Rhode Island
Education commissioner ponders next steps for control of Providence’s struggling public schools • Rhode Island Current
By the time Providence public school students go back to class on Sept. 3, Rhode Island’s education commissioner may have chosen whether to end, continue, or reconfigure the state takeover of their schools five years ago.
A new progress report from consulting firm SchoolWorks on the 2019 action that handed control of the capital city’s underperforming schools over to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) could help guide Commissioner of Education Angélica Infante-Green in making her decision.
“I have not ruled out any options,” Infante-Green said Friday morning. “I’m letting the process play out.”
Infante-Green shared and summarized the findings in a letter to the Providence Public Schools District (PPSD) community before taking questions from reporters at RIDE’s main offices in downtown Providence.
“This is about 30, 35, years of struggle for this district, and it’s not going to be fixed overnight,” Infante-Green told reporters. “We talk about it as a big ship with a little rudder … in a hurricane. That’s how it was happening during the pandemic.”
Math and English test scores from the 2022-2023 school year show just how far the district has to go to achieve the academic goals prescribed in its “turnaround action plan.” For example, among eighth-graders, only 6% were at grade level in math, and 15% were proficient in English Language Arts (ELA).
Compared to the 2018, pre-takeover baseline, eighth-graders’ math proficiency dropped one percentage point. The turnaround action plan called for 50% proficiency in math and 63% in ELA for eighth-graders by the 2026 school year.
Victor Morente, a RIDE spokesperson, told reporters the commissioned report — with its $120,600 sticker price — is a statutory requirement of the takeover process. The Crowley Act, codified in state law in 1997, allowed state education officials to exercise administrative powers over Providence’s underperforming schools.
“There has been progress in the hurricane, in the pandemic,” Infante-Green said.
SchoolWorks interviewed students, families, teachers and leadership across schools, the district, Mayor Brett Smiley’s office and Providence City Councilors about how well the plan has fared. The research team also visited schools and reviewed documents from some of the many stakeholders involved: RIDE, Providence Public Schools Department, the city and its school board.
This is about 30, 35, years of struggle for this district, and it’s not going to be fixed overnight. We talk about it as a big ship with a little rudder … in a hurricane. That’s how it was happening during the pandemic.
– Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Angélica Infante-Green
“City Council members, School Committee members, and community members reported a need for improved collaboration, communication, and transparency between municipal entities including RIDE, the School Committee, and PPSD,” the report reads.
Absent from that list is the state’s Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, to whom Infante-Green could supply her decision at their next meeting on Aug. 29. The commissioner is also set to attend the Providence school board’s meeting on Aug. 21.
Another report released Friday from Harvard Graduate School for Education’s Center for Education Policy Research didn’t cost the state anything, but is part of a series of assessments being done for various school districts on the impacts of pandemic learning loss. The report compares the state’s recent school reforms to similar districts in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
“Although the results suggest Providence is moving in the right direction, especially in ELA [English Language Arts], it is too early to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the Providence reform efforts,” the Harvard report noted. “The pandemic disrupted schooling in the Spring of 2020, just months after the state take-over. We only have two years of reliable student assessments post-pandemic (and a single year change in annual scores) by which to judge.”
‘A lot of material’
The plight of Providence schools has been on people’s minds, with a recent legislative study commission led by Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat, attempting to suss out what can be done about the at-times awkward coupling of municipal and state-level leadership.
Asked to comment on the pair of reports Friday afternoon, Zurier told Rhode Island Current that they contain “a lot of material,” and he’d be reviewing them over the weekend.
Zurier’s reticence to comment too quickly is understandable: At a combined 89 letter-sized pages, the two reports are not light reading. Even the authors of the Harvard University report concluded that they were working with data perhaps that lacks definite shape.
Erlin Rogel, president of the Providence School Board, didn’t need as much time to assess the new report.
“RIDE commissioning a progress report is like a student filling in their own report card,” Rogel wrote in an emailed statement sent to news outlets, claiming the agency has “roundly rejected” the school board’s attempts to be included in the decision-making process.
Rogel also argued that the report’s assertion that the school board does not act cohesively, and even lacks a “shared vision for governance,” echoes “RIDE’s belief that the Board exists to silently rubber stamp their agenda.”
“I am no longer surprised by RIDE’s rejection of attempts to hold the agency accountable to the people, but I am deeply concerned by their lack of self awareness,” wrote Rogel, who did not immediately reply Friday afternoon to a request to answer follow-up questions.
But the SchoolWorks report does voice some of the board’s concerns: “School committee members also stated that they are not consistently engaged by the Superintendent or senior leaders from PPSD regarding programmatic changes, nor are they engaged in an advisory capacity regarding analysis of student outcomes.”
The report does not evaluate individual job performances or personnel — like that of Infante-Green, or of Providence Superintendent Javier Moñtanez, who recently signed a three-year contract extension with the district. A copy of the contract was not immediately available Friday afternoon.
“The report is evaluating the system,” Infante-Green told reporters, pointing to the report’s drill down into metrics and standards as markers of the superintendent’s work.
According to the SchoolWorks website, the firm has worked with education officials in Colorado, Chicago, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Kim Perron, president of Schoolworks, said in an email that the company would not be providing any comments, and directed questions to RIDE.
Meanwhile, in high schools, ninth-graders are meeting turnaround plan targets for “being on track postsecondary success.” But the number of students who graduate high school with AP or college credit, or have progressed in a career or technical education track, are at 35%, which is 5% under the target. No SAT categories met turnaround numbers either.
Municipal struggles: The City of Providence is shortchanging its schools and has not upped its investments for the district in ways consistent with the Crowley Act, even with higher funds thanks to a 2019 Collaboration Agreement. (The City Council has successfully earmarked an additional $2.5 million for 2025). Money issues aside, the report still concluded the city is “beginning to provide value-added leadership” in its commitments to the schools. “The City has received the SchoolWorks report and has begun an in-depth review while we await the upcoming recommendation from the Rhode Island department of Education. The Mayor will be briefed this afternoon on the findings by the Department of Education,” Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for the city, said in an email Friday.
As Rogel’s comments might imply, there is also discord within and between the various stakeholders: “School Committee members shared examples of how mistrust among their members and across entities (superintendent, RIDE, PPSD leadership, mayor, City Council) is a barrier to collaboration.”
Parental advisory: Parents had mixed feelings when surveyed. They said they receive regular updates on their students’ progress, but high teacher turnover has led to reduced confidence in the takeover process in general. Overall, families with a favorable perception of the district dropped to 53% in the 2022 school year. That was a 7% drop from the previous year, and 12% below target.
Asked about parental perceptions, Infante-Green said that’s a primary challenge the superintendent faces: “The difficult part about that is that when you’re making change, there are people that are going to be unhappy, right? And it goes back and forth,” she said. “But the goal is that when we have a strong district, that parents are feeling like their kids are getting educated.”
Some good news: Students are feeling an increased “sense of belonging,” 17 percentage points higher in the 2022-2023 school year than in 2020-2021. School leaders are also feeling more secure in making decisions thanks to regular review of data — at least 90% of the surveyed leaders use district software to review student data at least once a week. Also improved: The conditions of the school buildings themselves. Lamentable facilities were prominently mentioned in the 2019 Johns Hopkins University report that preceded the takeover. But “every stakeholder group interviewed” by SchoolWorks noted better working and learning conditions in their school environments.Highlights from the SchoolWorks report on the Providence School Department:
Skill issues across grade levels: Rhode Island’s Comprehensive Assessment Score, or RICAS, measures third- and eighth-grade students’ learning in crucial areas like ELA (English language arts) and math. The report assessed that none of the RICAS scores, except third grade math, were on track with the turnaround plan.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX