Commentary: Rhode Island schools are on track despite failing grade from weekly
by Ron Wolk
The Providence Journal, January 18, 2001
EDUCATION WEEK’S failing grade to Rhode Island for its education policies does not reflect the important work being done here, and could be misleading.
As founding editor of Education Week and Quality Counts, I feel obliged to try to clarify why our state got an “F.”
First, Quality Counts did not evaluate schools the way headlines tend to suggest.
The grades are based on the policies that states put into place to advance standards-based reform and to improve the quality of teaching, the school environment, and the adequacy and equity of school financing. In actual student achievement calculated by student scores on federal reading, writing, math and science exams Rhode Island scores generally above average.
Rhode Island fared poorly in the Education Week assessment not because it has bad education policies but because it has chosen a reform course that is different from that of most other states. And the indicators that the newspaper uses, plus the data supplied to it by other agencies, reflect the mainstream approach to standards- based reform.
For example, in the evaluation of state standards and assessments, Rhode Island lost points because it does not have standards in the four core subjects: English, math, science and social studies, and it does not test students in all four disciplines. Rhode Island deliberately chose to concentrate on reading and math until schools are making real progress in those key areas. I believe, as do many others, that this is a more sensible approach than having detailed content standards in four or more subjects for every grade level. The results of a teacher survey in Quality Counts reveals that teachers complain that there is not enough time to teach all the standards mandated in most states, and the pressure to assess student achievement in four or more subjects is forcing teachers to spend too much time teaching to the tests.
Moreover, Education Week does not do its own evaluation of state standards, relying instead on the annual rating by the American Federation of Teachers.
The AFT gives the highest grades to states that have detailed content standards at every grade level. Many thoughtful educators and policymakers, including Commissioner Peter McWalters, believe this is a mistake. We should be stingy in setting standards, concentrating on key ideas and concepts at strategic points in a student’s academic career such as 4th, 8th and 12th grade. The AFT doesn’t like Rhode Island’s approach to the setting and assessment of standards.
Rhode Island lost points because it does not rate schools and does not reward or punish them for their performance, the way a growing number of other states do. Education policymakers here rightfully decided that it would be more productive to gather and make public as much information about school performance as possible and then work with schools and communities to improve learning. This state is one of the few states small enough for that approach to work. I believe that Rhode Island’s “Information Works” and SALT will produce better results in the years ahead than the carrot-and-stick ap-proach favored by other states.
The main point of the Education Week report is that the states need to achieve a better balance in their standards-based reform policies. Indeed, many education leaders have been calling for a mid- course correction because they believe state demands on schools and students are exceeding their capacity to meet them. As the Education Week report makes clear, there is far too much emphasis on testing, especially when the tests are not aligned with the standards. In addition, it is premature and unfair to require students to pass an exam to graduate or get promoted as Massachusetts is doing. Highly detailed content standards at every grade level are demoralizing teachers and turning education even more into a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Because education and legislative leaders here were thoughtful and prudent in enacting and implementing Article 37 the state’s school- reform law Rhode Island doesn’t need a mid-course correction. The state is on course. It hasn’t gone as fast or as far as many other states, but at least it has maintained a clear vision of where it wants to go. And I’m convinced the vision is the right one for Rhode Is-land.
A couple of final points:
* Rhode Island’s low grade in policies to improve the quality of teaching are deserved. There is no meaningful screening of new teachers to assure that they are qualified, no induction programs to help beginning teachers through a difficult transition, and not enough improvement in teacher preparation. Even so, one additional percentage point would have given Rhode Island a C-, which was the average for the states in this category. The efforts now under way to improve the teacher-certification process should boost Rhode Island significantly in future ratings.
* The low grade for equity in funding is also warranted. That is a problem that the state courts and the legislature have been struggling with.
* Even though Rhode Island got a D+ in school climate, it ranked 13th in the nation, and only Connecticut got better than a C+. School environment includes school and class size, parental involvement, and student engagement.
* Education Week’s report, in my biased opinion, is fair and objective. But like most evaluation systems that strive to be objective and reduce everything to numbers, it does not take into account gray areas or deviations from the norm. The shortcomings of the Education Week evaluation are the same shortcomings of the test- heavy assessment systems that most states have adopted. What happened to Rhode Island in this 50-state evaluation is what happens too often to individual schools and kids who are judged only by the numbers.
When we launched Quality Counts back in 1997, I said at the press conference that I don’t like letter grades because I feel they oversimplify and distort, but if states insist on grading students with letter grades, then they should not object to being graded that way.
Ron Wolk is the chairman of the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week and Quality Counts. He lives in Warwick.