Statewide Analysis

I. Student achievement –
Measuring how well the student/teacher relationship is fulfilling its task

Profile of Rhode Island Public Schools

RI's student achievement is average in the nation, lagging in New England

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and other national measures, Rhode Island students' academic achievement scores are right around the national average. RI students' achievement scores are similar to those in states like Texas, California and Virginia, which are as socially and ethnically diverse as RI. We are not woefully behind, but neither are we performing well. However, in a regional comparison, RI consistently performs below the other states in New England.

Poverty depresses achievement scores

According to Kids Count – a national organization devoted to tracking children's well-being using 10 common indicators across the states (see aecf.org ) – in 1999, New Hampshire ranked first in the nation in children's well-being. All New England states ranked within the first quartile (1-12), except RI. At 17th, RI is five places behind the next lowest New England state (CT). Perhaps not surprisingly then, RI student achievement on the NAEPs lags behind the rest of New England. RI's child well-being rank suggests that student performance should rank at the top of the second quartile (the states in 13th to 25th place), but often it is closer to the lower end of this quartile, which is to say right about the national average.

2000 Kids Count
Child well-being indicators for New England and the US Average

Money makes a difference

RI's relatively lackluster academic performance is not well understood, but it is worth observing that the state's economy also lags behind the rest of New England, which limits RI's ability or willingness to increase education investment. Both Connecticut and Massachusetts have been able to set aside impressive sums of money for the purpose of re-tooling their education systems. In most cases RI's financial investments are already earmarked to meet current obligations, leaving little left over to support reforming or re-deploying the basic investment. Shifting to standards-based instruction, as merely one example, requires professional development for all teachers who were otherwise trained and requires extra meeting and planning time to make the standards coherent throughout the school or district. Our wealthier neighbors have been able to fund sustained expert attention dedicated to the process of re-tooling.

The Children's Cabinet

However, according to the Kids Count data, RI is clearly improving the general well-being for its children. The state's overall rank changed from 22nd in 1996 to 17th in 1999. Certainly many factors contribute to this change, but the cross-agency collaboration of the Children's Cabinet deserves commendation for its focus on children's issues. Partnering on this Cabinet are representatives from the executive and legislative branches of the government, as well as the directors of all agencies that deal directly with children or children's issues. The nationally recognized RIte Care initiative, which provides health insurance for children whose families' incomes are up to 250% of poverty, has already made a marked improvement in the quality of health of RI's children.

In 1994 the Children's Cabinet reshaped their goals to recognize schools as the primary interface between children and state agencies. Their guiding goals now are:

• All children enter school ready to learn;
• All youth leave school ready to lead productive lives; and
• All children and youth are safe in their homes, neighborhoods and schools.

The very nature of the Children's Cabinet's work can not help but support both teachers and students in the course of their teaching and learning. The Cabinet's collective efforts, which include improving the physical and mental health of children, reducing crime in the neighborhoods, supporting the work of the schools, among other things, all serve to reduce the strain and struggle of RI's challenged families. Inevitably, as the children arrive at school more ready to learn, less apt to "act-out" and less pre-occupied, the strain and struggle on the teachers' part will ease as well.

RI's State Assessment Program
View Assessment Chart - Percent of students at each performance level on the assessments

Information Works! is only in its 3rd year which does not provide enough longitudinal data to make definitive statements about the trend of RI achievement. While all schools should be studying their own data, RIDE strongly discourages drawing any firm conclusions about a school's overall progress or the lack of it until more years of data are available for analysis. That said, however, the assessments do seem to suggest that progress is being made – slowly – at the elementary level. The state has paid more attention to early childhood, and those initiatives appear to be paying off. We have not invested as much attention on a statewide basis to our secondary schools, and the assessments confirm this lack. Our experience with younger children and the elementary grades does teach us, however, that when our minds, hearts and money are there, we can make a difference.

Sensitive performance assessments

Widespread use of standardized performance assessments is a relatively recent phenomenon dating from the surge in the standards movement in the early 1990s. These new tests examine performance through project-like performance tasks which ask students to apply a limited number of skills – out of a large number of possibilities – to solve a problem. Different forms of the tests examine different content and skills, all of which the student needs to know to be successful on any one of the possible forms. But, for example, if one year's test has an emphasis on statistics and a school's curriculum has not emphasized statistics, the resulting depressed scores might falsely signal a lack of progress of the school's improvement as a whole. This is only to say that performance-based tests are somewhat more sensitive to the changes from one form to another than the older norm-referenced or criterion-referenced tests. Furthermore, RI's teachers and students are not yet fully acclimated to assessments emphasizing in-depth thinking or requiring writing across content areas.

Closing sizable gaps between students with different characteristics
View Disaggregated Chart - Percent of students meeting and not meeting the standard

What is most painful about the chart showing the achievement scores by students of certain characteristics is that the majority of the scores, in all sub-groups, appear below the line indicating the proficiency standard.

This year for the first time, a poverty indicator is published at the elementary level only. The information comes from the student cover sheets for the New Standards English Language Arts assessment, which are completed by the test administrator (usually the classroom teacher). This indicator illustrates for us, with our own data, the extent to which poverty depresses achievement scores. While schools need to find ways to help more of these children meet standards, poverty is very much a community issue and responsibility. The educational effects of poverty can be mitigated by a number of supports that begin before the child enters school. Programs such as Head Start, Parents as Teachers and other early literacy initiatives can help prepare the children of families for whom the choice between food, shelter or other basic needs and books or other learning materials is no choice at all.

RI mirrors the national pattern of girls out-performing boys in verbal skills. Conventional wisdom would have the boys outperforming girls in math, but in RI this is not especially true. Girls lag somewhat in math problem-solving at the 8th and 10th grades, but are slightly more proficient in skills at the 10th grade. Teachers need to pay careful attention to the gaps between students of different characteristics to make sure the assumptions of their own cultural backgrounds do not inadvertently hamper any child's success.

Maintaining high expectations for all children

To some extent, the children of minority status are often children in poverty as well. All children need to be held to high expectations no matter what their status. In the SALT survey (chart D.1 at each level), students report on their own academic expectations, that of their parents and that of their teachers. The common pattern is to see students perceiving that their parents have higher expectations than themselves and their teachers having expectations considerably lower than themselves and the parents. Schools and teachers need to consult their own data to see if they should re-think the expectations they communicate to the children. Daily life in a classroom often includes small failures or frustrations to which children are sensitive. Without adults expressing strong faith in their ability to meet standards, children can easily become disaffected and give up.

All students need the opportunity to understand fully the standards by which their work is being assessed and then, if necessary, to revise their work until they have met the standard. Especially children who struggle with academics must be given the opportunity to experience the confidence of mastery and the pleasure of having met high expectations.

There is a fine line between necessary, rigorous assessments for accountability and merely expressing criticism or disappointment to the children and teachers who have not arrived at the goal. We all hope for high-yield student/teacher relationships. Particularly during these years while we are gathering data and learning to work with standards, rubrics and performance assessments, we need to resist undercutting the teacher/student relationship with blame and disappointment.

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