s list of top 1,000 in the nation, already has about 60 iPads for students to use and the middle school has about 20, Mercurio said.

But in inner-city school districts such as Central Falls, Woonsocket and Pawtucket they still rely on the old-fashioned textbooks. And sometimes there aren’t enough of those to go around.

Central Falls Supt. Fran Gallo said in some instances students from multiple classes will share the same text books. Teachers, she said, will stagger homework assignments so that each class can take the textbooks home at different times during the semester.

“Is that an ideal situation, no,” said Anna Cano Morales, the chairwoman of the board of trustees, the state-appointed school committee for Central Falls. “But … it allows us to be a little more creative in how we teach our students.”

Woonsocket and Pawtucket implement similar textbook-sharing programs, said Stephen Robinson, an education lawyer who represents all three districts as well as Portsmouth and Tiverton.

“I would suggest to you that this is the poster child for why what Commissioner Gist calls the best funding formula in the world is a fraud,” he said. “If it were equitable, every school district could, if not give every students an iPad, at least give them each textbooks.”

While RIDE says it is attempting to remedy such inequities through the new funding formula, Woonsocket and Pawtucket, represented by Robinson, are suing the state. Robinson said ten years is too long to fix the funding formula that RIDE has already said didn’t adequately compensate those and other communities.

“The problem with the funding formula,” said Robinson, “is it’s not fair to the poor urban districts. The reality is Woonsocket does not have fiscal capacity to fund [education].”

Central Falls has not had the fiscal capacity to fund education since the early 1990’s when the state was forced to take over. Meanwhile, in upscale East Greenwich, the school committee is also considering offering Chinese and Arabic classes. Across the Bay in equally affluent Barrington, the school committee there is considering selling slots at its high performing public schools to those who can afford to pay tuition.

While districts like East Greenwich and Barrington, where property taxes can support high quality education, thrive and adapt and even perhaps profit, schools in the inner cities in between the suburbs aren’t making ends meet. Providence has closed schools, and in Central Falls schools are under state control. Woonsocket identified a $10 million deficit in its school budget.

May 15, 2012May 15, 2012

ACLU Questions Legality of Barrington Tuition Idea

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The Barrington School Committee finally has a legal opinion on its idea to allow a small number of out-of-town students to to pay tuition to attend its high-performing public schools. It’s from the RI ACLU.

“The Barrington School Department has no obligation to establish a special program to accept students from out-of-town, but once it does so, it cannot simply declare students with disabilities off-limits,” wrote Steven Brown, the executive director of the local affiliate of the ACLU. “While in some circumstances schools may have some leeway in dealing with special-needs students, such as when significant problems might arise in providing them necessary accommodations, we are not aware of any basis whatsoever for a school to have a policy of automatically and categorically excluding special education students from an enrollment policy. Such blatant discrimination flies in the face of the numerous laws designed to treat such students equally, not segregate or stigmatize them.”

Brown’s letter assumed Barrington would not accept students with special needs, which was the initial idea. But after School Committee President Patrick Guida had a conversation with RIDE officials, he said they would likely accommodate for a percentage of students with special needs so long as they could pay the cost of their education there.

Brown wrote, “I realize that this policy is still a work in progress, but I would appreciate learning the basis behind the decision, however tentative, to exclude special education students.”

The Barrington School Committee will discuss the matter at its meeting on Thursday night.

May 11, 2012May 11, 2012

Legal, Moral, Fiscal Issues for Barrington Tuition Idea

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There are, at least, three major conundrums that need to be addressed before Barrington can move forward with its proposal to offer out-of-district students to attend the high-performing school district if they can afford to pay tuition.

The most obvious are the legal issues, and we detailed them yesterday. The public school system will need to devise either a formula or an admissions process by which it can demonstrate it is not discriminating against students with special needs – or, in other words, students that cost more money to educate than the average student. And, as of yesterday, Barrington had yet to even consult a lawyer, though Patrick Guida, both the chair of the local school committee and the vice chair of the state board of regents, told me the idea has been kicking around since January.

The second issue that must be addressed are moral and/or political and concern selling off the commons. By default, the government of Barrington will be offering up the fruits of its local tax base to a select group of citizens: those who can afford it. Maryellen Butke, the executive director of RI-CAN summed this up well, saying:

“What we need to work towards is ensuring all our students in every community, regardless of their income level or background, have access to a ‘Barrington’ education. Those who don’t have the means to move to a high performing community like Barrington or pay the $12,800 in tuition deserve access to a high quality public education as well.”

But there’s also a potential budget problem. In Rhode Island, don’t forget, the money follows the student. So not only would Barrington get a tuition check from the private sector parents, it would also get a check for the same amount from the state of Rhode Island. And if that student came from Providence, that school district would lose $16,600, its average cost per pupil.

It’s likely that the preponderance of students who apply to pay tuition to go to Barrington will be from the East Side, Rumford or Bristol (and why not Swansea?). If even just four of the 10 students selected are from just one district, that town just lost the price of a teacher but probably not enough students to downsize accordingly.

May 10, 2012May 10, 2012

Barrington Tuition Idea Might Be Discriminatory

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Not so fast, the state Department of Education tells a member of the Barrington School Committee after learning this morning that the district is considering allowing a limited number of students to attend the town’s high-performing schools if they can pay tuition to the public school system.

“They’d be smart to get a legal opinion first,” said Elliott Krieger, a spokesperson for RIDE. “We’re concerned with the equity and access of all students in general.”

Keiger said he first learned of the proposal this morning via an article in the Providence Journal, in which it was reported that Barrington is considering making ten slots available to families willing to pay $12,800, the per pupil cost of educating a child in Barrington, in tuition to attend school there.

Patrick Guida, the chair of the Barrington School Committee as well as the vice chair of the state Board of Regents, said there are potential legal issues to grapple with before the district could put the plan into effect, such as whether the plan would effectively discriminate against students with special needs or even those who couldn’t afford to pay the tuition.

“If there are any legal issues we would cancel the whole thing,” he said, but added: “By virtue of us making this opportunity available, we ought to have some opportunity for discretion.”

One way the school district may accommodate for students with special needs, Guida said, is to offer an additional two slots to students with special needs if a family was willing to for the cost of their child’s education. Special needs students can cost much more to educate than the average student, ranging anywhere from $16,000 to $100,000, Guida said.

The proposal is still very much on the drawing board and the schools have still not gotten a legal opinion from its solicitor, Guida said.

He said he spoke with Krieger about the plan this morning, but has yet to discuss the matter with Deborah Gist, the commissioner of education. Krieger said Gist is out of town and won’t be available until Monday.

“I wouldn’t say I didn’t talk to anyone at RIDE about it,” he said. When asked who he spoke with, he said, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

Tim Duffy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, said Lincoln is considering a similar proposal and that is not unlike the mayoral academy in Cumberland set up by Mayor Dan McKee, that serves students from Cumberland as well as neighboring towns.

Some worry that the proposal could start a trend of affluent suburban communities with high performing schools drawing away from less-affluent districts the students whose families can afford to pay the tuition costs, thus exacerbating the divide between education in affluent and poor communities.

“What we need to work towards is ensuring all our students in every community, regardless of their income level or background, have access to a ‘Barrington’ education,” said Maryellen Butke, the executive director of RI-CAN, a group that supports public education reform and school choice. “Those who don’t have the means to move to a high performing community like Barrington or pay the $12,800 in tuition deserve access to a high quality public education as well. RI-CAN supports giving access to great public schools to all Rhode Island kids.”

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