Star grading of RI’s schools

By ETHAN HARTLEY
Posted 12/27/18

A new statewide ranking mechanism that the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) hopes will inspire and track student growth is surely leaving districts starstruck in the midst of the holiday …

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Star grading of RI’s schools

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A new statewide ranking mechanism that the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) hopes will inspire and track student growth is surely leaving districts starstruck in the midst of the holiday season.

Launched officially on Dec. 19, the Rhode Island School Report Card platform is a one-stop-shop for tracking accountability within the state’s schools. Of the state’s 306 schools, 297 were given rankings, which encompassed a great many different metrics, that boiled down into overall ratings between one (the lowest performing) and five (the highest performing) stars.

The star ratings are generated by a point system that values different metrics related to educational attainment within each individual school within each school district. Statewide, 21 schools are designated at five stars, 40 are four stars, 132 are three stars, 68 were ranked at two stars, and 36 received the lowest ranking one star. In Warwick, all 16 elementary schools received three stars, while Warwick Vets Middle School and Pilgrim High School received two-star ranks in the city. Winman and Toll Gate both received three stars.

Ranking metrics include factors like student and teacher absenteeism – where schools with lower rates of absenteeism are awarded more points – and other factors such as the number of students given out of school suspension in a year. However, the most important factors that correlate to the ranking includes student proficiency on statewide tests, how students with disabilities perform and, at the top of the list, the growth projections and potential of students within the schools.

RIDE Commissioner Ken Wagner said during a recent interview that that student growth was a metric that can “help change the conversation” regarding education in the state, as some schools may have lower performance but have a higher potential for growth due to their academic model, and vice versa. It’s a metric that, he says, is highly valuable despite Rhode Island currently being in a state of flux regarding its state assessment – which is the tool that generates proficiency data for each school.

“One of the reasons we used student growth percentile as our metric is that student growth percentile is constructed to be used across assessment programs,” he said, stating that growth could be calculated between the PARCC and RICAS, as well as the PSAT and SAT tests, and that moving ahead the data will become clearer as the RICAS becomes the sole statewide assessment for students in grades 3-8.

According to Wagner, balancing the complicated story between advanced metrics that would benefit educators and educational policymakers and a more simplified version that could be understood by those outside the industry was of the utmost importance.

“We wanted to strike a balance between telling the complex story – all of the test scores and graduation rates and growth scores or attendance and suspension – we wanted to balance that with a user-friendly summary, which is the star rating,” he said. “The star rating cannot possibly capture all the complexity of the story, but the star rating can offer a quick summary of what that data might be telling and then the reader can judge for themselves.”

The simpler story begins at the landing page for each district, which provides the reader with the superintendent and the number of schools, students and educators as of the most recent count by RIDE. Wagner said there is an opportunity for each individual district to pen a 350-word introduction to their page, which could include areas they hope to improve or areas where they feel they have succeeded. However, he said only about half of the districts have taken advantage of this space as of yet.

Below on the overview page is an embedded reader with the selected district’s Surveyworks data from 2018 and 2017, where students, teachers, administrators and parents provided feedback on issues such as school climate and the quality of education within their respective school. Combined with the advanced data metrics, Wagner feels the Report Card gives an all-encompassing view of any given district that can be understood by anybody curious enough to take a look.

The hope, Wagner said, is that the Report Card will serve three important functions. First, it will ideally communicate an accurate, objective picture of each school in each district to educators and parents. Second, it will provide feedback to help schools improve growth potential and, lastly, it is a tool to hold RIDE accountable to the policies it enacts and programs it oversees.

Spotlight on students with disabilities

While a majority of the schools in Rhode Island ranked at either three stars or above in terms of their overall rating, 131 schools in the state were listed as needing additional targeted intervention in at least one key metric. Wagner said that this fact outlines the need for educational advancement is a statewide problem, not only a problem in low-income, urban areas.

“Not only did the RICAS show us the need for growth is everywhere, but in these 131 targeted schools, they are all across the state,” he said.

Of those 131 schools, 89 percent of them fell into the additional targeting category because they fell significantly short of expectations in the performance of their students with disabilities.

“We have 131 schools across the state where the performance of their students with disabilities is in the lowest 5 percent of all performance statewide, and there is simply no excusable reason why that would be the case,” Wagner said. “We have to do better and a metric like that just shows us clearly that it’s not ‘those kids’ in ‘those communities’ over there, it’s all of our kids everywhere. Because if we can’t teach our students with disabilities well, we’re not teaching anyone as well as we should be teaching them.”

According to Wagner, the struggles of so many students with disabilities is symptomatic of a larger problem regarding how the state educates its aspiring teachers and how it develops current teachers. However, he is quick to dispel any notion that the problems regarding educating students with learning disabilities is a problem that can only be solved with more money.

“This is not a money issue,” he said. “This is a failure of multiple systems, from teacher prep, to the way that we’re hiring, to the way that we’re providing ongoing learning – and the only thing we have to do is do all of that differently. I would never turn away more money, but this is not a money issue.”

Wagner said that a majority of what RIDE categorizes as “learning disabilities” boils down to a failure to teach reading well. He said that, despite decades of data clearly showing the importance of properly learning how to read – and how a failure to do so will result in drastic educational consequences for students throughout their entire scholastic career – the instructional priorities of Rhode Island are not doing right by aspiring educators, students or those with learning disabilities.

Wagner said that elementary school teachers are often only required to complete one or two courses in how to instruct reading, and that special education teachers are merely taught how to accommodate students who have already fallen behind. Instructional curriculums into how to teach reading, too, are behind the times, according to Wagner.

“We tend to teach reading as an abstract set of skills – like summarize the main idea of a passage – and that’s not how kids learn to read,” he said. “Kids learn to read in an operational way. They learn to read because they’re trying to read information or they’re trying to read for an interest or for pleasure. You learn how to read in the context of content.”

Wagner said that this “educational malpractice” needs to be fixed, and that recent teacher regulations passed by the Rhode Island Board of Education included some provisions aimed to help alleviate these issues, but that more work must be done. He mentioned that RIDE was in the midst of a comprehensive redesign of teacher preparation regulations at Rhode Island College, which he said was responsible for preparing about 65 percent of new teachers in the state.

It is also imperative, Wagner said, that teachers understand they aren’t being blamed for the flaws in the current system.

“This is not about our teachers, this is about our systems and our leaders supporting and preparing and educating and providing ongoing support for our teachers better,” he said. “This is not about blaming our teachers, this is about holding ourselves as leaders of systems accountable.”

Wagner said that the state has a clear picture of the challenges in front of them, and that collaborating with leaders from each community will be vital to moving the needle in the proper direction. However, the state will also need to be able to face the difficult truth – that improvement is necessary – if it is to improve.

“All of this is in the works, but there is still this psychological barrier that we have to break through,” he said. “People will say we can’t possibly do this without more money, and I would say more money would help but we can’t possibly do it unless we anchor our instruction in evidence-based research that, by the way, has been around for the past 20 years.”

Warwick Superintendent Philip Thornton said on Wednesday that he understood the merits behind the star ranking platform, but was concerned it may mask some of the challenges faced by districts. He said that Warwick will continue to focus on student achievement as their primary goal and that this spring will come the introduction of a shakeup in terms of how mathematics is taught at the secondary level.

Thornton, who in a past op-ed published in the Beacon criticized RIDE’s decisions to not pursue a graduation requirement through the state assessment and lessening the amount of professional development required each year in their most recent teacher regulations, said that Rhode Island will only attain Massachusetts’ level of success if it makes hard choices and sticks with them.

“I think the difference between Rhode Island and Massachusetts is that Massachusetts has been consistent and made tough decisions,” he said. “Rhode Island has a history of not making the tough decision. That’s the challenge here, to stop that.”

Comments

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  • Justanidiot

    dey would hab given warwicks negative stars but most uf da residants failed algebra and don't get negative numbers

    Thursday, December 27, 2018 Report this

  • Justanidiot

    dey would hab given warwicks negative stars but most uf da residants failed algebra and don't get negative numbers

    Thursday, December 27, 2018 Report this

  • richardcorrente

    Dear Justanidiot,

    I think you have caught my habit of "double-clicking".

    Sorry about that old friend.

    Happy 2019.

    Rick

    Friday, December 28, 2018 Report this

  • Justanidiot

    ittsa nervous click eyes hab developed

    Friday, December 28, 2018 Report this