All Pawtucket All The Time

The atmosphere of school reform in Rhode Island over the past eight months compels me to suggest an alternative vision for improving Rhode Island schools. Policy makers often make use of international assessment data to compare US students to students around the world. They are quick to point out that students in the US do not compare favorably to international students, but they are less quick to point out that the US has fallen further behind since No Child Left Behind was passed into law in 2001. If we are to use international assessments as a comparative tool, it seems prudent to examine what nations with the highest achieving students do to ensure that their students reach high academic standards.

There are several commonalities among the nations with the highest achieving students that might serve as guidance for Rhode Island’s efforts to improve public education. First, schools in the highest achieving nations teach fewer topics but teach them more deeply. This allows teachers and students to focus on higher order thinking skills. In Rhode Island, teachers and students struggle with teaching and learning hundreds of standards (Grade Level / Grade Span Expectations). 

Second, the highest achieving nations emphasize project-based and inquiry-based learning. This type of education was intended to be the foundation of high school reform in Rhode Island until the Board of Regents voted to make passing the 11^th grade New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) worth one-third of a student’s graduation requirement.

Third, the highest achieving nations invest heavily in teacher education including emphasizing graduate level courses centered on how to teach as well as content-based courses. In addition to the emphasis on education and content courses, those nations provide high quality professional development that is sustained throughout the school year, not delivered in one-week spurts during the summer. Because high achieving nations invest in teaching, they trust their teachers to decide what to teach and how to teach it in ways that best meets the needs of the students in their care. While teacher certification requirements in Rhode Island have begun to deemphasize teaching courses and the budget for professional development has been eliminated, plans are in the works to allow some people to teach with only five weeks of training before entering the classroom.

The fourth thing that most high achieving nations do is to allow teachers to develop local assessments. The teachers then evaluate what students know and are able to do and teachers use those evaluations to inform instruction. Rhode Island uses NECAP as an assessment tool and teachers do not know what may or may not be on the test.  Furthermore, the tests are scored out of state and the scoring is returned so late in the school year that teachers cannot learn from the assessments in order to work with the students.

The fifth, and perhaps most important, thing that can be learned from the highest achieving nations is that they do not use tests to rank and punish schools or teachers. In fact, most of those nations have outlawed the use of assessment to rank and punish. Other nations use assessments as a tool to improve teaching and learning while Rhode Island uses tests to threaten and bully.

I believe that the Commissioner of Education, the Board of Regents, administrators, parents, and teachers all want students in Rhode Island to do better.  If Rhode Island, as a community, truly wants to improve public education for students it will abandon the existing reform model and implement the types of efforts made in the nations which regularly out perform the US. Those nations invest in teaching, trust teachers, and collaboratively involve the teachers in the process of improving schools. That is the vision of school improvement we should pursue.

John A. Walsh, Ph.D.

Warwick, RI