Guest MINDSETTER™ Heather Tow-Yick, Kelsey Lucas: What Rhode Islanders Need in ESEA Reauthorization
Tuesday, July 07, 2015
As Congress debates reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, our nation’s education law, it is essential that the law provides schools, teachers, and parents with the necessary tools to monitor all children’s progress and, as important, that we have policies in place to ensure action is taken when students are chronically underserved by our education system.
There is no greater injustice than the disparity in educational opportunities that disproportionately limit the life outcomes of children growing up in low-income communities. Here in Rhode Island, all too often the neighborhood a child calls home and her parents’ paycheck predict the breadth of educational opportunity available to her. Rhode Island’s four year graduation rate, for example, looks promising at 80 percent. For low-income students, however, that number drops to 69 percent. And for special education students, the number dips again to 59 percent. This inequity fetters the strength of our economy and our communities.
Rhode Island’s teachers, school leaders and administrators are working hard every day for real progress and those closest to the work – our states - are in the best position to implement real change for their own students. However, the realities of what is going on cannot be ignored and in order to see real progress, the federal law must require states to identify and provide evidence-based interventions for our lowest performing schools and lowest performing students.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThere are too many stories of kids that came into our classrooms hearing that because they didn’t speak English as their first language or because they learned in a different way than other kids, they shouldn’t have to take a test. This is the same as telling them we don’t think you should have the same opportunities as other kids, or we don’t think you should have access to the same educational opportunities as your peers. All kids deserve to graduate college and career ready, and the parents of English language learners or special education students deserve to know how their children are performing as compared to their classmates and their peers statewide.
Test results are just one measure of student learning and achievement, but if we really want parents to be empowered, then providing them data on how their kids are doing every year, compared to others across the state, and dividing that data by categories of race, ethnicity, gender, English language learners, and income background, is what needs to be done so that they can make educated choices about their child’s education. Measuring shared high expectations for all of our children with a statewide annual assessment is critical in gauging how our schools and children are progressing and ensuring that parents, educators, and policymakers have the information they need to make good decisions. We cannot go back to the days of masking the performance of some students to promote a false picture of school success.
Rhode Island’s representatives in Washington have a pivotal opportunity to craft national education policy that supports local efforts to innovate towards student success while ensuring that there is meaningful accountability when schools are failing a group of, or all of, their students. Congress owes it to our students, families and communities to pass a reauthorization of ESEA that ensures all children, regardless of their race or ethnicity, where they come from, or how they learn, have the opportunity to succeed.
Heather Tow-Yick is the executive director of Teach For America in Rhode Island. Kelsey Lucas is a seventh grade Math teacher at the Paul Cuffee School, a Maritime Charter School for Providence Youth, and a 2011 Teach For America-Rhode Island alumna.
Related Slideshow: RI Experts on the Biggest Issues Facing Public Education
On Friday November 22, the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University, the Latino Policy Institute of Roger Williams University, the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, the Providence Student Union, and RI-CAN: Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now will host Rhode Island leaders in the public and nonprofit sectors for a symposium on "the civil rights issue of the 21st century, adequacy and equity and the State of Education in Rhode Island."
Weighing in on the the "three biggest factors" facing education in the state today are symposium participatnts Gary Sasse, Founding Director of the Hassenfeld Institute for Leadership; Christine Lopes Metcalfe, Executive Director of RI-CAN; Anna Cano-Morales, Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees, Central Falls Public Schools and Director, Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University; Tim Duffy, Executive Director, RI Association of School Committees; and Deborah Cylke, Superintendent of Pawtucket Public Schools.
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