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Rhode Island has taken a somewhat unique path regarding
school accountability, as compared with the other 49
states. Since RI has always considered the school, not
the student, to be the unit of accountability, the state
developed an information-gathering and reporting system
with a wide variety of accountability facets and thus
more ways of viewing school functioning than many of our
fellow states. From the hands-on approach of the SALT
visit teams who observe schools firsthand to the details
that govern the research methods of the “value-added”
charts, Rhode Island’s considerable accountability
mechanism depends on multiple information lenses. (For a
more complete understanding of the functions and
products of RI’s system, see the 2001 State Analysis
“Looking through RI’s School Accountability Lenses”.)
As the state (and now the federal government as well)
presses for hard evidence of improved student
performance as well as related measures such as higher
graduation rates and better school climate, RI’s policy
is to give the schools good information to allow them to
determine how they might best improve, given their
unique student population and community circumstances.
Even the judgments rendered by the
School Performance
Groupings list, new this year, are only this year’s
benchmark in the larger journey towards 100% proficiency
of all students. After five years of gathering and
distributing rich information, the public exercise of
expressing judgments has spurred schools into looking
more deeply into their data for any and all reasons that
might be holding their students from full proficiency.
RI remains committed to a multi-faceted approach to
understanding and evaluating schools.
Portraits of state-level
school functioning
Updated annually, the charts in this section show the
state’s districts or schools together through different
lenses of comparable data. Their purpose is to show
information indicative of school functioning more
generally across the state. These charts give us
different perspectives on student performance, community
financial support, school climate, and other issues. The
variety of perspectives is critical to the RI agenda
because school communities will need many indicators and
diverse kinds of information to understand the reasons
behind non-improvement as well as how to maintain
momentum where improvement has begun.
The introduction of the Performance Progress
lists
The objective of RI’s school accountability system has
always been to improve student achievement to the point
where All children perform at 100% proficiency. On-going
improvement – from whatever point schools found
themselves when this accountability project began – is
the only way to reach the 100% goal. Therefore, this
year RIDE introduced the first set of charts – generated
with criteria that can be found in the section on
“Performance Progress” – indicating whether or not
schools are making adequate gains in terms of improving
student performance. Many factors support high
achievement; others impede it. To create momentum
towards the 100% goal, many factors must be taken into
account. RI’s accountability system is valuable only
insofar as it aids and promotes this momentum, so RIDE
has made a first annual set of judgments as to whether
or not momentum is taking place at this time.
This year’s lists use only assessment data – the percent
of students who achieved proficiency as well as the
percent of students who are in the lowest three
performance categories, over three years and across
eight subtests. Already being considered to be included
in future summaries are data involving school climate,
absenteeism and other factors.
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