40 Percent Of Providence Schools Could Be Failing
Saturday, August 27, 2011
As many as “14 or 15” Providence public schools may be labeled “persistently low-achieving” and in need of intervention by February, the city’s new Superintendent of Schools said this week.
During an Education Subcommittee meeting for the City Council, Superintendent Susan Lusi said the city is preparing for two new cohorts of failing schools to be added to the current list of four, which means they fall in the bottom five percent of schools across the state in terms of performance.
The state identifies schools as persistently low-achieving by using a formula that indicates which schools have been have struggling on a consistent basis for multiple years. The schools are then given four potential options for intervention, which fall under federal guidelines.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe options include: Restart, which involves reopening the school under new management, such as a charter management organization like Achievement First; Transformation, which brings in a new principal and includes more evaluations for teachers; Turnaround, which gets rid of half of the teaching staff and fires the principal; and school closure.
In Rhode Island, only the transformation option has been selected for its schools so far.
Councilman: I had not heard the number
According to Lusi, a cohort of up to seven failing schools is expected to be announced in September, which will likely include the majority of schools that received the label last year before the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) chose to apply for a federal waiver in order to refresh the list. RIDE spokesman Elliot Krieger said the waiver is still pending.
In March, Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School, Hope Information Technology School, Mount Pleasant High School and Mary E. Fogarty Elementary School were all targeted for intervention.
That the city would triple its list of existing intervention schools was news to Councilman Sam Zurier, who heads up the Council’s Education Subcommittee and previously served on the School Board. Zurier said he was aware of a second cohort, but did not know when it would be announced.
“I attended a meeting last spring that Superintendent Brady convened to discuss the second round of RIDE’s selection of PLA schools, so I knew before Tuesday night that a group of Providence schools was likely to be affected in that round,” he said. “I did not know until Tuesday night that (a) the second round would conclude this fall and (b) a third round would take place in February. I had not heard the number of 10-14 schools before, but the selection criteria focus heavily on student achievement, and the relative performance of Providence’s lower performing schools relative to the rest of the State is a matter of public record.”
School Board President: We knew it was coming
But acting School Board President Nina Pande said the intention was always to have three cohorts of Rhode Island schools targeted for intervention and that the confusion was likely caused by RIDE’s decision to apply for a federal waiver to alter the list announced in March.
Pande said she was not surprised many of the failing schools come from Providence.
“We have always known there would be three cohorts of schools,” she said. “But Providence is the largest district and the majority of our schools are low-performing.”
She continued: “It’s alarming, it’s very concerning that 40 percent of our schools would be identified as PLA.”
New contract leaves much to be desired
Pande’s predecessor, Kathleen Crain, said her primary concern is with the city’s new pact with the teachers union, which guarantees zero layoffs for the life of the three-year contract. According to Lusi, the federal guidelines would be put ahead of the contract when it comes to the failing schools.
“One would think that, given 1/3 of our schools will be categorized as persistently low achieving within the next few months , the Mayor would be pushing for significant educational reforms where can most affect teaching and learning: the teacher contract,” Crain wrote in an e-mail Friday. “Yet to the contrary, the Mayor's agreement with the PTU failed to make any substantive, significant changes to the Collective Bargaining Agreement that promotes educational reform. In fact, he has promised that none of our teachers will be laid off during the life of the three year contract. We have become a job bank.”
Crain, who resigned from the School Board in July, said the contract’s lack of flexibility will deplete resources for students and has already proved to be force-placing teachers into classrooms.
“We are creating a cycle of PLAs,” she said. “We invest federal funds in those that are low achieving, force staff members of the PLA schools into schools that are relatively stable, and fail to hold nobody anyone accountable for the outcome.”
Shift the conversation to students
Another member of the Council’s Education Subcommittee, David Salvatore, said a clear picture needs to be painted to avoid a similar fate down the line.
“We obviously don't want any of our schools to be assessed as ‘low-achieving,” he said. “The most critical piece of our schools is educating our children. I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak with the school department, so that we can paint a picture of what the next steps should be to avoid these outcomes in the future. While I recognize that there is still much work to be done, I am confident that we can shift the conversation to students and focus on what is in their best interest. I am hopeful that we can effectuate positive changes for years to come.”
Local education consultant Chace Baptista agreed with Salvatore. He said the current system is not adequately preparing young people, particularly minorities.
“Honestly, I thoroughly believe that family engagement is becoming increasingly more critical as each day passes,” Baptista said. “The current system as it exists does not have the ability to prepare young people or more specifically poor young people of color at scale. We clearly need a portfolio of schools with a mixture of traditional public mixed with charter schools---that we then can present to parents and give them the choice to decide what they believe is best for their children.”
Praise for Lusi
Once the refreshed list of schools is released, federal dollars attached to each cohort of persistently low-achieving schools will be awarded to the district, according to Lusi. The Superintendent said the next cohort would be announced next February.
Despite the dire outlook, Zurier said he is encouraged by what he’s seen from Lusi, who has been on the job just five weeks.
“I am pleased to hear Superintendent Lusi express her understanding of the issue and her readiness to work with the School Board and the School Department to address it head-on,” he said. “It is my hope that the other stakeholders will see the PLA intervention process as an opportunity to work constructively with RIDE for the good of our students at those schools.”
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